Maybe the real question to ask is actually: What can't MAP do? MAP gives its users the ability to research any topic on blogs, social media sites, and in traditional news media reports.

MAP can, for example, tell you that the largest number of Twitter users who wrote about the Palm Pre come from California and Great Britain, as well as who the most authoritative Twitter users who tend to tweet about the Pre are (MAP assigns a score from 1 to 10 to every Twitter user, based on the number of followers, replies, retweets, etc.). Of course, you can then also compare these results with results from a query for 'iPhone,' for example.

This video gives a good, quick, overview of what the Sysomos tools can do. Usually these promotional videos tend to be a bit exaggerated, but in our experience, MAP and Heartbeat fully live up to their promises.

But MAP is not just a tool for analyzing tweets. It can also quickly give us a history of when and how often a Wikipedia article was edited, or what the most popular forum posts and YouTube videos about the any given topic were in the last 30 days.

For PR firms, another interesting function is MAP's ability to create a list of the most authoritative blogs (and blog posts) about any given subject. This way, a firm can quickly create a list of blogs to contact about an upcoming launch of a rival phone, for example (for the Pre, by the way, MAP identified CNET and Engadget as the top blogs). Once a firm has identified these blogs, MAP can also provide a detailed analysis of the topics these blogs tend to write about, how many posts per month they publish (almost 1000 per month for Engadget) as well as a list of blogs that tend to link to this blog's content.

On the technical side, Sysomos is obviously doing some very interesting semantic analysis, which, among other things, allows the software to create very cool 'BuzzGraphs' that display the key search term in relation to the most often used terms around it (here is one for 'Conan,' for example). MAP can also do sentiment analyses, which will be really helpful for PR firms who want to track the result of a campaign, for example. Given that MAP users can filter results by time, demographic, or language, the tools allow for some very detailed analysis.

Both MAP and Heartbeat are surfing the current wave of enthusiasm for the real-time web, and MAP's crawlers index an enormous number of blog posts, forum posts, news reports, and tweets every hour. One interesting aspect of Sysomos' backend is also that the company keeps a complete cache of tweets, blog posts, and news reports on its own servers, so that it never has to rely on the availability of Twitter's API, for example. Amazingly, Sysomos also manages to effectively filter out blog spam, which is not an easy feat.

Monitoring the Heartbeat

If MAP is for PR firms and maybe even news organizations who want to be able to analyze the reaction from social media sources about a given topic, Heartbeat is the companion product that firms would probably set up for their clients to use, as its focus is on monitoring specific terms in real-time. Besides giving users an overview of the most recent posts that included a specific keyword (usually a brand name in this context), Heartbeat also tracks data about sentiment, demographics (age, gender, location), and the language they wrote in.

Heartbeat, which comes in a standard and pro version, doesn't feature all the in-depth analysis tools that MAP offers, though both products are based on the same platform. Instead, Heartbeat provides users with an easy to use dashboard, where they can track new blog posts and tweets about a product, for example. Here, users can then also tag specific blog posts and tweets (Heartbeat also automatically assigns tags to every item), and assign a follow-up to other users. The standard version supports up to 5 users, while there are no limitations on the number of users in the pro version.

Intelligence for Social Media

MAP and Heartbeat are highly complex products, and we only got to touch upon a small sub-set of their features (Sysomos also offers Firefox extensions, for example). We weren't able to get a lot of information about the pricing for both products, but Sysomos told us that they work individually with every one of their clients to create the right package for them. However, barring any financial stumbling blocks, we would highly recommend both MAP and Heartbeat to any PR firm that needs a tool to research, monitor, and manage social media campaigns. The more we used these tools, the more we also felt that they could be highly useful for news organizations as well.

While Heartbeat is easy enough to use, MAP is clearly not meant to be used by casual users. It's one of those tools where one can jump in and start doing some basic analysis pretty quickly, but to really get the most out of it, a training session with Sysomos' staff or a detailed look at the excellent introductory screencast and other documentation is definitely necessary. Sysomos' co-founder and CEO, Nick Koudas, gave us an almost 1 1/2 hour long demo of these two products a while ago, and even this was only enough to touch upon the basic features of the products. It is important to remember, though, that neither of these products are geared towards casual users.

Don't Despair: Free Version Coming Soon

When we talked to the Sysomos team last month, they told us that they are also working on a free, consumer-oriented product that should launch later this year. Even if this free tool only includes a fraction of MAP's or Heartbeat's abilities, we can't wait to get our hands on them, because the dataset that these tools would be built upon is unlike anything Sysomos' competitors currently offer.

With regards to the basic demographics on Facebook, women still represent the majority of users (51% vs. 45%), and while younger users still represent the majority of active users on the service, users over 55 are driving most of Facebook's current growth.

The fact that women are clearly in the majority on Facebook is, of course, not exactly a new trend.

It is interesting to note, however, that the only region where men are in the majority on Facebook is the Middle East and Northern Africa, where men make up 56% of Facebook's user base and women only represent 35% of all users. Interestingly, though, this region also features the largest number of users who decline to disclose their gender.

Focus on Europe

In some European countries like Germany, where Facebook is only the fourth most popular social network, Facebook is still struggling to gain significant market share, as its slow adoption of local translations allowed other social networks like StudiVZ or XING to become very popular before Facebook was able to make a significant push into these countries. Today, Belgium has more active Facebook users than Germany. According to O'Reilly, however, Facebook's active user base in Germany grew 60% over the last four months.

According to Katrin Mathis, who has been studying the advance of Facebook in Europe, only about 3% of the total population of Germany can be found on Facebook right now, while 30% of all the British and 38% of all the Danes can be found on the social networking site.

Eastern European countries like the Czech Republic (191%), Bulgaria (105%), or Macedonia (95%) are currently seeing some of the most impressive growth rates in active Facebook users in Europe.

Growth in the Rest of the World

Looking at the world's major regions, O'Reilly found that Facebook continues to grow at about 30% in the last 12 weeks. In Asia and Africa, however, Facebook is growing much faster, with growth rates of 73.7% and 86.9% respectively. In Indonesia alone, where Facebook just eclipsed Friendster as the leading social network, Facebook saw the number of its active users grow by almost 240% in the last 12 weeks.

For more demographic data about Facebook, have a look at the embedded presentation from O'Reilly below. Among other things, this presentation includes interesting data for South America and Africa.

As a website or blog publisher, you've likely often wondered, "Who is visiting my website?" Traffic stats are readily available, so you already know that your unique visitors are up this week, and average time on-site is holding steady, and you're slowly beating down that ugly bounce rate, but what you don't know is who these people are. Are they social media geeks? Are they stay-at-home moms? Are they 20-something males with an interest in extreme sports?

We're often asked why site-centric demographic data is better than direct-traffic measurement (like Omniture, WebTrends, and Google's) or syndicated panel measurement (like comScore and Nielsen's). The truth is that all three have a place in the audience-measurement landscape. But the site-centric approach has some advantages that deserve special attention.

Site-centric research has two major advantages:

1. Access to the entire site audience,
2. Customized measurement of audience attributes.

Site-centric research is the demographic equivalent of direct-traffic measurement. Publishers simply tag each page of their site with the survey instrument. This means that the sample is selected based on the entire audience, from which a small percentage is invited to participate. This is unlike a panel survey, which does not have access to the entire audience and which can sample among only the small subset of the audience that happens to belong to the panel. With site-centric research, you get a more representative sample of your audience, the ability to conduct research on very small, targeted audiences, and, because of the potential for a greater volume of collected data, the ability to dive deep into particular parts of your site and audience segments.

Complementing greater access to audiences across different websites is site-centric research that executes customized questionnaires. Instead of a "one survey fits all" approach, each survey can be driven based on the category of the site and the context of particular visitors. So, your audience is asked relevant questions, and the data collected is far more valuable to publishers and advertisers alike. Compared with the sophisticated mathematical models that behavioral tracking companies use to infer the demographics and psychographics of Internet users, site-centric research can seem very simplistic. And in some sense, it is, though there is a tremendous amount of value in "just asking," and a lot of theory behind why it works.

Based on this, there are seven reasons why everyone should be thinking about site-centric demographics.

1. Know your audience. These are the folks actually on your site: you need to know them inside and out. Beyond basic demographics are visitor psychographics.
2. Profile who is visiting your site. Traffic stats are only part of the picture. Detailed and accurate portraits of online visitors are worth their weight in gold.
3. Tailor your content and offers. Detailed profiles allow you to customize offers based on who is visiting your site at any given time. Or, you could allocate ad space based on categories, interests, and behaviors.
4. React faster to emerging trends. Because you're getting real-time info, you can spot key indicators early and adjust your messaging and offers accordingly.
5. Ensure your advertising spend is hitting the right target. Whether you're a publisher or advertiser, profiles ensure that you are delivering the right message to the right audience.
6. Increase the impact of your research dollars. Site-centric research is very cost-effective. More importantly, the data is richer and allows you to do more.
7. Develop relevant partnerships. Partners are a great way to broaden your reach, as long as you can show them what you've got.

If any of these reasons strike a chord, maybe it's time to consider what site-centric demographics can do for you: all you need to do is ask.

According to a post on Nielsen Wire, unique visitors to Twitter.com increased 1,382 percent year over year, from 475,000 unique visitors in February 2008 to 7 million in February 2009. This growth earned it the title of "fastest growing member community site," a term that encompasses not just social networks but any online community - even one such as online wiki community Wikia, which, incidentally, came in at number five on the list. Zimbio and Facebook followed Twitter, growing 240 percent and 228 percent, respectively.

Nielsen also reported that the largest age group on Twitter was not college students or teens, but adults from the ages of 35-49. This group comprises nearly 42% of the site's audience at 3 million unique visitors. Twitter is also a popular site for people to visit while at work, notes Nielsen's Michelle McGiboney, as 62% of the combo unique audience accesses Twitter.com from work versus only 35% from home.

Of course, visitor stats to Twitter.com from a traditional web browser don't show a complete picture since the service is also accessible from a number of desktop and mobile clients as well as SMS. In January, 735,000 unique visitors hit Twitter's mobile web site, averaging 14 visits per month and spending an average of 7 minutes per visit. Twitter also had 812,000 unique users sending and receiving text messages in the last quarter of 2008. However, this last stat only took into account AT&T and Verizon cell phones. Within that group, though, there were nearly 240 tweets per person for the quarter.

A Word About These Numbers

Before taking these numbers to the bank, it's worth noting that they are being pulled from Nielsen NetView (U.S. Home & Work), so they're not representative of the service as a whole - they only give us a snapshot of what's occurring there. Also, the demographic chart is annotated with a note that reads "these demographics have insufficient sample sizes" in the 18-24 age group column, which may speak to the overall insufficient sample size of this particular survey, a number which was not reported.

That said, these numbers do seem to confirm what our gut instincts have been telling us for some time. Twitter is apparently not becoming the next big thing with teens and other members of Gen Y, despite rumors to the contrary. The hype surrounding Twitter's connection to the younger generation was even skewered hilariously by Jon Stewart not too long ago on "The Daily Show."

It looks like Twitter may be for "old people" after all. Just like Facebook.

The post informed advertisers that they now had access to two of the most frequently requested targeting filters: language targeting and location targeting. Obviously, the language targeting makes sense, especially considering that Facebook is currently available in 40 languages with over 60 more in development. In fact, it's somewhat surprising that this feature was not available until now.

When a particular language is entered into a box on the ad signup form, the approximate reach of the selection will appear at the bottom. For example, if an advertiser enters in a location of "United States" and the language "Spanish," the approximate reach will display 1,081,820 - the number of Spanish-speaking Facebook users in the States.

Facebook Knows Where You Live

However, it's the location-based targeting which is the most interesting of the two updates. Here, advertisers can narrow their focus in order to target users within a certain mile radius of a particular location. This feature is currently available only in the U.S., the U.K., and Canada for targeting cities and/or targeting within 10, 25, or 50 miles of the cities selected.

With this feature, advertisers can tap into the detailed demographics that Facebook users so willingly share along with their age, sex, relationship status, educational background, etc. (You didn't really think you were just filling that info out to share with friends, did you?)

Will Hyperlocal Ads Come Next?

As advertisers better learn to target narrower sets of users, we wonder if it's only a matter of time before Facebook introduces a mobile, location-based component to their network which would allow users share their exact (or nearly exact) location within a city. Imagine the possibilities for extreme hyperlocal ads then! What if advertisers could target all the users who updated how they were sipping lattes at Starbucks, for instance? Or perhaps the ads could target users who posted that they've checked in at a Vegas hotel for a big conference? These are the sorts of niche demographics that advertisers can only dream about now, but the technology already exists to enable that level of precision.

Today, a handful of early-adopters are currently sharing this type of information through Facebook's News Feed and status updates courtesy of the mobile social networking service Brightkite. If you're friends with any Brightkite users, you'll likely see the location updates pop into your feeds from time to time thanks to that service's ability to integrate with Facebook by way of Facebook Connect. This relatively new authentication technology allows users to log into the Brightkite service with their Facebook account and then shoot their updates from Brightkite back into their profiles. If Facebook advertisers could tap into the sort of niche demographics that Brightkite could give access to, it could open up a whole world of possibilities for hyperlocal ad targeting.

The only stumbling block to implementing this type of targeting is the same one that always comes up: those pesky users and their sense of privacy. Would Facebook users revolt if, all of a sudden, Facebook knew exactly where they were and served up ads that did too? The Facebook ads seem creepy enough now as they're often far more accurate and relevant than some users are comfortable with. What would hyperlocal ads look like then? Far creepier, we would imagine. "Do you really need that second Frappuccino? Why not head to the gym instead - it's only 3 blocks away!" Yikes.

But while it's true that some users would balk at that level of invasiveness, others would welcome it. In fact, Facebook is actively cultivating a sense among its users that going online is no longer a private activity. By tucking away their privacy controls deep within their settings, they're encouraging the average user to overshare personal information with people who would have never known them in that way before - people like mom, dad, and the boss, for example.

In time, the sense of openness Facebook fosters among a person's social - and perhaps professional - network will wear away at that sense of privacy until users aren't just tolerant of these hyperlocal ads, they will welcome them and they'll expect them. Google's recent foray into more targeted advertising will only help further this cause, too.

Of course, in this imagined scenario, Facebook users who want to maintain their privacy would be able to do so - they could just opt-out of the feature. But maintaining online privacy is something that will, over time, become harder and harder to do. There will be more settings to adjust, more configuring of block lists, and more checkboxes to mark. Most users won't bother with it - they will just adjust to the changes and to the new reality of the smarter (and yes, perhaps scarier) ads.

A majority of teens, percentage wise, join social networks, but it's the adults that still make up the bulk of these web sites. That's because adults make up a larger proportion of the U.S. population than teens, reports Pew Internet & American Life Project. So the 65% of online teens actually represents fewer users than the 35% of adults who participate online. Of course, out of that 35%, the adults that tend to join social networks still skews younger: 75% of those 18-24 use these networks, but only 7% of the adults 65+ do.

It's Not About Professional Networking After All

You may think that many adults have joined the online trend mainly to network professionally with others in their field. However, that turns out not to be true. Instead adults, like teens, are there to socialize with their friends and people they already know. Nearly nine in ten social network users (89%) say they use the networks to stay in touch with friends, and 57% say they use it to make plans with friends. Under half (49%) use the sites to make new friends.

Surprisingly, those on social networks for professional purposes are not as common as you may have thought. Only 6% of adults use LinkedIn, the online social network dedicated to professional networking, but 72% use other social networks (50% use MySpace, 22% use Facebook) for both professional and personal networking purposes. The most interesting finding is that less than a third of social network users are using them for professional purposes, regardless of which site they use.

More Tidbits: Demographics

Some other findings confirm what we've heard before about social networks: MySpace users are more likely to be women, Hispanic, black, and have a high school education or some college experience. The median age is 27. Facebook users are more likely to be male and have a college degree. The median age there is 26. LinkedIn, however, tends to be comprised of more older, white men with a college degree and median age of 40. The prevalence of men on these networks could be explained by the fact that men are more likely than women to have two or more online profiles (54% vs. 47%).

What It All Means

It appears that the trend of using social networking sites for professional purposes is not quite as common as we may have thought. Although there are portions of the population both young and old that do so, it isn't the main reason people join social networks. It's more common for people to go online to use the networks as they were originally intended - to socialize. That's not a bad thing, we suppose, but it will be interesting to see what this means for sites like LinkedIn, whose main purpose is to cater to the professional crowd.

We've already seen LinkedIn attempt to expand their network in new ways not too long ago. Just this past year, we've watched as LinkedIn added LinkedIn applications, an effort to make their network more interesting and dynamic. They also added helpful features for business-minded folks like the events section, which debuted last November. But it was only a month ago that the company brought in a new CEO, or rather, an old one - the company founder Reid Hoffman. Perhaps that means LinkedIn is planning to shake up their site and make it more relevant and popular among online users than it is today. ]]>Discuss]]> http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/more_adults_than_ever_on_socia.php http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/more_adults_than_ever_on_socia.php Trends Fri, 16 Jan 2009 06:15:13 -0800 Sarah Perez If there's any doubt that Facebook is rapidly becoming the next big thing in social networks, you only need look at their recent statistics. According to new reports, in recent weeks Facebook is growing at a rate of 600,000 users each day, up from 300,000 to 400,000 users per day earlier this quarter. The company is also reporting that, as of today, they have reached 140 million active users.

If Facebook continues at this rate, by the end of December they could add a total of 20 million new users. By March, the company could then reach 200 million active users - which would mean they doubled their userbase in less than a year's time. The majority of this growth (70%) is taking place outside the U.S.

To handle this growth, a poster on Slashdot notes that "the Facebook engineering team has been tweaking its use of memcached, and says it can now handle 200,000 UDP requests per second. Facebook has detailed its refinements to memcached, which it hopes will be included in the official memcached repository. For now, their changes have been released to github."

Facebook's Users Are Active and Engaged

Facebook did release some figures of their own today that show their users are actively using the site and engaged with the content. Here's what they reported:

General Growth

• More than 140 million active users
• More than half of Facebook users are outside of college
• The fastest growing demographic is those 25 years old and older

User Engagement

• Average user has 100 friends on the site
• 2.6 billion minutes are spent on Facebook each day (worldwide)
• More than 13 million users update their statuses at least once each day
• More than 2.5 million users become fans of Pages each day

Applications

• More than 700 million photos uploaded to the site each month
• More than 4 million videos uploaded each month
• More than 15 million pieces of content (web links, news stories, blog posts, notes, photos, etc.) shared each month
• More than 2 million events created each month
• More than 19 million active user groups exist on the site

International Growth

• More than 35 translations available on the site, with more than 60 in development
• More than 70% of Facebook users are outside the United States

Platform

• More than 660,000 developers and entrepreneurs from more than 180 countries
• More than 52,000 applications currently available on Facebook Platform
• 140 new applications added per day
• More than 95% of Facebook members have used at least one application built on Facebook Platform

Also worth noting is the data on mobile users released last month which revealed that the company has 15 million active mobile users using their site, having grown from only 5 million at the beginning of the year. Those aren't additional users, but are a subset of the 140 million who use the site from their mobile phones and other devices. We can't help but think those numbers were also aided by the September launch of Facebook's iPhone app, version 2.0. The new release, a huge improvement over the original, managed to pack in nearly every feature from social network including wall posts, status updates, the news feed, photos and more, all from the simplified iPhone interface.

How to Get More Stats

If you like delving into statistics or are just looking for specific information on Facebook demographics, the AllFacebook site has a pretty handy online tool available. With it, you can use drop-down boxes to select country, gender, and age range and have the tool chart that data on the screen for you. You can compare up to three companies using this tool.

Image credits: top chart, Inside Facebook; bottom chart, AllFacebook

Standard use of PolicyMap is free, but subscribers get access to proprietary data and projections, custom regions, more reports, and the ability to upload your own data.

I'll be moving next month, just six blocks away from where I live right now, but that part of the neighborhood is quite different. This is interesting data to look at. I did not know, for example, that a certain 10X10 block area I walk my dog through regularly is filled with people who have donated to the Presidential campaign of John McCain. No wonder I was the only one shocked when an openly gay man was elected Mayor of our city last night! I thought the whole city was filled with conservative lawn signs - but it's just that little patch.

Continued below, just tech no politics.

As ProgrammableWeb's John Musser pointed out in a post titled Demographics by API: Placestat and PolicyMap, the new REST API could really produce some magic if combined with last week's launch of the Yahoo! Geo-location Database and API.

Policymap was developed in collaboration with a nonprofit called The Reinvestment Fund. Thanks to them and to Pushpin for making this information both publicly and programatically available.

It's interesting to know that my latest video about late night escapades was viewed primarily by men ages 30 to 50. In a few minutes I will embed in this post a video of myself eating a live baby chicken and will report back on viewer demographics when they become available. You can view the demographics on your videos by clicking the "insight" button next to each video on your account view.

Geographic location is also reported as part of the Insight package. Statistics can be limited to any time frame and are viewable side by side with metrics on a video's relative popularity and leading sources of off-site inbound traffic. It's a great little metrics package.

Presumably YouTube isn't getting all Facebook Beacon on us and tracking the demographics of users logged into YouTube but viewing videos embedded around the web. That would be a positive thing to see in anonymous aggregate. Since such views are unlikely to be counted, perhaps I should spare the fluffy little baby chick. Oh what the heck, let's give it a try.

These kinds of statistics were presumably available for advertisers, in large quantities, since the dawn of YouTube. Breaking them out on a video by video basis and offering a nice interface is a very logical next step but one that too few services online would take the time to provide - much less for free.

It would be nice if users were given the option to publicly expose their video Insight statistics and could view them on a chanel-wide basis instead of just for a single video. Update! I was wrong, several readers pointed out that YouTube does offer aggregate demographics of all your videos! Thanks, friends!

Demographics are extrapolated from user panels and multiplied by traffic numbers gleaned from embed codes and presumably ISP data.

Continued below image of search results page.

The search function is primarily targeting ad buyers, just because no one online is willing to pay for anything except ads promoting more monetized mediums, but it is free for anyone to use after creating a Quantcast account.

There are any number of other reasons you might want to use a search service like this. I might be a nonprofit organization, for example, organizing an event that's particularly relevant to a certain demographic group. In that case, making sure I know what some of said group's most popular websites are could prove quite valuable. Asking some people is a good idea too, but a little Quantcast help could be a good first step.

Demographic information can be a touchy subject outside of the ad world, see for example Hillary Clinton's offensive assertion today that she's likely to fair well in the election because non-college educated white people like her best. None the less, though, demographics better engaged with than hidden from.

Room for Improvement

It's not clear how extensive Quantcast's demographic panels are. The company says it gathers this data from "several million" web users. That's great, though I'd like to see what percentage of those millions fall into the different populations they track.

Geographic filtering would sure be great, too, though then we're likely talking about making the pie even smaller and less accurate.

One of the biggest shortcomings of services like Quantcast is that they tend to limit themselves to estimating US traffic. The internet is global, the ad market is too, and some global engagement with geographic filtering seems like a big, open field.

The search here really is just for numbers. It would be awesome to see these demographics integrated into content searches. Quantcast's competitor Compete recently made their data available to users of the Ask.com search engine. This allows searchers to get a feel for the traffic numbers and trends of any site they find search results on. That's pretty handy.

Finally, the ability to filter by traffic trends would be really nice. As you can see from the screenshot above, many of my top search results were sites with falling traffic. What if I wanted to see sites that were growing in total or growing increasingly popular with my target demographic?

Despite its relatively rudimentary beta status, this new offering from Quantcast looks good. It should prove valuable to ad buyers and others and will undoubtedly increase Quantcast's profile online.