This is a guest post by Robert J. Moore, the CEO and co-founder of RJMetrics, a on-demand database analytics and business intelligence startup that helps online businesses measure, manage, and monetize better. He was previously a venture capital analyst and currently serves as an advisor to several New York startups. Robert blogs at The Metric System and can be followed on Twitter at @RJMetrics.

A few weeks ago, my former employer led a $100 million investment into Twitter and I must admit that I was quite jealous of my former colleagues. Chances are they got the opportunity to do some very cool analytics on Twitter’s data.

Rather than wonder about what I missed, I decided to figure out what I could from the outside looking in. Using some statistical trickery, the Twitter API, and my RJMetrics dashboard, I uncovered a ton of astonishing new information about Twitter. Here are some highlights:

• Twitter’s user growth is no longer accelerating. The rate of new user acquisition has plateaued at around 8 million per month.
• Over 14% of users don’t have a single follower, and over 75% of users have 10 or fewer followers.
• 38% of users have never sent a single tweet, and over 75% of users have sent fewer than 10 tweets.
• 1 in 4 registered users tweets in any given month.
• Once a user has tweeted once, there is a 65% chance that they will tweet again. After that second tweet, however, the chance of a third tweet goes up to 81%.
• If someone is still tweeting in their second week as a user, it is extremely likely that they will remain on Twitter as a long-term user.
• Users who joined in more recent months are less likely to stop using the service and more likely to tweet more often than users from the past.

Read on for some detailed charts a deeper dive into the data.

How We Did It

In most cases, this kind of outside-looking-in exercise wouldn’t be possible. Twitter, however, is a special case for a few reasons:

• The company is pre-revenue, so its value is wrapped up in user activity and engagement
• A Twitter user’s activity data (tweets, followers, etc) is all public by default
• Twitter’s API allowed me to automatically download up to 20,000 data points per hour
• Twitter uses auto-incrementing ID numbers (1,2,3,4…) for both users and tweets
• The central limit theorem tells us, among other things, that a large enough random subset of a large data set will behave like its parent set with a high degree of statistical confidence

In the end, our sample size consisted of about 85,000 users and just over 3 Million tweets. By piecing all of these things together and pulling the data into the RJMetrics Dashboard, I was able to chart loads of information about Twitter’s user base and user behavior. I’ve looked around, and this appears to be the largest public analysis of Twitter’s user base online. Enjoy!

Number of Twitter Users

This analysis leverages the fact that Twitter uses auto-incrementing ID numbers for both users and tweets. We identified the range of IDs that were consumed by the system in any given month and the percentage of them actually tied to real Twitter accounts. (”Dead” IDs are likely canceled accounts, SPAM accounts, test accounts, etc.) In combination, these numbers give us a reliable approximation of how many new users joined Twitter each month:

This shows us the exponential growth experienced by Twitter in 2009. In Q3, this plateaus at a rate of about 8 million new users per month. A chart of total cumulative users is below:

Hockey, anyone? As of September 1st, the actual number of live Twitter accounts was just above 50 million.

Average Number of Followers

According to the data, the average Twitter user has 42 followers. It’s interesting to see the distribution of users by the number of people following them:

As you can see, the vast majority of users have ten or fewer followers, and over 20% have no followers at all! As we know, most users have been on the system for less than a year and, as shown in the chart below, the number of followers is proportional to the user’s time since joining:

Number of Tweets

It’s also interesting to look at the number of status updates, or “tweets” made by the average user. Obviously, the number of tweets from any given user grows over time (per the trend shown in the chart below):

When we look at the distribution of tweets by user, we see a very surprising trend: over 75% of all Twitter users have tweeted fewer than ten times.

“Protected” (Private) Twitter Profiles

Before moving onto analyses at the tweet level, it’s important to note that some of the users we identified have “protected” their tweets, meaning we were able to see how many followers they had and how many times they had tweeted, but were unable to download specific tweets (and, more importantly, tweet times).

The chart below shows how many users in our data set are “protected” by the month they joined. The overall number sits around 10% (and dropping):

Also interesting is how “protected” Twitter users differ from public users. As shown in the charts below, protected users tend to tweet far more often, but have far fewer followers:

Power Users

Another limitation of the API is that it can only return the 3,200 most recent tweets for any given user. This is obviously not a big deal for most users, but there are some users out there who have passed that mark. Our sample data set showed that less than 0.02% of Twitter users have sent more than 3,200 tweets. These users will have incomplete data sets in our study, but the population is so small that they should not have any meaningful impact on our conclusions.

Tweets by Source

It’s interesting to see how different tweeting methods have risen up over time. Below I show the most popular methods and what percent of Twitter traffic came through them each month since 2007:

The web clearly dominates this list. Let’s exclude it to get a closer look at which other sources are driving tweets:

Twitterriffic has clearly seen better days, and text messages (txt) have been declining as a channel, as well. Meanwhile, TweetDeck appears to be aggressively gobbling up market share.

Time Between Tweets

Since we know the timestamp of every tweet in our sample data set, we can study the time between tweets and the recency of tweets from the userbase.

Remarkably, the average time between any two tweets from the same user is exactly 24 hours.

The chart below shows the average amount of time between tweets for a user’s first ten tweets (when applicable). The x-axis contains the time of the tweet in question, and the value is the average amount of time since the previous tweet.

Surprisingly, the time between Tweets actually drops as users do more tweeting. However, this could be biased by the fact that most users have tweeted fewer than ten times. To clear things up, let’s look at the average time between tweets based on how many times the user has tweeted:

Indeed, as you might expect, users who send more tweets also tweet more frequently, and the dropoff is quite significant.

Probability of Incremental Tweets

Since there is such a huge dropoff in tweeting activity up until the 10 tweets mark, we thought it might be interesting to look at the “probability of an incremental tweet” based on how many tweets a given user has completed. This can be calculated with just a few clicks in RJMetrics:

As you might expect, with every Tweet a user performs, their chance of tweeting again goes up.

Active Tweeters

We know that Twitter has 50 million registered users, but we also know that the vast majority of them have tweeted fewer than ten times. Let’s investigate just how many of these registered users are actually actively tweeting.

Using our tweet data, we can identify what percent of the user base sent out at least one tweet in any given month. This “unique tweeters” statistic is charted below (to get a fair statistic we excluded protected accounts from our denominator):

The number seems to hover in the 25% range. In other words, only about 1 in 4 registered users is actually tweeting in any given month. (Although it’s worth noting that some users may only be using Twitter to read others’ tweets, meaning they are not full-fledged “zombie” accounts.)

Notice the bump in early 2009, right around the time when new user growth began to accelerate aggressively. This suggests the obvious: on average, a newer user is more likely to tweet than an older user. When new user growth exploded in early 2009, the concentration of new users became denser, driving this average up. To illustrate this (and get a better look at how users behave over their lifetime), we turn to cohort analysis.

Cohort Analysis

A cohort analysis is a great way to look at user behavior and loyalty over time. Each line in the chart below represents a different “cohort” of Twitter users based on the month they joined (we chose 7 cohorts from different time periods to avoid clutter). In the chart below, we monitor what percent of the users in each cohort come back to tweet again in each month after having tweeted in the first month. Obviously, month 1 is 100% by definition:

This is quite a telling chart:

• There is an expected usage dropoff in month 2, but after that point usage holds predictably steady. This is great news for anyone trying to forecast user activity early on in a new user’s lifetime.
• The newer cohorts, despite being significantly larger in size, actually consist of more loyal users. The two highest lines are also the two most recent, meaning that users who joined in 2009 are actually more likely to keep tweeting after their first month than those who joined in the same month in 2008.

Since the dropoff in Month 2 is quite pronounced, let’s zoom in and look at weekly cohorts to see if we can see how usage drops off at the weekly level:

We see a similar pattern here, although more recent cohorts don’t stand out as much as in the monthly analysis. Again, however, the dropoff in the second period doesn’t seem to further decline as time goes on. This means that by the second week of a cohort’s lifetime, Twitter can reliably predict its users’ future behavior as a group.

Another cohort analysis that might be interesting is to look at how many tweets a cohort makes each month after joining. This metric will incorporate both the dropoff in usage from the users who churn in the first month and the uptick in activity from users who stay on the platform:

Wow! This is a remarkable image. Despite the massive dropoff in users after the first month, the tweeting activity from the users who are left is so voluminous that it makes the “tweets per month” of each cohort average over 100% (and, as before, the more recent cohorts are the more loyal)!

In other words, the users who stick around actually tweet so frequently (and at such a rapid pace compared to their first month) that they more than make up for the lost activity of those who churned after the first month. This is a very powerful and unexpected statistic.

Conclusion

Everyone has their own feelings about Twitter’s reported $1 billion valuation. I hope this article gave you a taste of what its new investors likely considered before coming up with that number.

In 2007-2008, many brands and companies flocked to Second Life to build a virtual presence, which spiked and created a bit of a backlash and ultimately a bit of a retreat in the process. By mid-2009, virtual worlds were realizing a comeback of sorts. In July 2009, virtual worlds consultancy kzero.co.uk reported that membership of virtual worlds grew by 39% in the second quarter of 2009 to an estimated 579 million. World of Warcraft, Entropia Universe, Habbo Hotel, Club Penguin and Second Life are respectively posting profits powered by those who were intent on getting a “second” life.

According to the study, it is the youth demographic that drove the bulk of the 39% growth. Kzero reported that poptropica.com, which targets 5 to 10-year-olds, boasts over 76 million registered users. As the ages increase, so do the numbers of users. For example in the range of 10 to 15-year-olds, Habbo’s virtual world population rivaled some real world countries with 135 million

users. Other networks also accommodate massive citizenry. 54 million inhabit Neopets, 34 million occupy Star Dolls, and 28 million reside in Club Penguin.

Older users seem to take more interest in real life social networks such as Facebook, MySpace and Twitter. Among 15 to 25-year-olds usage appears to diminish – apart from Poptropica, which maintains and active community of 35 million.

However, as existing, younger demographics of virtual worlds mature, their conditioning and expectations for sophisticated and immersive interaction won’t dwindle. Social Networks that cater to older demographics may soon need to integrate virtual features and experiences in order to attract new users over time.

Kzero breaks out the world of virtual words using a visual that resembles a radar screen. In its cartography of the virtual landscape, the company organizes the disparate varieties of communities in 12 categories:

- Soclializing/Chat

- Casual Gaming

- Misc

- Mirror Worlds

- Roleplay/Fantasy/Quests

- Toys/Real World Games

- Music

- Fashion/Lifestyle

- Education/Development

- Sports

- TV/Film/Books

- Content Creation

Virtual Worlds by Sector (Click for Larger Image):

Virtual Worlds Organized by Registered Accounts:

July 28th, 2009 | by Ben Parr

Twitter now has a brand spankin’ new homepage. Of course, if you’re a regular TwitterTwitter user, you’re rarely going to see it because you’re already logged in. But for the 5 billion+ people Twitter has yet to convert, it provides the company’s big chance to get them to sign up and stay on their website.

So what’s Twitter’s big ace-in-the-hole? Well, just look at what the company puts in your face when you arrive: trending topics. Not just 8 or 10 topics, but 23 topics that represent the collective discussion of the entire world. Twitter’s no longer about updating your friends, but about being THE place for global events.

Evidence

“Twitter is a service for friends, family, and co-workers to communicate and stay connected through the exchange of quick, frequent answers to one simple question: What are you doing?

And here’s the new text:

“Share and discover what’s happening right now, anywhere in the world”

You immediately notice the deemphasis on your personal network – the people you live, sleep, and work with – and the focus on realtime discovery and world events. Twitter’s stepped away from being branded as a social network, or being compared to FacebookFacebook.

The second big change is search – specifically the trending topics. The company not only makes sure you realize that the Twitterverse is talking about things you care about (whether it’s pitcher Mark Buehrle or Blue M&Ms), but it explains them with a conversation bubble that appears when you hover over the question mark icon.

Even bigger, Twitter provides an explanation of the trending topics. The explanations are pulled from What the Trend, although it looks like the explanations aren’t updated in realtime. So how do they decide which trending topics get homepage explanations? How long does it take for it to appear? Could it be abused?

We’ll get the answers later, but the significance of explaining trends to a potential user is huge. Everything is geared towards a curious onlooker seeing that Twitter is the place to have a conversation about anything that’s anything in the world.

Twitter’s Changing Directions

Now Twitter has taken away that focus, and in its place, Twitter is focusing on the entire world. There’s not a single reference to you in Twitter’s new explanation. We think we understand why, because we hear this reason for not joining Twitter all the time:

“I just don’t have anything to say.”
“I don’t need to update people on my life.”
“It’s for people with followings and something to promote, not for me.”

Emphasizing that Twitter is the world’s platform for realtime information, for being connected to the entire world, is a savvy move on the part of Twitter. People who have something to promote are already on Twitter. Now the company has to convert the people who think Twitter’s just about telling people about what cereal you ate.

Branding Twitter as the one place where you are plugged in to the collective world makes it tougher to ignore. You can say “I don’t feel like updating people on my life,” but it’s far tougher to say “I don’t care about what’s happening in the world.”

Welcome to Twitter, the hotspot of cultural and global relevance. Welcome to Twitter, Version 2.

July 27th, 2009 | by Sharlyn Lauby

Sharlyn Lauby is the president of Internal Talent Management (ITM) which specializes in employee training and human resources consulting. She authors a blog at hrbartender.com.

I admit I’m a Twitter addict. I enjoy the flurry of tweets and the variety of information my followers share with me. But even though I like the variety, it’s still important for me to feel some sort of connection to the people and companies I follow. On the people side, the way I connect is by getting to know someone’s personality. It’s the same if I’m following a company. Where the person is offering personality, the company is successfully tweeting their corporate culture.

But if all you’re doing is sending out auto-tweets, I’m not sure either of us is getting the full benefit of your presence on TwitterTwitter. Some people don’t like communicating with a company logo. But when a company offers a pleasant look and feel, and tweets out information of value to customers, then it is possible to connect with them. Here are 7 suggestions (along with some Twitter examples) for establishing a rock-solid corporate culture on Twitter:

1. Share Your History

Another historic moment is when an organization grows and expands, especially in the current economic climate. Dunkin’ Donuts did a great job announcing their entry into the Birmingham market.

2. Talk Vision and Mission

His point is well taken. People want to be engaged with companies that look engaging. Think about the purpose of your organization. Twitter can be a place to talk about goals, plans and offer a glimpse of what life is like at your place of work.

3. Reveal Industry Insights

Another company setting the standard in this area is Pandora Radio. When a piece of legislation that could impact their business was introduced in the U.S. Senate, they turned to Twitter to educate listeners. They regularly updated their followers on the progress of the legislation. And, they thanked their tweeps for the support. (Very important!)

4. Recognize Employees

First, they very smartly tweet about their company’s commitment to diversity. As a reader, this speaks volumes about what’s important to Marriott as a company. Second, I have been equally impressed with the sensitivity they expressed for their associates and others during the recent tragedy in Jakarta. That puts a very human face on the corporate Twitter account.

5. Profile Customer Successes

Jessica Lee, senior employment manager for APCO Worldwide, feels that as Twitter matures we’ll start seeing companies share more of their own and their clients’ successes. “I personally like sharing even the very smallest things – clients wanting to get more involved in social media, or how our own Facebook Fan Page is growing – because it’s exciting to see the growth along with new and different ways of being applied in the business world.”

DAXKO, meanwhile, is combining the popularity of Twittering by their customers with their company user’s conference by setting up a Twitter account for the conference. According to Dunn, they’ll use the site to “live tweet from the conference so our customers that couldn’t attend can follow what’s going on and hopefully get some value out of it.”

6. Be Responsive

Much of the success attributed to @ComcastCares is their responsiveness. Dunn agrees. “I think I’d rather have no Twitter account than an account that wasn’t responding to replies or DMs within 5 to 10 minutes. Customers that are savvy enough to use Twitter are going to expect a lot of responsiveness.”

And, it’s not only how fast you respond but how you respond. Lee reminds us that “whether your customer is a consumer of your product or service, or in my case, a potential employee who is interested in working for APCO – the tone should still be conversational and friendly. And ultimately, you want it to be an extension of yourself and a reflection of your organization’s culture.”

7. Ask Questions About the Future

Or, what do you want to see in our tweets?

As a consumer, I love it when companies ask me for my opinion. It shows me they care about me and what I have to say. And, I love it even more when I see a company take suggestions and ideas seriously.

Conclusion

Use the examples in this post as the starting point for a conversation or training session about Twitter best practices and your corporate culture. By sharing with your team the right way to leverage Twitter, we can all celebrate our successes together. If you know any other good examples of companies using Twitter to share their corporate culture in a positive way, please share them in the comments.

July 23rd, 2009 | by Vadim Lavrusik

Vadim Lavrusik is a new media student at the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism. He is @lavrusik on Twitter () and blogs at Lavrusik.com.

In the current economy, job security has become somewhat of an oxymoron. Which is one reason why maintaining connections with your old university classmates, especially when you find yourself looking for a new job, can be crucial. Now universities across the country are beginning to use social media tools to engage alumni and build a network of graduates with a shared affinity for the institution.

Of course, helping former students stay connected is just one reason universities are turning to social media; fundraising is another, and there are many more. Below is a look at 10 ways higher education is harnessing the power of social media to engage alumni. Let us know of any other ways you have used social media to connect with graduates or your former classmates in the comments below.

1. Helping Alumni Find Jobs

Keidra Chaney, an emerging media specialist at DePaul University (@depaulalumni), said LinkedIn is by far the school’s biggest success with 5,500 members currently in their alumni network on the site, and about 100 new members joining weekly. Chaney said the community has active job postings for alumni on the hunt for work, and that most jobs are posted by other alumni. The most recent issue of the school’s alumni magazine actually focused on how alumni are using social media.

Michigan State University uses both LinkedIn () and Twitter to share job leads with alumni, said Dave Isbell, alumni career services coordinator at the school. Isbell said recruiters often contact him with quick advice or job information that he shares with his followers. The school’s Career Resources Network also uses YouTube () to give students and recently graduated alumni advice on their job search. Schools like Emory University (@EmoryAlumni), meanwhile, host what they call a “Coach Chat,” where alumni can phone in and share ideas, tools and career resources. Alumni can also e-mail in questions and those that miss out on a chat can download it as a podcast.

2. Collaboration and Connecting With Students

Stanford University law school created its own Facebook ()-like social network for alumni and students that includes legal wikis that they can collaborate on for specific practices, said Lisa Farris, associate director of web communications and identity at the Stanford law school. The wikis include overviews of different practices, key skill sets and more information that students and alums can share together. Though there is a lot of alumni-to-alumni conversation that takes place on the network, the collaboration between students and alumni is key in positioning the students for their careers, Farris said.

M.I.T. (@MIT_alumni) has had similar results with its LinkedIn alumni group, which it allows students to join before they graduate so that they can network with alumni, said Christine Tempesta, director of strategic initiatives at M.I.T.

Caltech (@caltechalumni) offers its students similar access to its LinkedIn group. Andrew Shaindlin, who is executive director at the Caltech Alumni Association and also writes a blog on trends in alumni relations, said allowing students and alumni to connect blurs the transition from student to alumni, which makes the transition more fluid.

Furthermore, using social media tools to engage students can create a lasting relationship between student and school into their alumni years, said Dave Baker, web communications director at Oregon State University (@poweredbyorange), which built an entire site that is interconnected with social media called “Powered By Orange.”

3. Fundraising: From E-mails to Tweets

“It’s a hot topic right now,” said Shaindlin. “If we are using social media to get our messages out, we have to figure out how to incorporate a need for fundraising and support and build that into the stream of information.” Instead of sending out generic mass e-mails, the challenge is moving to personal, one-to-one forms of communication to make it more effective. Shaindlin thinks that social media can achieve that, but alumni who are the recipients of the message have to be ready to accept it through such a new medium.

Some schools are experimenting in this area. Brown University used a Facebook Page to engage its alumni as part of its annual fund drive. The school posted to the wall of the Page encouraging alumni to make a gift to the Brown Annual Fund, announcing dollar-for-dollar matches and the end results of the drive.

Emory University started the Blue Pig campaign to encourage its undergraduate students to give to the school by using a Facebook profile, a Twitter account (@thebluepig) and other media. The hope is that when the students graduate, the practice of giving back to the school will continue, said Cassie Young, program coordinator for alumni programs. The campaign seems to have been very successful too, resulting in a 157% growth in number of gifts from undergrads, according to Michael Stoner, who owns the mStoner communications firm, which specializes in web development for higher education institutions.

Stoner said the campaign is a good example of how to integrate various technologies and demonstrates the increasing importance of social media in fundraising. Stoner also noted, however, that there is not much focused work among universities using social media to fundraise. “A lot of people [are] saying this could be big for us, but not knowing how to take advantage of it,” he said.

Some universities are still taking steps toward integrating social media into their fundraising practices. Colgate University (@colgatealumni) in New York, for example, integrated Facebook Connect into its donation process, allowing donors to post that they made a gift to the school in their Facebook status. Because of the virality of Facebook and the visibility of status updates, the idea is that friends of the donor, who may be alumni of the school as well, would see news of the donation in their news feed and be encouraged or reminded to donate as well, explains Charlie Melichar, vice president for public relations and communications at the school.

4. Training Alumni To Use Social Media

5. Meeting Alumni Where They’re At

For example, Texas A&M University has its own Facebook-like social site, MyAggieNetwork, but usage of the network has been on the decline – only 344 logins last month, in comparison to the 4,000 in September 2008. “It has not done what we wanted it to do,” said Kathryn Greenwade, vice president of communications for the Texas A&M alumni association. Despite having a lot of similar features to other social networking sites, Greenwade said she thinks it didn’t catch on because it is another account for alumni to have to remember. She said they are going to continue to let people use the site, but have turned their focus to their presence on established social networks like LinkedIn and Facebook, which has grown without a lot of promotion. “We decided to go where the people are rather than creating our own network,” Greenwade said.

As mainstream social sites continue to grow, niche sites created by universities may become irrelevant and burdensome for alumni to use. Plus, building the sites take resources from the universities that could be applied more effectively elsewhere.

Stanford law school’s own private network for its students and alumni has done well, said Farris from the school. She said this is largely because the content on the network is valuable and exclusive to those that register to use it, such as students sharing class notes. Furthermore, the school hopes to integrate other features, like a curriculum guide that could be synced with the wikis.

6. Providing Tools To Spread Information

Aydelotte said he has seen donors embed the widget to their sites and Facebook profiles because it features a story about their large donation to the school.

7. Alumni-Generated Content

The University of Texas at Austin built its own photo sharing site that allows alumni to share photos of themselves showing the school’s well-known “hook ‘em, horns” hand gesture, along with a brief bio.

“It’s sort of a Flickr for alumni, but hosted on our website,” said Nyleva Corley, web and social media manager at the school. The idea, she said, is to allow people to get reconnected to the school and their fellow classmates by sharing where they are now and what they are doing.

Oregon State University uses Flickr () and encourages alumni to post photos of a cutout of Benny, the school’s mascot, taken in various locales. Colgate University uploads photos to its Flickr account and lets people interact with them, including this set from an alumni reunion. Melichar from Colgate said the content is what is important, not the container. “If we post our photos to Flickr, they have their own social life,” he said. “People can interact with them and one another.”

8. Promoting Alumni Networks

Andrew Gossen, senior associate director for class affairs and social media at Princeton University’s Alumni Association, said that if schools don’t take advantage and aren’t quick to provide tools for alums to connect to one another, they will do it themselves. “And if that happens, we become irrelevant and the tools replace a lot of the functions of our (alumni) offices,” Gossen said. There are about 45 alumni Princeton groups on LinkedIn, according to Gossen, and the aim is going to be to consolidate them into one group, working with those who started the others.

Most sites promote the social media groups on their alumni websites – because often that is the landing point for many alumni. M.I.T. and other schools have experimented with using targeted Facebook ads to try to attract alumni to their social networks. Christina Tempesta, director of strategic initiatives, said the experiment wasn’t too successful – at least not in the amount of click-throughs the ads got.

9. Mobile Reunions

For example, instead of just having the shuttle schedule times printed out, the mobile application allowed users to type in their destination and get much more specific information about which shuttle to take and when and where it was arriving. The goal is to continue to expand the mobile app and eventually replace the printed program, which is about 52 pages in length. The application got 1,000 unique visits and 1,600 total visits.

10. Connecting The Dots: Google Maps

Google ()

Oregon State University uses Google Maps () on its Powered By Orange site, as well. The site includes a map at the center of the page and lets alums post their current location and career along with their graduation year and degree. Baker from OSU said that the site hasn’t been promoted and isn’t set for its official launch until the end of September and already has been getting good traffic. The map already has a good number of orange dots on it.

July 23rd, 2009 | by Ben Parr

We know that Twitter’s rising rapidly in popularity. We also know that a huge number of Twitter users don’t stick around. So what’s a company with a user retention problem to do? Launch a guide to using its own product, of course.

Just minutes ago, Twitter released Twitter 101 for Business, a guide for getting started with using the Twitter service. It covers the basics of Twitter, how to get started, the lingo, and includes case studies. Here’s how Twitter describes its value to businesses on its new Twitter 101 website:

Every day, millions of people use Twitter to create, discover and share ideas with others. Now, people are turning to Twitter as an effective way to reach out to businesses, too. From local stores to big brands, and from brick-and-mortar to internet-based or service sector, people are finding great value in the connections they make with businesses on Twitter.

Will this get more business on Twitter, and more importantly, will it fix Twitter’s user retention problem? It probably can’t hurt. In fact, we launched our own Twitter Guide Book to help people understand and learn more about Twitter as well.

July 16, 2009 by aniisu

Planning to get your organization on the social media map? There are factors which I learnt along the way that is needed to get completely immersed. Read more about the do’s and don’ts of kick-starting your firm’s social media communication. Understand also how you can leverage internal communication context and content.

The power of social networking sites can’t be ignored and communicators may be worried if your stakeholders are being actively engaged on them. If your organization believes that social media is meant only for the Marketing or Public Relations department to handle, they may be missing a great opportunity to maximize the power of your employees and internal communication.

I believe the boundary between the external world and the internal environment is blurring rapidly. Internal communicators who spot this opportunity can maximize the value social media offers. Extending an organization’s reach is today an avenue for collaboration between internal communication and external media teams.

If you are for instance starting out on a social media campaign, here are some ideas to translate the great work you do internally to feature as your organization’s effort to hire, engage and collaborate with their stakeholders.

a)       Study the scope and environment: You may not be the first to get on any of the well known social networking sites such as Facebook, Linkedin or MySpace. That does not take away anything from getting what you want to achieve by starting out now.  Understand what others in your field have done in terms of content, engagement, methodology and monitoring feedback.

b)      Define how your organization can engage: Do you expect the page to be an extension of your website? Is it a channel to provide support for your products or services? Are you hoping to hire the right candidate? Should you be showcasing your culture? Do you believe your customers will share their practices and pain points on your page? Document the precise objectives and measurement criteria. Get a legal point of view – it never hurts to know what can get you in trouble and out of it!

c)       Get an enthusiastic team in place: This is a cross pollination project – not an individual initiative. Have employees from different departments to play leading roles in the administration, content generation and maintenance.  Some of the best ideas can come from those fresh out of college – since they use this medium the most!

d)      Create a site-map before you tackle the content: Are you clear about how the site will look? Are you sharing a lot more than what you bargain for? By getting a buy-in on the structure and outline, you hold the key to the best outcome from your content.

e)       Articulate the rules of engagement: So you expect your prospects to visit your site? Will you allow them to use it for their personal marketing objectives or do you want them to focus on what you have defined? Do you have a set of ‘do’s and don’ts’ called out?

f)        Content matters: Every organization has a lot to share ranging from their culture, values, ethics, policies, their work, client wins, industry awards, employee testimonials, office imagery and fun events. Choose how you want your organization to be perceived. Content once published can always be replicated in no time across the web world.

g)      Pilot a site: Having got your site live, you can begin by getting your employees to test drive it first, get feedback, have them as fans and improvise.

h)       Get leadership to promote it: Nothing works more than the commitment of your senior leaders. Request a senior leader to officially announce the page open, seek participation and drive traffic.

So now that you have your company’s social networking page live, how can you keep it current?

Invest time to brainstorm ideas such as leveraging ‘internal writers’ to contribute, getting employee profiles, running a contest, having your recent employee fest showcased or an upcoming event highlighted. Also give the site mind space on your intranet.

Other thoughts to keep in mind while keep your organization’s social networking page buzzing.

a) Be open: You may have feedback which is scathing and embarrassing. Step back and understand the context of the feedback and take action if merited.

b) Start small: Begin with the basics and evolve as the page take shape. Remember social media is about collaboration and your employees and other stakeholders can help make it robust.

c) Monitor progress: Understand that having a page on MySpace or Facebook is not the end but a start of the social media journey. Keep a finger on the pulse and monitor posts, comments and inputs coming on the page.

Go ahead, let the power of ‘six degrees of separation’ maximize the potential of your organization’s social media plunge.

The Coming Change in Social Media Business Applications

July 7th, 2009 | by Stan Schroeder

Analytics company iStrategyLabs has examined the demographics stats from Facebook ()’s Social Ads platform, and they’ve reached some very interesting conclusions. Facebook’s userbase, as a whole, is getting much older very fast.

As you can see in the chart below, the overall number of users between 18 and 24 years of age has grown only 4.8% between the fourth of January and the fourth of July of 2009. In comparison, the number of users aged 25 – 34 has grown 60.8%; the number of users aged 35 to 54 has grown 190.2%, while the number of users older than 55 years has grown a tremendous 513.7%.

If the iStrategyLabs numbers are correct, Facebook, simply put, is not a young site anymore. Most of the users (20,3 million, or 28.2% overall) on the site belong to the 35 – 54 age group. Compare that to the age group that was once Facebook’s bread and butter – the 18 – 24 group – which is now in third place with 18 million (25.1%) users, behind the 25 – 34 year old group, which makes for 25.2% of Facebook’s user base with 18.1 million users. The number of users aged 55 and over has grown from negligible 950,000 to 5.9 million in mere six months.

Now, although it may seem like the number of young users has declined, this is not true. The overall number of users of all ages is growing. But they are growing at very different speeds, and therefore the percentages have changed significantly; on a site like Facebook, which lives on advertising, this is a big deal.

However, although the number of young users has increased, the number of high school and college students has declined by -16.5% and -21.7%, respectively. This can indicate several things: first, that the data that iStrategyLabs is incorrect or very rough (which is a possibility, since Facebook doesn’t guarantee that the data provided to advertisers is absolutely accurate); secondly, it’s possible that Facebook users simply don’t think that their education, or the school/college they’re in are very important so they’re simply not entering the data. It’s probably a little bit of both, but it’ll be interesting to see and compare Facebook’s own demographics data with these numbers.

In any case, these are significant changes. If you show the same ads to Facebook users now, they will react vastly differently than they would have half a year ago. If you’re an advertiser on Facebook, you should take these changes into account and react accordingly, because your campaign might not be as effective as it was a couple of months ago.

July 15th, 2009 | by Vadim Lavrusik

Vadim Lavrusik is a new media student at the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism. He is @lavrusik on TwitterTwitter and blogs at Lavrusik.com.

Instead of focusing their attention on promoting information to mainstream media, some university public affairs offices are using the power of social media to engage the community directly. In many cases, social media tools like Facebook Pages have given universities an opportunity to speak to audiences on their own, reaching thousands of people interested in keeping up with news at the school and connecting with others on the social network.

Universities are constantly exploring new ways to use social media to fulfill their missions of engaging and sharing knowledge with their constituents. Below are just 10 highlights of how universities are using social media for public affairs. As always, please share other examples you have used or come across in the comments below.

1. Gathering and Sharing Information

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The point is to try to educate and provide a glimpse into what the institution is like, said Dan Wolter, director of University of Minnesota News Service, which has a Twitter following of 2,900 and 1,700 YouTube subscribers. Many larger universities have multiple accounts across various channels that are specific to departments or schools (i.e., Twitter, YouTubeYouTube, Facebook accounts for the medical school, English department, admissions office, etc.) and often times the school’s news service or public affairs office will pick out information that could appeal to the broader audience and share it through the general university account, Wolter said. These social media tools are often used to supplement traditional press releases being sent out.

2. Showcasing Student and Faculty Work

That can be as simple as featuring photos taken by students through a photo album on the Stanford University Facebook page, which boasts 38,000 fans. Or it can take the form of an elaborate YouTube rap video a pair of Stanford students created for a biology class assignment that the school’s News Service shared on multiple social media channels:

3. Providing a Platform to Broadcast Events

Stockholm University (@Stockholm_Uni) in Sweden provided a live streaming video on its website for those who could not attend a seminar on environmental issues and another on file sharing, said Maria Erlandsson, press relations manager at Stockholm University, which has multiple social media accounts on services like Twitter, in both English and Swedish.

To accompany the video webcast of its main 2009 commencement ceremony, Vanderbilt University (@VanderbiltU) designated a page on its website that gathered commencement tweets that included the #vu2009 hashtag. This allowed students and others to report on the commencement happenings as they were being attended. (Example: “Can I just record the applause and play it back everytime I’m supposed to clap? My hands r tired. #vu2009” via @triciafields).

4. Emergency Notification

“Some students check their Facebook more often than their school’s e-mail accounts,” said Nyleva Corley, the Web and social media manager in the public affairs office at University of Texas (@UTAustin).

Corley said that when the school had a case of H1N1 flu (previously known as swine flu) this past spring, they used Twitter to notify the community of the case as well as pointing them to information and resources.

The University of Minnesota has an Emergency Notification group on Facebook that it uses to blast messages to its 2,300 members during a case of an emergency. It provides another way to reach students that spend a lot of their time there during critical situations, Wolter said. Wolter’s team has used Twitter and Facebook to notify university students of bomb threats as well as announce the cancellation of classes during snow storms.

5. Connecting People

The 46,000 fans of the University of Michigan Page often connect to one another, for example, especially incoming students who are eager to make new friends. Facebook groups made for a specific graduating class and university Twitter accounts have a similar effect.

6. Producing, Not Just Promoting

YouTube is instrumental in that for many schools. Patric Lane, health and science editor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill News Services (@Carolina_News), said there have been several times in which blogs like The Huffington Post would embed one of the videos from their YouTube channel. Though getting a video like this picked up drives traffic, the YouTube audience contributes views directly as well.

The same thing can be said of university Facebook Pages. Stephen Orlando, director of print media at the University of Florida News Bureau (@UFNow), said their press releases posted to the school’s Facebook Page reach 21,000 people. “So we feel that even if the news media doesn’t pick up a news release, we still have a way to reach our audience,” Orlando said.

Cynthia Hoke, director of the News Service at the University of Georgia, is using their Facebook Page as a publishing tool as well. Many of their links get comments, criticisms, and inspire a conversation on the topic.

7. Creating a Dialogue and Communicating to Students

Blogs are actually a great example of how schools are getting into the conversation. Though they’re not real-time, blogs provide a format for dialogue via comments. During the school year, the University of Texas hosted student blogs called “Longhorn Confidential” in which two students from each grade level blogged about their experiences at school. The public could respond to each post via comments, and often did. “It served as not only a story-telling format, but created dialogue as well,” said Corley, the school’s public affairs social media manager.

8. Facebook Office Hours

Facebook office hours are something of a four-part process. First, a Facebook note is posted promoting and describing the professor or faculty member hosting the “office hours.” Then a video is posted with the faculty member talking about their research or work (or that of their department). Next, fans then have a chance to ask the hosting member questions via comments. Finally, the faculty member answers questions through a second video, often addressing those commenting by name.

So far, Hsu from Stanford said the experiment has been a success, which is evident by how many questions are being asked of the faculty members – and by the positive reviews the practice has gotten. “It’s not just about Stanford news, it’s about taking part in the community of social networks,” Hsu said.

9. Coaching for the Spotlight

Lane from University of North Carolina said their YouTube channel often serves as a coaching tool for their experts and professors to get used to being on camera. “When they do go on to do a ‘real interview’, they can be more confident, more capable. They can communicate in a more effective way” Lane said.

10. Getting Wired Via Mobile

Ian Hsu from Stanford said the development of the app, which was done by two students, was commissioned by the university and has further potential. What if the campus was sprinkled with signs that point visitors with iPhones to be able to connect to the application, he asked. “There is a lot of potential there,” Hsu said.

For those without an iPhone, the school also has a mobile web client that allows students to access their mail, check the calendar, and more all from a mobile device. Other schools have also introduced similar applications (Duke University, Georgia Tech, U Cal at San Diego, etc.). The Chronicle of Higher Education recently did a series on schools introducing mobile applications.

Greater than 97% of college students own a cell phone, so connecting with students via mobile devices is smart.