Social media research company Sysomos looked at all the tweets from May 30 to see what services people were using. Of all tweets that day, Sysomos found that 1.25% of tweets contained a link to a photo sharing service, or about 1/12th of all links shared. That translates into 2.125 million tweets that were pictures from third-party services. It is just one day of Twitter, but it's probably indicative of day-to-day trends. What third party services were the most popular?

The next on Twitter's list of services to build is probably video sharing. TwitPic unveiled the ability to host and share video in February and there are services like Qik (bought by Skype, which now makes it Microsoft property) that integrate with Twitter. Video hosting and sharing is a bigger and more diverse market to break into with giants YouTube and Vimeo roaming those grounds.

[Source: Sysomos.com]

You may have heard that last night or this morning. It has been all over the television, Twitter, Facebook. Really, any medium that you can possibly think of almost anywhere in the world has been entirely devoted to the death of Bin Laden.

Twitter was especially important in spreading the news. Social media monitoring company Sysomos was curious about just how fast and how much volume was created by the death of Bin Laden and broke down the numbers. Within 12 hours of the news being broken around 10:30 p.m. EST (UTC-4), there had been 40,000 blog posts and an incredible 2.2 million tweets.

Sysomos posted a map of where the news was coming from. Mostly the news was concentrated in the United States but Bin Laden was a high-profile name across the world and tweets came in from all corners of the globe.

Even FourSquare got in on the act with people checking into a "Post Bin Laden World" as well as the town of Abbottabad, Pakistan where the firefight and killing of Bin Laden happened. Sysomos reported that by 10 a.m. EST there were 11,570 FourSquare check-ins related to Bin Laden.

Update: @TwitterGlobalPR has tweeted some factoids this afternoon. Twitter saw its highest rate of tweets per second last night with the peak coming with 5,106 at 11:00 p.m. EST. Between 10:45 p.m. and 12:30 a.m. EST Twitter average 3440 tweets per second. It is notable that Twitter did not crash under the load. A year ago at this time Twitter was having problems surrounding people tweeting about the soccer World Cup. This year the most notorious man in the world is killed and the company can handle it fine.

People who created a Twitter profile before January 2009 now account for just 4.7% of the total Twitter population. That's one of the findings in a new study by the social media analytics and monitoring service Sysomos that examines over 1 billion tweets from 2010 and compares the data with Twitter usage in 2009. So how has the influx of new users changed the ways in which Twitter is used?

Twitter Users Disclose More Information in Their Profiles

The number of Twitter users who provide personal information in their bios has more than doubled since last year; 82% of Twitter users now provide a name, compared with only 33% in 2009. And 73% provide location information, compared to 44% in 2009. Forty five percent give a website address, up from 22% a year ago. This seems to indicate that Twitter users are becoming more comfortable disclosing personal information on the site, but more importantly perhaps, that having a profile on Twitter is becoming increasingly important.

Of course, one of the most popular two-word phrases in personal profiles is "Justin Bieber," so I'm not sure we can argue that this is all about professional networking.

More Followers and Following

The vast majority of Twitter users - 95.8% - follow less than 500 people. Only 0.05% follow more than 10,000. The number of users who follow less than five people has decreased considerably from last year, from 37% to 21%, while the number who follow more than 100 people has increased three-fold to 21%.

Only 0.06% of Twitter users have more than 20,000 followers, and only 2.12% have more than 1,000 followers. Again, the vast majority of Twitter users - 95.9% - have less than 500 followers. But users with less than five followers decreased from 46% to 32% between 2010 and 2009, and users with more than 100 followers has more than doubled, up from 7% to 16%.

Who's Doing All the Tweeting?

Of all Twitter users, only 0.18% have made more than 25,000 tweets, and 2.7% have made more than 5,000 tweets. More than three-quarters of Twitters users - 80.6% - have tweeted fewer than 500 times. What Sysomos calls "a small hard-core group" - 2.2% of Twitter users - have accounted for 58.3% of all tweets, while 22.5% of Twitter users have accounted for about 90% of all activity in 2010.

In 2009, Sysomos reported that 5% of users accounted for 75% of all activity, 10% account for 86% of activity, and the top 30% account for 97.4%.

Although the figures have changed someone, the shape of the graphic is still the same, with a few users dominating Twitter activity. According to Sysomos, many of those top tweeters are automatic feed generators.

As Twitter continues to become more mainstream, will we see more people tweeting? Or simply, as the change from last year to this year suggests, more people just following along?

The average blogger today falls into the 21- to 35-year-old demographic. Indeed, this group accounts for a little bit more than half of all blog posts in the company's database. Bloggers under the age of 20 account for about 20% of all posts, and bloggers between 36 and 50 account for another 20%. Bloggers over 51 only account for 7.1% of all posts.

Gender

The blogosphere represents a very balanced gender distribution, with women accounting for about 51% of all posts and men accounting for 49%.

Location

The vast majority of bloggers still reside in the U.S. (29.2%), followed by Great Britain (6.75%), Japan (4.88%) and Brazil (4.19%). In the U.S., California plays host to the largest number of bloggers (14.1%), followed by New York (7.16%) and Colorado (5.25%).

These numbers, of course, are skewed, as they don't take the relative size of these countries and states into account. It would be interesting see these numbers on a blogger-per-capita scale.

As Sysomos co-founder Nilesh Bansal told us earlier this week, traditional analytics tools like Google Analytics tools help users get a good understanding of what a visitor is doing on your own site. This, however, doesn't tell you anything about the sites that influence your visitors and the actual value of these visitors for you business. After all, somebody who tends to visit auto blogs is far more likely to buy something from your auto parts site than somebody who doesn't show any interest in cars.

Sysomos wouldn't give us any details about how it tracks a user's behavior across the Internet. Bansal told us that the company doesn't use cookies and just places a small snippet of JavaScript code on the publisher's site. Thanks to the data Sysomos already has in its Heartbeat and MAP social media monitoring and analytics tools, the company can easily identify the ecosystem around a certain topic. How Sysomos can tell that one of your visitors also went your competitor's sites and read Autoblog earlier in the week remains Sysomos' secret, however.

For publishers and e-commerce sites, this also means that they can now keep a closer tap on their social media ROI. After tweaking Audience's scoring engine, marketers can now see exactly what the value of a given campaign on Twitter or the company's blog was. You can also see what blogs tend to bring the most valuable visitors to your site and then specifically target this audience.

We do have some lingering questions about how Sysomos can track a user's behavior across the Internet and the potential privacy implications of this, but there can't be any doubt that this will be a very popular tool among marketers, community managers and sales managers. Sysomos is currently testing Audience with a small group of beta testers and plans to open the service to all of its clients by the third quarter of 2010.

The Power of Retweets

This also highlights the power of retweets. A retweet really doesn't have to propagate very far to reach a very large number of people. Of course, chances are that not all of your friends and friends of friends will retweet your message - and even then, appearing in a Twitter user's stream doesn't guarantee that your message will actually be seen.

The Sysomos team also looked at how far Twitter users would have to roam to meet a follower of their own. According to the company's data, it only takes 3.32 steps on average (standard deviation is 1.25 steps) before you will find someone who is already following you. As Sysomos' Alex Cheng notes in the report, this means that "there are many small, circular connections on Twitter."

Sysomos already allowed its users to search and analyze Facebook fan pages and groups for the last few months through its MAP analytics tool. The company now also includes these updates in Heartbeat, Sysomos' social media monitoring tool. Sysomos' integration of the Open Graph API will surface all the activity that has been made public by a user, including status updates and public wall posts.

Thanks to Sysomos' new ability to analyze and search public Facebook updates, we were, for example, able to track the backlash against Facebook's "instant personalization." According to Sysomos, only about 15% of the public updates about this topic were positive.

Are Facebook Users Aware that their Updates Will Live a Second Life in Social Media Analytics Tools?

Sysomos, of course, only pulls in public updates, but we have to wonder if most Facebook users are aware that their updates will end up in the vast data repositories of firms like Sysomos and Radian6. Given the current backlash against what some users perceive as an invasion of their privacy by Facebook, it will be interesting to see how Facebook users will react to this.

First Step Towards Integrating LBS Analytics Into Sysomos' Main Services

As Sysomos co-founder Nilesh Bansal told us, the company plans to bring location-based sources - including Foursquare - to Heartbeat and MAP, Sysomos' professional social media and analytics and media monitoring applications. For Sysomos, launching a free service is just a first stop towards learning more about this space.

As services like Foursquare, Gowalla and others continue to gain momentum and slowly inch towards the mainstream, social media monitoring services like Sysomos or Radian6 need to give their customers to monitor these communities. If these services go mainstream, a bad comment on Foursquare about a restaurant could easily have the same effect as a negative Twitter message or Yelp review.

Most Popular Music Videos on YouTube

1. Pitbull - I Know You Want Me
2. MiIey Cyrus - Party In The U.S.A.
3. Miley Cyrus - The Climb

Click here to see all of these videos on one page.

Top News & Politics Videos on YouTube

1. Taylor Swift VMA Award Moment Ruined by Kanye West
2. Barney Frank Confronts Woman At Townhall Comparing Obama To Hitler
3. Town Hall Meeting with U.S. Congressman Brian Baird

Click here to see all of these videos on one page.

The most popular YouTube videos in the second half of 2009 were the JK Wedding Entrance Dance, the Evian Roller Babies, the Muppets' version of "Bohemian Rhapsody," a video of musicical stairs in Stockholm and "United Breaks Guitars."

You can find our full list of top 10 YouTube videos of all time here.

What YouTube Videos do Bloggers Embed?

Bloggers mostly embed music videos (31%) and entertainment clips (15%). Sports (6%), animation (3.2%) and science videos (2.9%) rank at the bottom of the most often-embedded YouTube videos. Interestingly, the film (3.6%) and how-to (3.1%) categories also ranked very low in Sysomos' index.

We would have thought that how-to videos would have ranked higher, but while videos about how to make a BristleBot can be quite popular, they can't quite rival the popularity of Miley Cyrus and the Muppets.

Who is Embedding Them?

The study also looked at the demographics of bloggers who embed these videos. In general, 20-to-35-year-old bloggers embed most of the videos (57%), followed by teenagers (20%) and bloggers over 35 (20%).

While music videos are the most popular category across age groups, older bloggers tend to embed far more videos in the news and politics categories than younger bloggers.

A few more interesting YouTube stats from the report:

• Videos about news and politics get the highest average number of comments (561), followed by sports (490) and entertainment clips (436).

Sysomos did not find any clear correlation between how high users rated a video and how often they were viewed. The most popular videos actually had rather average ratings (2-3 stars).

• North American bloggers link to a lot more News and Politics videos with a specific interest in health care, global warming and U.S. political issues.
• 20-to-35 year old bloggers are most active in embedding and linking to videos within their posts with 57% of total videos coming from this demographic group.
• The average length of a YouTube video is 4 minutes and 12 seconds.
• The average number of views for the YouTube videos Sysomos analyzed in this report was 99,160.
• European bloggers embed even more music videos than the rest of the world.

Click here to see the most popular music videos on YouTube.

The Most Popular Music Videos on YouTube

Pitbull: I Know You Want Me

Miley Cyrus: Party in the U.S.A.

Embedding for this video is disabled. Click here to see the video.

Miley Cyrus: The Climb

The Top News & Politics Videos on YouTube

Taylor Swift VMA Award Moment Ruined by Kanye West

Embedding for this video is disabled. Click here to see the video.

Barney Frank Confronts Woman At Townhall Comparing Obama To Hitler

Town Hall Meeting with U.S. Congressman Brian Baird

Public Buzz Messages Only

To filter out noise, the company has decided to only index public messages that users post directly to Buzz. Radian6 won't index re-posted items for Twitter or blogs, which makes sense, given that the company is already monitoring these items on Twitter and through RSS anyway. Interestingly, the company has decided to classify Buzz updates as blog posts. According to Radian6's founder and CTO Chris Newton, Buzz updates closely resemble blog posts, as they support " long-form commentary and threaded comments."

Buzz doesn't restrict users to Twitter's 140-character limit, so this looks like a sensible solution, though it seems rather early to assume that Buzz's users will want to use the service to post long-form content.

More Companies Integrate Buzz: Viralheat and Sendible - Sysomos Coming Soon

Earlier today, social media metrics platform Viralheat also announced support for Google Buzz. Just like Radian6, Viralheat will monitor conversations on Buzz. Social media monitoring and analytics firm Sysomos also just told us that it is working on integrating Buzz as well.

Another company that just announced support for Buzz is Sendible, which allows companies to run social media, SMS and email campaigns and track the online response to these updates.

Social Media monitoring and analytics service Sysomos analyzed over 100 million tweets from January 1 to 15. Overall, the company looked at topics in six different categories: people, locations, film, business, sports and miscellaneous entities.

Haiti, Obama and Avatar

In the early days of January, President Barack Obama was the most often mentioned person on Twitter, followed by Lady Gaga and Michael Jackson. Thanks to his inane comments about the disaster in Haiti, Pat Robertson came in at number four.

Unsurprisingly, the most talked about location on Twitter in early January was Haiti, followed by the United States, China, Texas and Canada.

YouTube, Facebook and Google were the most often discussed businesses on Twitter, followed by Microsoft and Yahoo. This list is clearly dominated by the usual suspects, including like AT&T, Netflix and Starbucks, though it also features Etsy and the Fox News Channel.

Avatar was the most talked about movie on Twitter in early January, followed by Sherlock Holmes and Start Wars. The Cincinnati Bengals were the most often discussed sports franchise.

2.4 Million Tweets About the iPad

Of course, we couldn't help but ask Sysomos about the iPad. According to the company's data, the iPad would be the number three item in the miscellaneous entities section - following iTunes and Microsoft's Xbox. Overall, Sysomos registered 2.4 million tweets that referenced Apple's latest creation.

Brazil now accounts for 8.8% of all Twitter users - up from just 2% in June. Indonesia's Twitter users now account for 2.5% of all users (up from 0.5%). The percentage of German users among all Twitter users is now 2.5%, up from 1.5% in the middle of last year.

Users from Brazil now represent Twitter's second most active population, followed by the U.K. (7.2%), Canada (4.35%) and Germany (2.49%).

Interestingly, the U.K. still leads Brazil when it comes to the number of total tweets contributed. Here the U.S. leads with 56.59% (down from 50.9% last year), followed by the U.K. (8.09%). Twitter's Brazilian population contributed 6.73% of all tweets.

Twitter's most active users can be found in New York City, London and Los Angeles. Twitter's hometown of San Francisco is home to the company's 10th most active group of users.

These numbers clearly indicate that Twitter saw significant growth outside the U.S. over the last six months. You can find Sysomos' full report here.

Nobody is Using Geotagging

Sysomos got this this data by analyzing the profiles of over 13 million unique Twitter users who were active between Oct. 16, 2009 and Dec. 16, 2009.

Given the recent interest in geotagging and geolocation services, we also asked Sysomos to look at the percentage of tweets that are currently being tagged trough Twitter's Geotagging API. While we didn't expect that large numbers of users were currently attaching location data to their tweets, we were surprised by how low this number currently is. Sysomos scanned 10 million tweets from Monday and Tuesday this week. Only 0.23% of these had been tagged using the Geotagging API.

Given that the API has only been available for a few month and that only a small number of Twitter clients currently supports this service, it doesn't come us a surprise that only a few users are currently using this service. This small number, however, also indicates that users aren't clamoring to tag their location to their tweets.

Update: There was a mistake in Sysomos' report. Twitter.com's share actually grew slightly from 45.7% in June to 46.7%. We apologize for the confusion.

Compared to Sysomos' last study of Twitter clients in June, Twitter.com's share fell from 55% to 46%. As Twitter's growth is slowing down, these numbers make a lot of sense. New users tend to use Twitter's web interface at first and then migrate to a third-party client. If Twitter.com's market share among Twitter clients is dropping, then this can be seen as a strong indication that the number of new signups is going down as well.

TweetDeck: The Client of Choice for Active Twitter Users

TweetDeck doesn't just have the largest number of users, it is also the tool of choice for the most active Twitter users. Sysomos analyzed the number of tweets posted by active users based on their primary Twitter application. On average, TweetDeck users send out 1.24 tweets per day, followed by Seesmic users (1.18 tweets/day) and HootSuite (1.11 tweets/day). Users of all the other popular clients like Tweetie, Twhirl and Twitterific update their status less than once a day. Those who prefer Twitter's own web interface only send out 0.67 tweets per day.

How Many Clients Do You Use?

Sysomos also analyzed how many third-party clients Twitter users normally use. Looking at active Twitter users only - those with at least 50 tweets in the last 5 months - the study found that 82% only used a single application. 14% used two applications, 2.35% used three and then the numbers drop off quickly. Only 0.01% of all active users used 6 or more clients. Chances are that a lot of active users use different mobile and desktop clients (Tweetie on the iPhone and Seesmic on the desktop, for example). This would explain why quite a large number of users use two clients.

Bloggers who embed YouTube links tend to be male and young. The most active group of YouTube users is between 25 and 35 years old. Bloggers who embed YouTube videos are mostly male (58%), and Break.com is the most male-dominated video site (885), while MTV attracts more female bloggers (68%).

The most active video embed users live in the US, followed by Brazil, Spain, the UK and Canada. In the US, most of these YouTube users live in California, followed by New York, Texas, Pennsylvania and Florida. The size of these states account for a large chunk of these differences. Connecticut, Alabama and South Carolina come in last.

Taking all video-sharing networks into account, the most active bloggers can be found in New York City, followed by Sao Paulo, London, Madrid and Paris.

In Asia, more than 90% of bloggers are younger than 35. In North America, 28% of all bloggers who embed videos are older than 35.

Focus on YouTube

Unsurprisingly, YouTube is the most popular video service in the blogosphere. The site attracts 82% of all embeds and direct links from blogs, followed by Vimeo (8.8%), DailyMotion (4%) and MySpace (1.1%). YouTube's dominance in this market becomes even more apparent when compared to other popular sites like Hulu and MTV. Hulu accounts for only 0.5% of all blog embeds, and MTV is dead last on Sysomos' list with 0.1%.

In Asia, YouTube is even more dominant, accounting for 88.5% of all embeds; and in South America, YouTube leads with an 87.4% market share. Some of these differences can be explained by the fact that some of the services that Sysomos looked at are simply not available in these markets.

More Data

Sysomos' report offers a lot more demographic information than we could highlight in detail, but here are a few more nuggets of interesting information:

• The most popular day for embedding videos is Tuesday.
• The most popular time is between 11:00 am and noon EST.
• YouTube's most active demographic group (20-35) is three times larger than the second-most active group (35-65).
• 20% of bloggers who embed YouTube videos are teenagers; 2.4% are over 60.

Fastest Growing Brand: Gillette

Among the top 20 brands, Gillette managed to become the fastest-growing brand in social media over the last two months. We wondered if the fact that the New England Patriots play in Gillette Stadium is a factor here, but Sysomos told us that most of the mentions were generated by Gillette's campaign for its new Fusion razors. Strangely, though, 13 brands in Sysomos' top 20 saw their social media mentions drop in the last two months. Car manufacturers like BMW (-31%), Honda (-25%) and Toyota (-24%) saw the largest declines, though even Google registered a 13.4% drop.

Sentiment Analysis

The fact that a company was mentioned often on social media sites like Twitter, however, doesn't really tell us a lot about how exactly people interacted with this brand. To deal with this, Sysomos also did a sentiment analysis of all the mentions of these 20 companies. Here, we see some interesting changes to the list. Samsung, for example, comes out on top here, followed by Nokia, Intel, IBM and Cisco.

The social media mentions of McDonald's, Marlboro and Toyota, however, were generally negative. According to another survey by PR firm Wildfire on behalf of Tealeaf that was published yesterday, 74% of all British adults said that negative comments about a product or brand negatively influence the likelihood that they would want to do business with this company.