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

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

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?

As we previously described, the new system serves up ads based on keywords in Twitter search queries.

Promoted Tweets will appear at the top of the search results page, with small text indicating they were sponsored. The Times piece notes that companies could use this to combat negative tweets (they can place a positive tweet at the top of the page)

A Promoted Tweet isn’t guaranteed to stay afloat for a long time — if the tweet isn’t tracking well in terms of replies, clicks, and a number of other metrics Twitter is calling “resonance”, it will be pulled, and the advertiser won’t pay for it.

One ad will be shown at a time

Initial ad partners include Best Buy, Virgin America, Starbucks, and Bravo

Advertisers will be paying on a CPM basis initially, with plans to adjust the model once Twitter can better gauge how people are engaging with Promoted Tweets

So the long awaited news about the Twitter Advertising platform was covered yesterday in a number of online publications with the announcement from twitter expected today. (The above excerpt was from TechCrunch.com)

The programme is apparently going to be called 'Promoted Tweets', will mean that adverts will show up Twitter users search for keywords that the advertisers have bought to link to their ads and that in a later development, Twitter plans to show promoted posts in the stream of Twitter posts, based on how relevant they might be to a particular user.

According to comScore, Twitter.com had 22.3 million unique visitors in March 2010, up from 524,000 a year ago, excluding the millions of people who use third party applications to use Twitter.

The adverts will mean that as a business you will be able to insert messages about your products or services into the stream of real-time conversation.

In the New York Times there is a quote from Starbuck VP of brand, content and online Chris Bruzzo who comments “When people are searching on Starbucks, what we really want to show them is that something is happening at Starbucks right now, and Promoted Tweets will give us a chance to do that.”

Initially it is anticipated that you will will pay per thousand people who see promoted posts.

The interesting question for me is will we ignore the ads as some of us do on Facebook and in Google search results?

I wonder what the first ad insert in Twitter will be that I see today?

For additional coverage check out the following articles:

In AdAge 

In the New York Times

UPDATE

Here is the official Twitter Announcement of 13 April