A great infographic from the BBC about the changing numbers of people engaging in social networks across the globe.

The data is provided by Nielsen as at June 2010.

You will see the growth in LinkedIn which now has over 70 million business people on their site - no where as big as Facebook but certainly a network that is of interest especially if you are a B2B marketer.

Want to learn more about how to use social networks as part of your marketing plan you can access my free webinars:

- about Facebook and Facebook advertising for business

- about LinkedIn for business 

P.S. make sure that you leave a valid email address when you check out the LinkedIn webinar so that you can access a discount off my forthcoming 4 week programme starting the 9 August 2010 called “LinkedIn for Business Leads and Profits”. The discount is valid until the 31 July 2010

The new trailer for the 'The Social Network' the film about Facebook and it's founder Mark Zuckerberg is now launched - here's the clip from Yahoo Movies.

The film is written by Aaron Sorkin and directed by David Fincher.

I wonder what Mark thinks when he watches this - must be interesting to have a film about you!

Will you be heading to the movies to watch the film when it is released in October?

The song is Scala’s version of Creep.

Are you following Barbie on Twitter and FourSquare? If you are in San Francisco, Los Angeles, Chicago and New York you just might want to if you want to be in with a chance of winning one of the new Barbie Video Girl dolls.

She has just announced the competition on her blog.

Follow Barbie:

• on Twitter - http://twitter.com/barbiestyle
• on FourSquare - http://foursquare.com/user/barbiestyle
• on Facebook - http://www.facebook.com/barbie where she currently has 426.900 fans!

Here is a great example of an alternative way to celebrate your centenary - with a flash mob.

I noticed an article at Ragan.com about the Swedish Medical Centre in Seattle celebrating the 100th anniversary of the non-profit healthcare service (funded by Swedish immigrants some 100 years ago).

On the Seattle hospital’s anniversary, employees were invited to gather for a group birthday photo and then some of the employees started to dance to Abba's 'Dancing Queen'. At the timeof writing this article the video on YouTube has had 18,851 views.

You will also find the hospital online:

On a microsite celebrating the 100th anniversary of the hospital - http://www.swedish100.org/our-first-100-years

On Twitter - http://twitter.com/swedish

On Facebook for the hospital - http://www.facebook.com/swedishmedicalcenter

On Facebook for with a lovely page celebrating the babies born at the hospital - http://www.facebook.com/swedishbabies

What do you share online?

Do you comment on blogs? Do you share photos with the family? Do you upload videos?

This is an interesting piece of research published in HBR using data from the Trendstream Global Web Index (a survey of more than 50,000 users of social platforms in 18 markets).

The info graphic shows how people share information differently in different markets across the globe.

The researchers looked at five different types of content we share online:

- blogs
- social networking profiles
- sharing photos
- sharing videos
- microblogging.

The research indicates that those people surveyed in China and India are three times more likely to use a microblog than the American's surveyed and are twice as likely to share videos.

Another great reminder that if we are using social media to reach different markets across the globe we need to understand preferences and platforms.

You can access a large copy of the infographic here.

 

WORLD’S* MOST POPULAR BRANDS ONLINE / April 2010
Brand	% of World’s Internet Population visiting brand	Time per person (hh:mm:ss)
Google	82%	1:21:51
MSN/WindowsLive/Bing	62%	2:41:49
Facebook	54%	6:00:00
Yahoo!	53%	1:50:16
Microsoft	48%	0:45:31
YouTube	47%	0:57:33
Wikipedia	35%	0:13:26
AOL Media Network	27%	2:01:02
eBay	26%	1:34:08
Apple	26%	1:00:28
Source: The Nielsen Company *Global refers to AU, BR, CH, DE, ES, FR, IT, UK & USA only

 

Reach and Usage by Country / Apr 2010 (Home & Work)
Social Networking / Blog Sites
Country	% Reach of Active Users	Time per Person (hh:mm:ss)
Brazil	86%	5:03:37
Italy	78%	6:28:41
Spain	77%	5:11:44
Japan	75%	2:50:50
United States	74%	6:35:02
United Kingdom	74%	5:52:38
France	73%	4:10:27
Australia	72%	7:19:13
Germany	63%	4:13:05
Switzerland	59%	3:43:58
Source: The Nielsen Company

 

Facebook Reach and Usage by Country / Apr 2010 (Home & Work)
Country	% Reach of Active Users	Time per Person (hh:mm:ss)
Italy	66%	7:00:21
Australia	63%	7:45:28
United States	62%	6:43:22
United Kingdom	62%	6:19:59
Spain	57%	4:04:53
France	57%	4:33:05
Switzerland	45%	4:18:47
Germany	27%	3:42:50
Brazil	26%	1:46:50
Japan	3%	0:31:38
Source: The Nielsen Company

Three of the world’s most popular brands online are social-media related (Facebook, YouTube and Wikipedia) and the world now spends over 110 billion minutes on social networks and blog sites.

In other words this means that 22 percent of all time online (or one in every four and half minutes) is spent on blogs or social networks.

NielsenWire report that for the first time ever, social network or blog sites are visited by three quarters of global consumers who go online, with the numbers of people visiting these sites increased by 24% over last year.

The average visitor spends 66% more time on these sites than a year ago, almost 6 hours in April 2010 versus 3 hours, 31 minutes last year.

NielsenWire go on to report that Facebook’s reach is the greatest in Italy, capturing two-thirds of the active unique audience in April 2010, making the site relatively more popular in Italy than in the three major English-speaking markets.

Australia, the U.S. and the UK follow Italy with over 60% of active online consumers visiting the site.

Japanese people have the least interest in Facebook, with reach and time spent markedly lower than in any of the other countries measured. Ameba, which offers a micro-blogging platform akin to Twitter, is the most popular social networking and blogging site in Japan, visited by 38% of Japanese people online while Facebook is the 40th most popular.

TechCrunch.com last week reported on the continued growth of Twitter.

According to comScore’s numbers Twitter grew from 83.8M unique vistors in April to 90.2M in May worldwide — an increase of 7.6%.

By comparison, there was 5.5% growth between March, when Twitter had 79.4M, and April’s 83.8M.

A year ago comScore reported that Twitter had 37.3M million uniques.

TechCrunch goes on to comment that the meaure is not accurate in terms of the total number of people people using Twitter’s platform as it only includes data for people who have been to Twitter.com, and not any applications that access Twitter through the API.

Twitter COO Dick Costolo recently shared the company’s internal stats, which show that Twitter gets 190 million visitors per month (though this is not people actually using Twitter to publish content as some people just visit the site), and 65 million tweets a day.

Have you found more people in your network starting to use Twitter?

If you are in the hospitality sector you will no doubt be checking out the recommendations about your business on TripAdvisor.com.

This week TripAdvisor integrated Facebook even deeper into their site functionality with a new feature called 'Ask Friends'.

TripAdvisor members who log onto the site using Facebook Connect to research hotels, destinations, attractions or restaurants can also see and message a list of their Facebook friends who've visited or lived in that location.

Travel.usatoday.com comment

The information comes from publicly available Facebook profiles and from TripAdvisor's "Cities I've Visited" application on Facebook, a pushpin map that's one of the social media site's most popular travel applications with 16 million downloads and 5.5 million active monthly users.

TripAdvisor estimates that 5%-10% of members' Facebook friends will have downloaded the "Cities I've Visited" feature, with the average user "pinning" 70 locations.

TripAdvisor/Facebook launched "Cities I've Visited" in 2007 and earlier this year it integrated the Facebook "Like" button that shows how many friends have given a thumbs up to a specific destination or property.

TripAdvisor has been established 10 years and has 34 million unique visitors a month - it is the world's most popular travel site.

Forrester Research estimates that 58% of travellers are Facebook members and 72% have participated in some form of social media (which includes user review sites).

It's a natural progression for TripAdvisor - what other sites have you seen that have integrated such features?

Thanks to Chris McCabe (@maxer08 on Twitter) for highlighting this article to me.