140Char

I’m a big fan of both Tumblr and Posterous, despite not really having the time/project to make the best use of them at the moment. So the fact that Tumblr has released a new feature, some interesting statistics and signs of new revenue streams launching soon has reignited my thoughts on how I could use the service effectively.

The new feature is the ability to add static pages – which will aid companies and bloggers looking to keep content highlighted. Adding a page is simple, with three layouts to choose from.

And it will only build on some pretty impressive statistics released today – 1 billion page views in February 2010 for starters. It also has 2 million posts every day, 15,000 new posts daily, and 18 new posts and reblogs every second.

Incidentally, 1 billion page views in February equals 36 million page views per day, 25,000 page views per minute, or 400 per second. And Tumblr has put together a nice infographic to show off the info:

And if that isn’t enough, apparently there are also plans to unveil two new revenue generating features next month, powered by the widget mysteriously pictured below:

For a personal or simple company blog, I’d definitely recommend checking out Tumblr or Posterous. They’re easier to update than a traditional hosted blog platform (whether Blogger or Wordpress), and offer as many design options etc. Ultimately a full self-hosted blog platform such as Wordpress (Which this site uses) offers some additional advantages, but if you don’t want the hassle or advertising, then go with the microblogging platforms.

A belated look at a recent report from comScore which shows Twitter is the fastest growing social network on mobile, with growth of 347% since 2009.

The number of users in January 2010 reached 4.7 million – compared to just over 1 million in January 2009, giving a 4.47 multiple increase. Twitter’s 347% growth compares with Facebooks 112% (But Facebook still rules with 25 million mobile users), and Myspace declining 7%.

But to be 1/5th of Facebooks size and growing 3 times as quickly shows Twitter is looking even more promising on mobile than on the fixed internet.

Although comScore only measures visits to Twitter.com, and more than half of Twitter users use clients and apps, it does provide a clue to Twitter’s growth rates.

In June it gained around 7 million new visitors, hitting 44.5 million unique global visitors, up 19 per cent from May 2009, and now making it the 52nd biggest site in the world (and with a 55 per cent international audience).

Techcrunch points to the Iran election as a contributor to the growth, while Mark Evans over at Twitterati somewhat confusingly uses comScore and Compete figures to calculate a 50-50 U.S and International split.

For the record, the biggest properties measured by comScore are Google sites, Microsoft sites, Yahoo sites, Facebook and Wikimedia Foundation sites.

I’ve played around with numerous Twitter analytics and statistic applications, and I have to say that Twitter Analyzer seems to be about the most comprehensive in terms of available information.

It features:-

User stats:- including number of tweets, reach, hashtags, popularity,etc etc.

Friends stats:- including f0llowers growth rate, location, activity and re-tweeting, etc.

Mentions:- including all, social, updates, etc.

Groups:- including by occupation, join date, gender, etc.

And Trends and Fun tabs are apparently ‘coming soon’.

It’s fast after the initial username analysis, and nicely presented, with handy graphs and charts. The biggest flaws currently are that you don’t seem to be able to export the charts and graphs to anywhere else (although there’s a handy ‘Tweet’ option for some of the interesting information you might want to share via Twitter.

It also seems to be limited to the 30 days for a lot of the information, in line with the data and limits that Twitter has. Which is understandable, but also frustrating. If they were able to pull data in on a regular schedule to provide longer timeframes once a username has first been indexed, and enable the ability to export the information for presentations and spreadsheets, it would be a clear leader in Twitter stats and analysis.

Twitter website traffic has overtaken both the New York Times and Wall Street Journal for April 2009, as picked up by PaidContent and expanded on by ReadWriteWeb.

Which is a handy stat, but….

Are we really comparing like for like, or is this as misleading as comparing print and online figures?

For starters, we’re looking at website traffic, and although publication has numerous ways to be accessed online, I’d risk assuming that Twitter’s proportion of mobile and desktop client access is greater than that of the newspaper sites – which probably means the numbers went past the paper sites long ago.

And where’s the measures of interaction for comparison? While not every Twitter user is interacting, and newspaper sites are building in increasing routes to conversations and communities, surely it’s the engagement, interaction and effectiveness of Twitter versus other sites which is of as much importance? Even when it’s breaking news, e.g. Mumbai, the ability to converse with both the source and others is built into Twitter to a far greater extent than the paper sites.

Finally for a comparison – what amount of data is being generated by the different sites?

That’s surely of major importance considering the changes happening in general searching:

First hands on test with Wolfram Alpha

Google search tools moving closer to ‘real-time’

And considering the current wave of new and improved Twitter search tools:

Scoopler

Twitscoop

Tweetmeme

Oh, and major changes to Twitter Search itself.

Whether or not the current buzz and celebrity/mainstream adoption continues, or whether a backlash increases along with the pretty high drop-out rate from people trying Twitter for the first time, it’s the levels of data and engagement which are key to the longterm success, and routes to monetization for Twitter, rather than sheer mass audience numbers. Particularly when the types of both advertiser and advertising which are going to be most effective will also be quite different from traditional publishing outlets.

tr.im is the latest in a fairly substantial list of services which offer to shorten your links to make them more compatible with microblogging sites like Twitter.

After all, when you’ve only got 140 characters to play with, you don’t want to be posting a lengthy website address – and even better, many of the newer services also include tracking of click-throughs. Particularly useful for marketing professionals to see whether it was their link which got traffic to their content.

tr.im works with Twitter and Indenti.ca and will automatically update your status. It tracks stats, allows comments on your urls, and your account keeps a history of your shortened urls (You can log in with your Twitter details). One of the main ways it stands out from other url shorteners is by offering to retweet popular shortened urls – bonus traffic!

Some of the other popular url shorteners are:

TinyURL is just about the grandaddy of url shortening. It does what it says on the tin, via the website or bookmarklet.

SnipURL: Shortens URLs, allows you to see how many people have clicked on them, and has useful options including showing the long url in brackets when the shortened url is copied – handy if people might mistake your url for a phishing scam etc.

Bit.ly: I started with tinyurl but switched to Bit.ly. It keeps stats for your urls, and splits them between Twitter (seperating out individual pages e.g. those clicking from twitter.com/home and twitter.com/badgergravling, and also those from 3rd party applications. Plus it records any conversations and retweets on Twitter and Friendfeed, comments, and metadata. It’s interesting that Twitterfeed (auto RSS posting to Twitter) seems to be using Bit.ly now. And most interesting is that you can set a custom term for your shortened url address – which can only be used once, so it’s yours forever if you pick a good one!

Some that I haven’t tried, and can’t in any way vouch for,  include:

Notlong:

Shorterlink

Doiop

Shorl

Shorttext

Tinypic (for images).

Zurl

Curio.us

Get-URL

and many many more. Interesting several that I’d heard of appear to have folded due to a combination of problems with hosts or spammers using their service. It’s important to make sure you check who is posting a shortened url before clicking on it, just in case – and obviously be aware if the link takes you to a site requesting any type of login information.

To see all the available url shorteners we’ve encountered, check out the Microblogging tools section.

Twittertise is billed as a method of advertising on Twitter, but personally I see it more as a tool to measure the Return on Investment for corporate Twittering – something which arguably has a lot more value than a basic advertising tool. Owner and creator Jon Steinberg got in touch via Twitter, (@jonsteinberg), but it took me a little while to get some questions to him, and I’m glad it did, because this post now coincides with a new release which answers some of the questions I had about the value of the service.

In it’s simplest terms, Twittertise is a free service which builds on Bit.ly url shortening to offer some statistics on referrals through to your website – but the latest release starts to go further than the Bit.ly tool by offering some useful graphing capabilities for overall referrals and individual messages – and graphs are always useful for corporate reporting!

Jon was kind enough to answer some questions about the thinking behind Twittertise, how brands including Comcast, Nortel and the American Cancer Society are using it, and how you could be using it for your company:

Twittertise and Whalewhisdom are both applications by Thursday LLC – can you tell us a bit more about the company, where it’s based, and how many people are behind the applications?

“I think comcastcare’s use during huricane Gustav is my favorite.  Timely messages that needed to be spaced.
http://jonsteinberg.com/post/48213746/comcastcares-using-twittertise-to-send-out-gustav
http://jonsteinberg.com/post/48214167/another-shot-of-comcastcares-using-twittertise
Nortel has also been a consistent and solid user for communicating corporate and product related information and tracking it.
http://twitter.com/nortel
On the non-profit side, I’m proud to see American Cancer Society using:
http://twitter.com/americancancer.”

Thanks to Jon for taking the time to answer a few questions, and I’m definitely planning to follow Twittertise and future releases in detail. One of the biggest problems in social media and social networking is tracking a return on the time invested, and this is one of the tools that will start to make that job easier.

It’s also interesting to note that Jon advises using Twittertise in conjunction with real human tweeting – I’m not a big fan of just plugging in an autofeed and letting it run – it could be really useful to ensure important messages don’t get forgotten or phrased badly in the rush of conversation. And it could also be useful to retweet your most important message when you’ve finished posting for the day to ensure people in different timezones might see your most important messages.

If you liked this post and want to keep up with the latest articles, news, Twitter tools and interviews, why not subscribe to the www.140char.com RSS feed?

And if you missed our earlier interviews why not catch up with them now?

An interview with Blippr founders Jonathan C and Chris Heard.

An interview with Posty creator Cesare Rocchi.