Facebook Statistics: The Numbers Game Continues

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After some weeks ago we published a very detailed infographic about Twitter Statistics and Growth we thought that it was time to have a closer look at everyone’s favourite this time: Facebook stats.

Just like with Twitter the numbers are rather interesting: did you know that Facebook is more widespread in the United Kingdom than in the USA? Did you know that there is one Facebook applications for every 900 members and that there are almost twice as many developers as applications?

Huge thanks to Infographiclabs for this graphic.

Remember Facebook?

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Sometimes it is good to get a reminder about how things relate to each other. The way we all buzz about Twitter obviously means that it is not only a huge service, but also a rewarding one to be using and talking about. However, as pointed out in the Royal Pingdom blog, you shouldn’t forget about Facebook. Why? The numbers:

On July 15, Facebook announced that it had 250 million active users, and on September 15, two months later, it had reached 300 million users. Facebook grew by 50 million users, roughly the equivalent of an entire Twitter, in just two months.

So yeah. Twitter is huge and great and dandy, soon to be worth even more money, but Facebook is still the juggernaut that just plays on a different level. In the midst of the Techmeme buzz and the millions of blog posts talking about the brilliance of Twitter, it is easy to forget about that.

5 Things to Do With a Blogging Day Off

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In the United States, today is Memorial Day, a holiday in honor the veterans who fought for our country over the course of our history. It is a holiday for most and a chance to spend at least some of the day reflecting.

As such, many will not be blogging today, but that does not mean it is always a full day off. Most, myself included, will be spending at least some time working on our sites, just not necessarily writing new content for it.

If that describes you, here are five things that you can do, other than actual blogging, to help your site and keep it going strong. Best of all, these are all, for the most part, short-term tasks you can pick up and drop off between other activities on a holiday.

Here’s 5 suggestions on how to spend your blogging holiday if you plan to spend at least a little bit of in front of your computer. [Read more…]

Blog Design: What You Don’t Know About Your Blog Audience Can Hurt

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blog design timeline iconI had an interesting discussion with a client last week about when and how to implement a new blog design. She wanted to warn her readers that a change was coming, and take a few months to implement the changes step by step.

We talked about the process and created a timeline for the slow unveiling of the site design, a smart decision for those with a large audience, especially when making dramatic changes to the site’s navigation and content handling. Some audiences can handle it, and love design changes, but some can’t. They just don’t respond well to change.

We talked a little more about her readership, covering some basic web analytics such as where her readers come from, how they access the site (through the front page, single pages, tags and categories, or through aggregators, email or feeds), and I stumbled upon some stunning facts that shifted the entire game plan.

While her site gets a steady stream of visitors, several thousand a day, only 10% return. Of those, only three percent return to the blog at least once week. Honestly, that’s about 9 people a week.

This changes everything. [Read more…]

Are You Using Google Analytics? Is Your Code Up To Date?

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A survey on 10,000 of the “top websites on the Internet” (according to Alexa) done by Pingdom reveals that a whopping 40% of the Google Analytics users still use the old tracking code, known as urchin.js. This script still works, but it might not in the near future.

“The information we are getting from Google is that urchin.js will be decommissioned sometime this summer,” says Julien Coquet from LBi, a Google Analytics Authorized Consultant.

When we asked Julien what will happen once urchin.js is decommissioned, his guess was that it will eventually start returning a 404 error (file not found) and therefore stop registering traffic.

There’s really no reason to use the old urchin.js script, the new one (known as ga.js if I’m not mistaken) is faster and has more features. If you’re a Google Analytics user, you really should check what version you’re using, and update the code if it is pointing to a file called urchin.js.

Just 2% of British businesses using Twitter, 6% blogging, web stats show

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Micro-blogging service Twitter may be the latest rage with celebrities and their followers but it has yet to catch on as a marketing tool for British businesses.

According to the latest web analysis from WebTrends, just two per cent (one in fifty) businesses in the UK are using Twitter for marketing, while six per cent are blogging or podcasting.

Only the likes of direct email marketing, detailed web analytics, traditional online advertising and search optimisation really made the grade, with at least one-third of companies using always or often. [Read more…]

What Gets Copied: A 3-Week Study

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Three weeks ago I signed up my blog for a beta service by Tynt called Tracer in an attempt to both test the service and get a better understanding of how people are using my content.

The service works by having users embed a line of JavaScript code into their site and it tracks when users select or copies text and images from the site itself. Tracer also adds an attribution line to every copy that includes a special link Tracer can track, thus letting you know when people visit your site from copied text.

The information provided by Tracer is only aggregate in nature, there is no information about what an individual user did with your content, and Tracer does nothing to prevent copying, thus it is not a DRM solution. All Tracer does is analyze how users interact with your content and which pages are the most “active”.

To do that, Tracer follows four metrics: page views, selections (meaning when someone selects objects), copies (actually copying the work) and generated traffic (clicks on links generated by Tracer).

After over three weeks of running the service, I’ve gotten some pretty good data on my site and the results more than surprised me. Here is what I learned. [Read more…]

Measuring the Curse of Social Media Tools

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Exploring Social Media article series badgeAs part of my ongoing series on exploring social media tools, I’d like to take a look at the usage of curse words on the web, specifically those tracked by .

Adult Content Warning: The following includes words that may offend some. Consider yourself warned.

A lot of SEO and web strategies specialists spend a lot of time tracking keywords, search terms, hashtags, and other frequently used words and phrases across the web, especially those used in social media tools. takes this research a step further. [Read more…]

The Inquisitr 6 Months In

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Duncan Riley, the founder of the Blog Herald, continues to share his struggles with The Inquisitr. The site is no 6 months old, which means it is getting really interesting to see how it fares.

This from the wrap-up:

I say this every month but it still holds true: we’re not quite there yet, but the outlook is rosy. The notion that it takes 6-9 months to establish a blog would appear to be holding true: we continue to improve in content, engagement and page views.

Check out the full post on Duncan’s blog.

Engadget Scored 14 Million Pageviews on the Apple Notebook Event

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The Apple Tuesday notebook event, where new MacBooks were announced, and drove traffic to a lot of gadget focused sites and blogs. One of those are Engadget, which got a mammoth 14 million pageviews on that particluar day, according to a leaked internal mail reposted by TechCrunch. They reported 1.3 million uniques, so that’s almost 11 pageviews per person. That’s a record for the site.

Weblogs Inc. as a whole served 23.9 million pageviews, and 3.4 million uniques, another all-time high according to the internal email.