Mat Morrison's data-driven social media insights and opinion
I’ve been interested by forums for a while. It often seems that the Social Media establishment overlooks them in favour of shinier platforms; unjustly, in my opinion. Forums require more time investment than other social platforms, grow more slowly, often cater to a slightly less attractive demographic, and (significantly) are more intrinsically hedged against commercial […]
Last Friday, all Facebook Pages automagically switched to the new Timeline format. What will the impact of this be? In anticipation of this change, Simply Measured (a web metrics company) recently published a pre and post study of brands that had been early adopters of the new Facebook Timeline format. In it they made the […]
The chart above illustrates the emergence and resolution of a flame war[1] on Waitrose’s Facebook Page last November. The horizontal axis represents sequential Posts on Waitrose’s Wall while the vertical axis represents the individual contributors to the "conversation" (really it was more of a barney than a conversation.) Each blue dot plotted on the chart […]
This chart (click for bigger) represents 9 days of activity on ASOS’s Facebook Page. Compare it to the Budweiser flow and you’ll see how focused ASOS is on Customer Service by comparison. And yet their post frequency is high: an average of more than 3 posts per day. They promoted 11 individual links during the […]
Facebook Pages aren’t a community as most people would understand a community. They’re more like an email list in many ways (albeit an email list with some pretty compelling social features.) The thing we see on all the brand Facebook Pages that we’ve analysed so far is how much the conversation is controlled by the […]
Today, a question popped up in a meeting: a client had two Twitter accounts and wanted to know how many users followed both accounts. I’ve spent what seems like a great deal of time tinkering with a combination of open source and homespun SNA tools to answer interesting-sounding questions about Twitter social networks – but […]
Geek alert: if the title of this post isn’t a dead giveaway I should tell you — unless you’re interested in APIs and badly-put-together bits of code — this probably isn’t for you. I’ve recently found myself using a service provided by Damon Clinkscale called DoesFollow. All it does is answer the simple question “does […]
A couple of weeks ago, I asked a bunch of people to send me their OPML files (for those of you who aren’t aware, an OPML file is what tells your RSS reader what feeds you’ve subscribed to — it can act as a way of moving your subscriptions between readers.) Some of the more […]
Using nothing more than their public twitter relationships, is it possible to predict whether a US Congressperson is a Republican or a Democrat? The answer seems to be a guarded “yes” — our tools predict correctly 40/46 times (or around 87% of the cases.) This post follows on from a post earlier today in which […]
This is a follow-up post to Why doesn’t the Tory MP have Twitter friends? — a report on some early research into the interrelationships between the few Westminster MPs who are on Twitter. According to Tweetminster, the number of UK MPs on Twitter has doubled since this time last month. Where there were eight Twittering […]
