The rise of Reddit and the steady decline of Digg have been well documented. Just recently Reddit announced that its traffic has more than doubled in less than a year (to 2.07 billion pageviews in December), an impressive feat.

Has this translated into a significant change in social news referrals for publishers?

Anecdotally we’ve all seen Reddit gain in prominence at a time when Digg has struggled to maintain its relevancy. Adam Singer summed up the general sentiment in recent conversation we had on Twitter:

“Reddit / Stumble won.”

I wanted to get a better idea of just how much of a shift has occurred with some of the publishers that we work with at Define Media Group. So I pulled the 2009-2011 Reddit and Digg referral figures for selection of 12 major magazine and Web-only content sites.

I’m not able to reveal the specific sites or figures due to confidentially requirements but they are all well established brands. I intentionally chose sites from several different publishers and focused on those with content that is a reasonably good fit for social news sites.

To anonymize the data I combined each site’s figures into a total number for the group. The numbers represent visits, not pageviews.

12 sites is a very limited sampling so this survey is certainly not meant to be conclusive. I just found the comparison interesting and I thought I’d share the findings here.

First a look at the total combined traffic for all 12 sites in 2009-2011:

The trend lines tell the story loud and clear: traffic from Reddit is way up and traffic from Digg is way down.

Among the surveyed group, Reddit went from a combined total of 6.3 million visits in 2009 to 22.7 million 2011. Conversely Digg dropped from 31+ million in 2009 down to 4.6 million in 2011.

Here is the YoY change for 2010 and 2011:

Again the numbers look great for Reddit and not so good for Digg.

Nearly all of the surveyed sites have seen substantial gains from Reddit in the past few years and significant declines from Digg.

Only one site in the group saw a slight increase in Digg traffic in 2011 and just one saw a slight decrease from Reddit. Otherwise the figures are overwhelming in favor of Reddit.

The decline of Digg was already apparent when I did a basic survey of Twitter, Facebook and Digg traffic to newspaper and magazine sites in early 2010 and the negative trend continues today.

Digg is certainly trying hard to improve its position through initiatives like Newsrooms and Digg Social Reader. We’ll see if they can stem the tide.

What you are seeing with your own traffic? If anyone is willing to share their figures or experiences either in the comments or privately, I’d be interested to hear from you.

Related posts:

1. Survey: Twitter Less than 1% of Traffic to Newspapers and Magazines; Facebook 1%
2. Official Publisher Profiles on Digg One Year Later: Followers up 720% But Have They Died on the Vine?
3. Social Media Visitors More Loyal But Still a Very Small Percentage of Site Traffic

News organizations (along with businesses of all kinds) have been able to create official Google+ pages for a couple months now so I thought I’d check in and see how their pages are doing.

I’m going to forgo looking at which media outlets have attracted the largest following since that data becomes quickly outdated.

Instead I’ll focus on some basic signals of user activity and engagement: the number of 1+’s, shares and comments on each page.

To pull the activity and engagement figures I used All my +, an interesting tool created by Gerwin Sturm.

Submitting the profile ID for a particular Google+ page generates an overview chart like this:

I collected the +1, share and comment figures for a selection of 45 news organizations. The post volume varies greatly by page so I focused on the per post averages to allow for better comparison.

The list of organizations is not meant to be comprehensive; I chose a cross-section of print, broadcast and Web-only outlets. Most are from the US but there are a handful of international sites too. I omitted location-focused outlets such as local TV stations.

Normally in posts like Which News Sites Get the Most Social Media Engagement? I stick to mainstream news sites, but this time I expanded the scope a little to include TechCrunch, Mashable, ReadWriteWeb, The Next Web and CNET.

Here are 45 news organizations ranked by the combined figure of total +1’s, shares and comments per post:

The New York Times leads the group by a considerable margin. Their total output on Google+ is considerably less than some of the more active pages but what they do post gets a lot of interaction.

Mashable and The Next Web at #2 and #3 is not surprising based on the nature of their audience. I expected TechCrunch to be right up there too, but they did make the top ten.

Fox News tends to get a high volume of comments per Facebook update, so I was curious if the same would hold true on Google+. It does to some extent, as 22.70 puts them in the top 5 for comments per post. But their fan base is not nearly as active on Google+ as it is on Facebook.

One organization that is missing is CNN. Surprisingly as of today they do not appear to have an official page. The top Google+ search result for “CNN” is a people result that no longer exists. So instead I included CNN iReport (although it is not a great representative since there are only a couple posts on the page).

Have you noticed any news organizations doing particularly noteworthy things with their Google+ pages?

UPDATE:
Based on feedback from Cory Bergman of Breaking News (see comments below) I went back and pulled the total +1, share and comment figures for each site.

Originally I chose not to use the total figures because it felt like more of an arms race comparison. Sites with more posts will typically have more user interactions, so that didn’t seem like a useful insight. I was more interested in the level of activity and engagement the pages are getting on average. In addition the total figures will quickly go out of date.

However I agree that a comparison based on averages can also be skewed by pages that have made very few posts. It’s sort of like baseball statistics; you need a minimum number of at bats in order for the figures to be meaningful.

So while I prefer to look at the average figures, it is a good idea to cross-reference them against the totals to get a better overall picture:

In this comparison Breaking News moves up two places to #3 overall. The Next Web, Mashable and Breaking News dominate the group in terms of total user actions, which is impressive.

The New York Times drops down to #11, but based on the welcome message in their first post they are apparently taking a more conservative approach in terms of total output. Attracting a decent number of user actions with a fairly limited number of posts is impressive too.

Related posts:

1. Facebook Pages: Which News Sites Get the Most Engagement?
2. Which News Sites Get the Most Social Media Engagement?
3. A Closer Look at Fan Engagement on the Fox News Facebook Page

What are the best third-party tools for advanced Facebook analytics? It’s a question I’m asked fairly often so I thought I’d do a round-up of options that are worth checking out.

It is fair to say that Facebook is getting better at providing this data itself; the latest version of Facebook Insights offers a wider range of information than ever before. But many still find it lacking so a number of companies have stepped in to try to fulfill this need.

In this post I’m purposely leaving out comprehensive suites like Radian6 or Lithium and focusing on solutions that are specifically (or at least mostly) geared towards Facebook analytics.

I’ve also left out the feature and pricing information as this frequently changes.

With that in mind here are some Facebook analytics tools to experiment with:

PageLever
PageLever may be the most frequently suggested third-party tool, having positioned itself as Facebook Insights on steroids. The functionality is good and the price is reasonable, and they offer a 14-day free trial.

Simply Measured
Simply Measured’s Facebook Fan Page Analytics gets a gold star for clear, simple data visualization. They roll up the analysis into a series of graphs and charts that can be viewed online or exported to Excel or PowerPoint. It is also easy for agencies to white label the reports.

EdgeRank Checker
EdgeRank Checker offers a good way to dig deeper into the specific actions that aid in Facebook newsfeed optimization. The Pro version is reasonably priced and worth the upgrade.

Buddy Media
Buddy Media doesn’t technically belong on this list because they’re now positioning themselves as a comprehensive suite. But in the past they focused primarily on Facebook Page creation and management so I’ve included them. Their Analytics offering provides advanced data for Page owners, and they recently partnered with ComScore to provide additional data and analysis.

Socialbakers
Socialbakers is also now branching out into Twitter, Google+ and others but Facebook is still the major focus. Their Engagement Analytics Pro offers performance monitoring and competitive analysis for Facebook.

SEOmoz Pro
While SEOmoz Pro is primarily a suite of SEO tools, they recently added a Social Analytics section that provides a range of data on Facebook pages and activity.

Webtrends
Webtrends has a Facebook add-on that pulls in data on Facebook pages and apps into their analytics suite. The catch is you need to be using Webtrends, so this is not an option for those on Omniture or Google Analytics.

Clickable
Clickable is a good solution for advertisers. Their Facebook Advertising Suite offers both deep analysis and effective management for Facebook Ads.

So that’s a good group to get you started.

Had positive or negative experiences with any of these tools? What else are you using?

Please let me know.

Related posts:

1. Which News Sites Have the Most Valuable Facebook Pages?
2. The Most Popular Summer Blockbuster Movies in Social Media
3. Is Using Facebook Comments Good for Publishers?

Pinterest is getting a lot of attention these days and deservedly so. The photo and video sharing site offers great opportunities for promoting lifestyle content and reaching niche audiences and specific demographics.

Need a primer on Pinterest? Kerry Jones did an excellent one on the BlueGlass blog: Everything You Need to Know About Pinterest.

While any photo-rich site can benefit from Pinterest, at least at this stage in its evolution there are particularly strong opportunities for lifestyle publishers and brands.

In scanning through user pins and boards things like recipes, decorating ideas, household items, art and fashion are among the most frequently shared content:

The boards automatically created by Pinterest for new users also guide them in this direction, with topics like “Products I Love,” “For the Home,” “My Style” and “Favorite Places & Spaces.”

Who’s Doing it Well

A number of lifestyle sites have already set up official profiles, including:

Real Simple
MyRecipes
Cooking Light
Better Homes and Gardens
Bon Appetit
Saveur Magazine
HGTV
Daily Grommet

Among that group Real Simple has attracted the largest following to-date. At the moment it has more followers than all of the others combined.

I am primarily covering publishers in this post but there are also solid opportunities for retailers. All the more reason to utilize high-quality, interesting photos for all key products.

What are the Benefits?

As with most social sites it is a good idea for brands to have an official outpost. On Pinterest publishers can showcase their content, build brand awareness and connect with influencers, evangelists and good old fashioned regular users who like their stuff.

Brands can also establish credibility and topical authority by curating and sharing content from other sources. Taking a diversified approach by supplementing the brand profile with personal profiles for staff members with expertise in specific areas is also beneficial.

But the largest upside comes from the Pinterest user base at large pinning, liking and repinning your photos and videos.

This not only generates additional visibility for your photo content and exposes the brand to new audiences. It also creates links back to your site:

At the moment the attribution links do not have the nofollow attribute, which means they have SEO value as well.

That may change in the future, but even if it does the links will continue to be a valuable source of traffic and content promotion. And even nofollow links have indirect SEO benefits since users who come across them may choose to link or share the content elsewhere.

Should Publishers Add “Pin It” Buttons?

For sites that want to encourage pinning Pinterest offers an official “Pin It” button as well as a range of follow buttons to promote a profile:

I’m not coming across “Pin It” buttons in the wild all that much yet but I’d expect their usage to increase.

For any publisher on-page real estate is a valuable commodity and it is important not to overwhelm users. With Facebook, Twitter and now Google +1 buttons becoming virtually required placements that doesn’t always leave room for niche sites like Pinterest.

[As an aside: third-party tools like AddThis or ShareThis can help reduce clutter but it is easy to go overboard in those drop-downs too, and they require an additional click or hover from users.]

And since the site has yet to go fully mainstream a healthy percentage of your user base may not be aware of it just yet.

But if your image content is a natural fit for Pinterest, it may be worth experimenting with the button at least on galleries and slideshows and on recipes.

Encouraging your users to get involved with Pinterest will ultimately benefit your site in the long term.

Have you incorporated Pinterest into your social efforts yet?

Related posts:

1. Does Google Want Brands in Your Social Circle?
2. Is Using Facebook Comments Good for Publishers?
3. Can Publishers Harvest Social Media Intent in a Meaningful Way?

I was talking with John Shehata from ABC News yesterday about Facebook, and he brought up an interesting question. What’s a better approach for journalists, creating official Facebook Pages or enabling the subscribe button on their regular profiles?

Facebook is certainly encouraging the use of the new subscribe button. Journalists were specifically referenced in the launch post:

The Subscribe button also lets you hear from interesting people you’re not friends with—like journalists, artists and political figures.

They’ve also created a Subscribe for Journalists guide, and the Facebook + Journalists page frequently touts new journalists that users can subscribe to:

However their Getting Started page for journalists equally promotes both options:

So it seems they are still officially in favor of either approach.

Since the subscribe button has only been around for a month or so there are still plenty of well-known journalists using official pages, for example Nicholas Kristof of The New York Times. Kristof’s page has 230K+ likes so it makes sense to keep that going.

But in checking around more journalists do seem to be utilizing the subscribe button on their regular profiles.

Shortly after launch Facebook put up a list of media professionals that had already enabled the button. And more journalists are doing so each week.

Forbes recently posted a list all of its journalists that users can subscribe to, so they’ve opted to go that route.

So what’s the right approach?

There are pros and cons of each.

One advantage of using Facebook Pages is access to better analytics data via Facebook Insights.

Another is they allow journalists to keep their personal profiles completely personal, which is attractive to those who like to maintain a firm boundary between their work and home lives. However the ability to control what is shared with subscribers from regular pages helps to offset this advantage.

Pages also allow for more functionality like special widgets and custom tabs. But in most cases functionality like that is best suited to a news organization’s main page as opposed to individual journalists.

In addition in Facebook official pages surface in Page search results, separate from People results, which is helpful if a journalist has a common name. However regular profiles with a lot of subscribers tend to surface high in people results, so that too is offset to some degree.

With all this in mind I’d expect that using the subscribe button on regular profiles will continue to evolve towards being the default approach for journalists on Facebook.

And since not every media professional is a “public figure” that necessarily warrants a Facebook Page, in practical terms this may prove to be the best fit for many news organizations.

So my advice to news organizations is to experiment with using the subscribe button on regular profiles and see how that goes.

You could consider mixing in few official pages for well known personalities, but you’d want to be careful about fostering a divide between “A-Listers” and the rest of the staff.

What do you think is the best approach?

UPDATE:
In January 2012 Facebook shared some new statistics on journalists using the subscribe button. According to Facebook thousands of journalists have enabled Subscribe and the average journalist has seen a 320% increase in subscribers since November 2011 (though that figure is based on a sampling of only 25 journalists).

However in response to that announcement Jim Romenesko made the point that for many journalists the quality of the subscribers is poor and spam is frequent.

Comments on Jim’s post from other journalists like Katherine Goldstein of Slate and Nisha Chittal of Travel Channel indicate that this is a common experience:

However Craig Kanalley of NBC News didn’t agree with that sentiment and set out to prove it.

Related posts:

1. Official Publisher Profiles on Digg One Year Later: Followers up 720% But Have They Died on the Vine?
2. News Sites Not Making Much Use of Static FBML on Facebook Pages
3. Facebook Pages: Which News Sites Get the Most Engagement?

Based on first impressions, I have to say I like The Washington Post’s Social Reader on Facebook.

It offers a clean, simple user experience – big and open with lots of white space (in fact too big to capture well in a screenshot):

(click to enlarge)

There are enough additional sources to offer a wide range of content choices which makes it more engaging.

And being able to read the articles right in the app is a big plus.

That alone is a big step for publishers, who are understandably tentative about social efforts that are not directly focused on bringing users back to their site. But with the right monetization strategy there is no reason that a news organization needs to be limited to the confines of its own website.

There are also attribution links to the original articles (although those links point to redirected feed URLs):

I like seeing what friends have read too:

Reporting friend activity gets overdone in social media, but in this particular app it did successfully get my attention.

I was curious to check out what some real friends had read. And seeing that Brian Solis – who isn’t an actual friend but is a respected voice in the industry – had read certain articles did encourage me to click on them.

Overall I’d give Social Reader the nod over WSJ Social which launched just before it.

For more background information check out Robert Scoble’s video interview with company chairman Don Graham.

The Washington Post is actively recruiting more content partners. I’m not familiar with the terms but it is worth investigating. And I’m sure more publishers will follow The Wall Street Journal and The Washington Post’s lead and come out with similar offerings soon.

At that point it will be interesting to see what happens. Once everyone is doing it, how much attention and engagement will each get?

UPDATE:
For more on the impact of Social Reader on users’ news feeds, see Why Is the Washington Post at the Top of My Facebook Feed Yet Again? from Liz Gannes of AllThingsD.

Related posts:

1. Paywalls, Media Coverage and User Access: What’s a PR Pro to Do?
2. Is Using Facebook Comments Good for Publishers?
3. Google Buzz and News Sites: Good Potential But Facebook Still the Better Play

It has been a year since I took at look at the followers and activity of News Sites on the New Digg so I thought I would see how those official profiles are faring today.

When I did my original post Digg v4 was just about to come out of alpha so there has been a significant increase in exposure for the profiles and many more publishers have created them.

However once Digg discontinued the ability to automatically submit content via RSS after negative feedback from users, activity on the official profiles dropped off considerably. So where do things stand today?

For comparative purposes I will stick to the 30 mainstream and business news profiles that were examined in my original post.

First a look at follower counts one year later:

Not surprisingly the follower counts for all of the profiles are way up. The YoY increase for the collective group is 720% and quite a few profiles have much higher increases than that.

In terms of total following Time jumped from #4 in August 2010 to take the top stop from The New York Times today. The Daily Beast also had a large jump that puts it in the top 10.

How about user interaction and engagement? Most of the publishers continue to follow very few others:

Time stands out in this group but it is actually following two fewer profiles than last year so it does not appear to be a priority for them.

The number of diggs by each profile is up quite a bit but there has been little commenting activity:

Reuters, Bloomberg Businessweek and Forbes have much higher digg counts than the other publishers. But a quick look at the diggs by the Reuter’s profile shows that it is mainly just digging its own content.

The same is true for Businessweek and Forbes as well as many of the publisher profiles. One exception is Breaking News which appears to be digging a variety of content.

I didn’t look at the submission counts for the profiles last year since it was very early days for many of them.

But here are the submission counts as of today:

Reuters and Bloomberg Businessweek again lead the pack by a considerable margin, but this came from self-submission (which is no longer possible to automate via RSS) as opposed to active participation.

So what do you think? Have official publisher profiles already run their course or is there still a good opportunity for those that are willing to engage users through genuine participation?

Related posts:

1. News Sites on the New Digg: Who is Active, Who is Gaining Followers?
2. Publisher Survey: Reddit Traffic Way Up, Digg Way Down
3. NBC Targets Local Markets on the New Digg

Earlier this week Search Engine Land reported that Christian Oestlien, the Ads Lead for Google+, had posted a message asking businesses to hold off on using personal accounts to create business pages and that non-user profiles would be shut down.

Quite a few media outlets have already created personal Google+ accounts and many of them are still up and running. With business profiles potentially not available to everyone until later this year will news sites keep using personal accounts, and will Google let them?

In checking today several high-profile news sites still have active pages including Mashable, the Chicago Sun-Times, Breaking News, The Next Web and Search Engine Land.

[UPDATE: Most of the pages referenced above have now been taken down so I removed the links; see below].

Others that had been previously reported as active now result in a 404 page including CNET, ABC News Radio and ITV News.

According to Dan Patterson ABC News Radio took its page down after learning that Google did not want businesses to create personal accounts. Other media outlets have similarly followed suit.

As for Mashable, in a Google+ discussion (that is no longer available so the link has been removed) started by Brent Csutoras, Sean Carlos noted that the Mashable News page had stopped appearing in search results for Google+ pages with “news” in the title but then later reappeared. Some saw this as a sign that the page had been banned or taken down and then allowed to reappear, potentially indicating a double standard for some brands.

It will be interesting to see how long news and content sites will continue to use personal accounts and whether or not Google enforces stricter compliance.

The best solution is for Google to fast track the Google+ business pages, which they now appear to be doing at least in terms of working with an initial test group. With various media sites already reporting good referral traffic from Google+ it is hard to blame any news organization for wanting to establish a presence ASAP.

For news sites that have not yet created a personal account I’d heed Google’s request and wait for the business pages. In the interim there are plenty of ways for individuals within an organization to engage users and promote content from their own accounts.

In addition, businesses can apply to be part of the initial test group for Google+ business profiles. But hurry; yesterday Oestlien told AdAge that they have already received thousands of applications and they’d likely stop taking more early next week.

UPDATE (7/22/11):
In the 7-10 days after I published this post a lot more brands (in news and other categories) created a Google+ presence using personal accounts. Many of the pages were getting a lot of activity and engagement, creating the impression that experimenting with personal pages might be worth it after all.

But then this week Google started suspending many of those profiles. In fact all but one of the pages I linked to above have now been taken down.

See Google Removes Mashable, Sesame Street & Other Prominent Accounts From Google Plus for more information.

Yesterday Mashable posted an announcement that it was converting its page to a personal profile for Pete Cashmore:

The good news is all this activity, as well as the flood of applications that Google apparently received for the business page test program, has prompted Google to accelerate its timetable for business pages.

Yesterday Google+’s Christian Oestlien published a new post indicating that business pages would be available to everyone within the next few months.

Related posts:

1. Google Buzz and News Sites: Good Potential But Facebook Still the Better Play
2. My Top 10 Posts of 2009 on News Media, SEO and Social Media
3. Google Social Search: Are You in Your Target Audiences’ Social Circles?

According to the new Pew Internet study Social Networking Sites and our Lives there are nearly twice as many male LinkedIn users as female. What gives?

So what accounts for this disparity? More males in the workforce? Do men prefer LinkedIn’s brand of simple, stripped down, business-oriented networking?

For what it is worth, females have stronger participation overall and in every other social network that was examined. In fact the male/female usage percentages are the exact opposite on Twitter.

That’s interesting in and of itself, as marketers sometimes (over) generalize that men prefer Twitter while Facebook is more appealing to women.

How about age? While MySpace continues to have a strong pull with younger demographics the age distribution is fairly even across the other social media sites, although users age 50+ prefer both Facebook and LinkedIn over Twitter:

The Pew Internet study also takes a detailed look at specific activity on Facebook by age and gender that is worth checking out.

Related posts:

1. Pew Research News Survey: Findings on Search Engines, Social Networks and Twitter
2. Journalist Social Media Usage Increases, Concerns About Reliability of Information
3. PEJ Study Shows Print Still Primary Source of Original News Reporting

Alterian recently released some data on the most popular summer blockbusters in social media, focusing specifically on movies with May and June release dates.

According to their data Fast Five and Thor are far and away the most popular summer movies with each getting 38%+ of social media activity among the selected group of films:

(click to enlarge)

Share of social media activity:

1. Fast Five 38.46%
2. Thor 38.05%
3. Green Lantern 9%
4. X:Men: First Class 4%
5. Pirates of the Caribbean 4: On Stranger Tides 2.7%
6. The Hangover: Part II 2.26%
7. Super 8 2.25%
8. Cars 2 1.7%
9. Kung Fu Panda 2 1.5%

Apparently much of the discussion of Fast Five was generated by Vin Diesel’s Facebook page, showing the value of star power and a loyal fan base in any endeavor. The Vin Diesel Facebook page has more than 24,000,000 likes.

At the other end of the spectrum, in Alterian’s sentiment analysis two summer movies had more negative opinions than positive: Green Lantern and The Hangover Part II.

Green Lantern

The Hangover Part II

(click to enlarge)

It will be interesting to see if early negative reactions translate into poor performance at the box office.

Does the Alterian data match what is available through some of the free tools out there?

Here is the Social Mention data for Fast Five, Thor, Green Lantern and Hangover 2:

Social Mention’s strength and reach scores are fairly similar for all four films so there is not much separation for Fast Give and Thor in its data. In terms of sentiment analysis, Green Lantern actually has the best ratio of positive mentions (8:1) in its dataset.

Specific to Twitter, Topsy Analytics shows that Fast Five’s highest peak in the past month was greater than Thor’s but both films have pulled in a lot of mentions, and both are significantly outpacing Green Lantern:

(click to enlarge)

Hangover 2 was omitted because a maximum of three terms can be compared with the Topsy tool.

Related posts:

1. Social Media News Releases Get 3x More Media Coverage
2. My Top 10 Posts of 2009 on News Media, SEO and Social Media
3. Which News Sites Get the Most Social Media Engagement?

This year’s NBA playoffs have been great so far, a nice surprise considering it is still early in the second round. Since I like looking at the social media presence of NBA teams I thought I’d run the 2011 playoff teams through the beta version of the new Klout to see how the fare against each other.

Last year I simply ranked the NBA playoff teams by Facebook engagement, so this year I thought I’d try a different approach for Twitter and apply Klout scores to the actual bracket and declare a winner for each matchup, round by round.

First the Eastern Conference:

Chicago and Miami cruised through the first round, similar to how it happened in the actual playoffs. Atlanta had the worst Klout score in the conference so that doesn’t sync with their surprising performance thus far in the playoffs. Their 67 is more symbolic of how they laid an egg in last year’s playoffs. Boston had a much tougher matchup against the Knicks on Klout than they did on the court.

In the second round the Magic proved no match for the Bulls. Boston and Miami was a great matchup; let’s hope the real series is that close.

In the Eastern Conference Finals the Bulls and Heat tied with a Klout score of 81, so I used additional data from Klout to declare the winner. As a Bulls fan it pains me to say it but the Heat have a stronger Twitter profile:

Now for the Western Conference:

Memphis matched up well against the Spurs but unfortunately for them when it comes to Klout they fell just short. The Thunder beat the Nuggets in a fairly close series and Portland managed to sneak past Dallas. The Lakers had no trouble with New Orleans.

In the second round the Spurs made it through another matchup 74-73, close to how many fans thought the veteran team might perform in the actual playoffs. The Lakers blew past the Blazers, so no revenge for their loss with Scottie Pippen to the Shaq/Kobe Lakers.

Los Angeles easily defeated the Spurs in the conference finals.

The Lakers’ 84 also gave them a close victory over Miami, making them the 2011 NBA Klout champions:

Will they make it happen on the court?

POST-FINALS UPDATE:

Not even close! But the point was to compare the teams head-to-head by Klout score, not to try to use Klout to predict the actual champion. So it’s really a better indicator of popularity from past success plus current level of engagement.

Related to that, since winning the NBA title the Mavs’ Klout score is up 11 points to 81, making it comparable to the other top teams in the league. However the Heat’s score is also up to 85, meaning that at least in the world of Twitter influence the Heat come out on top. By contrast the Lakers have dropped to 74 so a lack of recent activity has harmed their score:

Related posts:

1. Which NBA Teams Have Seen the Most Growth on Twitter and Facebook?
2. The Most Popular NBA Teams on Twitter and Facebook
3. NBA Playoff Teams Ranked by Facebook Page Engagement

Thanks to Marketing Lessons from the Grateful Dead we know that the band’s approach over the years offers useful insights for marketers. But how is the organization itself doing with social media today? Based on a current promotion on the Grateful Dead Facebook page I’d say they’re doing great.

In support of the release of the complete recordings from the Europe ’72 tour (and the 40th anniversary of that tour) the Grateful Dead Facebook page utilizes a separate tab to create a multi-page interactive experience for fans.

Users can follow the tour route on an animated map, view set lists and photos and read accounts from people who were at each show. Best of all, a live track from each date is streamed right from the tab. It’s not every day you hear a rip-roaring Truckin’ suddenly jump out of a Facebook page.

They have also done a good job of building in elements to encourage repeat visits. The tour took place in April-May 1972 so the content for each show is featured on the Facebook page during the corresponding week this year. This gets users coming back week after week:

The tab also includes a sweepstakes which allows them to collect fan email addresses and of course a link for buying the complete recordings.

In terms of the technical setup I like how the use of sub-navigation buttons makes it possible to offer a multi-page experience within the same tab (see below). And effective use of colorful, interactive pages with multimedia content brings it all to life.

One thing that needs improvement is the message that is provided when a user clicks the “Share” link on the intro page:

An image and a more compelling message will significantly improve the click-through rate.

Since the content won’t be on the Grateful Dead Facebook page indefinitely I’ve grabbed some screenshots:

Related posts:

1. Alicia Keys Facebook Page: I’d Sign Up if She Asked Me All Cool
2. News Sites Not Making Much Use of Static FBML on Facebook Pages
3. Newsweek’s Tim Geithner Interview Live on Facebook: Don’t Forget to Link to the Video Afterwards

Many publishers are now doing a good job of developing social media strategies for brand awareness, content promotion and user engagement. And they’ve made good strides in utilizing social media monitoring and measurement to better understand user behavior and quantify the success of their efforts. But is it possible to extract user intent in a meaningful way?

This week I’ll be part of a panel discussion at Socialize that will address just that question: Social Media: Harvesting Intent for Better ROI. It’s an interesting topic and one that is more challenging for news and content sites than some other types of businesses.

In search marketing extracting basic intent signals is fairly straightforward since users’ search queries often reveal their intentions. Shari Thurow has written some good articles on key types of searches to be aware of (beyond navigational, informational and transactional queries) and on drilling down on commercial intent.

Thus by understanding searcher behavior publishers can position their content to be well matched to searches with editorial or informational intent.

But can the same approach be successfully applied to social media?

A lot of social activity around editorial content is focused on sharing something simply because the person likes the content or finds it useful or interesting. There is not always intent beyond that and harvesting meaningful signals can be challenging.

One reason is that the language used in social sharing does not often include much more than the article headline (be it in a tweet, Facebook like or some other share). And even when a user adds a personal comment (e.g. “great article or “good tips”) that information may help with sentiment analysis but it may not reveal intent.

Another reason is that just because a user shares something once doesn’t mean they will regularly share content on that topic. Similarly, just because someone engages with a publisher once doesn’t mean they are a strong candidate to become a repeat visitor or site evangelist. So a single social media touch point may not shed much light on user intent.

That said, by looking at social media activity in aggregate publishers can start to get a better understanding of user behavior as it relates to their content.

Even the basic benchmarks like the number of tweets/likes/shares/comments per article as well as the types and quality of interactions provide some meaningful signals. And when tied to referral traffic, pageviews and time on site, repeat visits and interactions, subscriptions and sign-ups, etc. the data becomes more useful.

Is this harvesting intent? Not exactly, but it is a step in the right direction. At a minimum publishers can develop a reasonable understanding of what topics and types of content users prefer, how best to package it and when and how to promote it. All of which leads to opportunities for better monetization and improving ROI.

What else can publishers do to accurately harvest and interpret social media intent? What tools and methods are you using?

Photo credit: Khalid Albaih

Related posts:

1. My Top Posts of 2011 on SEO, PR and Social Media for Publishers
2. Social Media News Releases Get 3x More Media Coverage
3. My Top 10 Posts of 2009 on News Media, SEO and Social Media

There were some interesting posts over the weekend from Steve Cheney and Robert Scoble on whether utilizing the Facebook Comments Box plugin kills or in fact increases user authenticity within on-site commenting. TechCrunch also shared that comments are down but quality is up since implementing the system and they’re going to stick with it for the time being.

Is it what users want?

As someone who limits his Facebook friends mainly to actual friends but who frequently reads and comments on industry and marketing blogs, for me the main concern with using Facebook Comments is the desire to keep my professional and personal lives separate.

It’s safe to say that most of the things that I read and comment on professionally are of little interest to my friends from high school, college, time spent overseas, etc. So I’d rather not put that activity into my Facebook news feed. And in my professional interactions I want to represent myself through a link to this blog or my Twitter profile, not my Facebook page.

Regarding the first issue you don’t actually have to post your comments on Facebook:

Malcolm Coles had a good suggestion for the second issue: set up my blog as a Facebook Page then do professional commenting as the Page and personal commenting via my personal profile.

I like this idea but not everyone has a blog or a professional Facebook Page. Hopefully in the future Facebook will allow users to share comments with only certain friends; you can do this now with wall posts if you have lists set up.

It is also important to note that most Facebook users are interacting largely with mainstream media and general interest content that is not professional in nature. So for the average person these concerns are not always relevant. But there are plenty of users out there that are concerned not only with privacy but also with having to mix their personal and professional interactions.

Is the system good for publishers?

There are certainly downsides like the lack of backup/export, ceding control and giving Facebook access to valuable data for free, weakening your own on-site community, etc. Ryan Singel covered this well last week.

But publishers also get increased exposure on Facebook and with that more opportunity for traffic, engagement and social sharing, all of which has the additional benefit of helping directly and/or indirectly with SEO.

It also proves helpful to sites that are battling with comment spam and low-quality or inappropriate comments. And the reality is that not every site is able to build up a strong, active on-site community of its own.

So if you publish content that appeals to a wide audience, and if you don’t already have a well-engaged on-site community, the positives outweigh the negatives and the Facebook Comments Box plugin is worth experimenting with.

UPDATE:
April 2011: Facebook has added new features to the Comments Box plugin including an improved News Feed story format, permalinks to each comment and the ability to access comments for every URL via the Graph API, among other things. Hotmail has also been added to the list of login providers (Yahoo! and AOL were already options).

June 2011: Facebook has added reverse chronological sorting to the Comments Box plugin.

Related posts:

1. Google Buzz and News Sites: Good Potential But Facebook Still the Better Play
2. The Washington Post Social Reader on Facebook: Good First Impression, Good User Experience
3. Newsweek on Tumblr: Good Effort, Needs More Engagement

Who will win Super Bowl XLV, the Green Bay Packers or the Pittsburgh Steelers? Vegas gives the Packers a slight edge but most people think it could go either way.

Last year after winning my Social Media Super Bowl the New Orleans Saints went on to win the actual game. So this year I thought I’d do a similar competition by comparing the official Twitter profiles of both teams.

Will it predict the winner of Super Bowl XLV? Who knows, but I like looking at sports and social media signals and the Super Bowl offers a good analogy for comparing teams.

The figures referenced below are accurate as of February 2, 2011.

Ok, let’s move on to the opening kick-off.

1st Quarter: Most Followers

This is a close one but the Steelers edge out the Packers by roughly 8K followers:

It’s worth noting that both teams’ followers are significantly up since the beginning of the season (see: The Most Popular NFL Teams on Twitter and Facebook: 2010 Season). In fact to my knowledge the Steelers didn’t even have an official presence until recently so that shows how quickly they’ve grown their reach.

A TwitterCounter chart for the past three months shows how quickly @Steelers has been gaining followers:

One negative for both teams: neither is particularly interested in following others. We’ll call that a turnover by both sides.

Advantage: STEELERS

__________________________________

2nd Quarter: Topsy Social Analytics

Topsy recently came out with a new Twitter analytics tool so I thought I’d look at mentions and replies for @Steelers and @Packers in the past month:

The level of activity is pretty similar for both teams but that giant peak for the Steelers gives them the edge.

Advantage: STEELERS

At halftime the Steelers are up but it’s a close game. Let’s see what the Packers can do in the second half.

__________________________________

3rd Quarter: Twitalyzer

Which team is making the most impact on Twitter? Twitalyzer gives the Steelers the edge:

See my post on the Twitter impact of news sites for an overview of how Twitalyzer calculates its Impact scores.

The game remains tight but the Packers can’t seem to close the gap.

Advantage: STEELERS

__________________________________

4th Quarter: Klout

Ok, it comes down to this. Which team is more influential on Twitter? Let’s look at their Klout scores:

Once again the Steelers beat out the Packers in a close competition.

Advantage: STEELERS

__________________________________

So that’s it. The Packers scored well and the teams were closely matched, but the Steelers win all four quarters to become Super Bowl XLV Champions – at least based on Twitter signals.

WINNER:

PITTSBURGH STEELERS

Now let’s see if the social media winner becomes the real Super Bowl champion for the second year in a row.

Related posts:

1. Social Media Super Bowl: Which Team Has More Reach?
2. The Most Popular NFL Teams on Twitter and Facebook
3. The Most Popular NFL Teams on Twitter and Facebook: 2010 Season

Last year I did a couple of posts on the reach and engagement of NBA teams on Twitter and Facebook. Yesterday Yago Colás came across one and shared it with the students in his Cultures of Basketball course.

The students thought it was an interesting concept and one of them, Blake McLimans, pulled updated numbers for all of the teams.

Since it has been a year since my original post I thought I’d use Blake’s figures to look at the growth percentages for all of the teams.

These figures are accurate as of January, 26, 2011.

Twitter

First the official Twitter profiles. Here are the most followed NBA teams as of yesterday:

A year later the Lakers and Magic are still the top two teams. Boston moves up a spot to #3 and not surprisingly the Heat jump from #15 to #5.

Here are the NBA Twitter profiles ranked by percentage increase since last year:

I figured Miami and would have the highest growth percentage and they almost do, coming in 2nd with a massive 582% increase. Golden State has actually seen the most growth, but despite a 597% increase they are still #26 in total followers.

Facebook

As for Facebook, here are the most popular official team pages:

One year on the Lakers and Celtics still have the most likes. The Bulls move up to #3 and the Heat jump from having the fewest likes of any team last year to being #4. The Cavs are hanging in there at #5 so there hasn’t been much abandonment by the fan base.

Here are the NBA team pages ranked by percentage increase since last year:

It’s no surprise that the Heat have seen the most growth. Since their official team page had only 599 likes at this time last year their jump to over a million likes brings with it a crazy percentage increase. Oklahoma City and New Orleans also saw very high growth.

Nearly all the teams saw greater growth on Facebook than Twitter which also makes sense given Facebook’s much large user base.

Related posts:

1. The Most Popular NBA Teams on Twitter and Facebook
2. The Most Popular NFL Teams on Twitter and Facebook: 2010 Season
3. The Most Popular MLB Teams on Twitter and Facebook

By now Twitter is an important part of most publishers’ audience development and content promotion efforts. But in reviewing the Twitter presence of newspapers, magazines and other content sites on a regular basis I’m often surprised by the mistakes and missed opportunities that still occur.

So to help out I’ve created a list of Twitter tips for publishers.

I have intentionally left off some of the basics like being genuine, fostering two-way communication, participating not just promoting, etc. that I hope are now well-established fundamentals. In this post I’ll focus on simple, practical tips for getting better results from Twitter.

While my list is geared towards publishers the tactics are applicable to most organizations.

1. Diversify your approach – a Twitter profile can’t be all things to all people and a high volume of tweets can overwhelm followers. So spread things out through a diversified Twitter strategy. Supplement your main profile with additional accounts for key sections and topics and incorporate editorial staff profiles into your efforts. But be careful not to spread yourself too thin; how much you diversify depends on the size of your audience and your area of focus. For some titles a single branded profile is the right approach.

2. Give edit a voice – who would followers rather interact with, a marketing person or the actual writers of your content? Let the editorial staff take the lead on branded profiles, and promote individual profiles on-site to extend engagement further. Personal profiles are a great way to share additional information around a story and allow users to get more than just headlines and links.

3. Style and word choice matters – the language used in tweets can greatly impact click-throughs and retweets. Be compelling enough to encourage user action without neglecting the literal, keyword-focused terms that help your tweets surface in Twitter search, real-time search and social search. This is turn helps the content linked in your tweets perform better in regular Web search. For some sites editorial headlines with a link work quite well; for others a more personal touch is needed. The best approach is to mix things up; avoid being too formulaic.

4. Frequency and timing matters too – it’s not just what you tweet, it’s when and how often. Frequency of tweets has a major impact on attracting and keeping followers. Every profile has to find its sweet spot – often enough to maintain interest and foster regular engagement, but limited enough to avoid losing followers. The volume of tweets and when tweets occur (time of day, day of week) also have a strong influence on user retweets. Dan Zarrella has done great research in this area (and the one above); get a copy of the “The Science of ReTweets” on his site.

5. Curate, don’t just self-promote – no one likes the guy at the party who does nothing but talk about himself. Be sure to share things from other sources too and get involved in related conversations. Make your Twitter profiles topical authorities on your areas of coverage. Twitter Lists are another good way to do this; create lists around specific topics, stories or events. It’s a good way to network while improving the strength of your own profiles.

6. Breaking news and trending topics – when news is breaking or a topic is trending in search and/or social media, maximize the visibility of your related content by coordinating promotion through Twitter and other social vehicles. The goal is to have your articles pop on news search, real-time search and social search all around the same time, all of which helps with regular Web search visibility too (immediately and longer term). By monitoring trend tools you can discover what topics are hot and how users are searching for and discussing them.

7. It’s not just for new content – while your latest articles and features will naturally get the most attention, take advantage of opportunities to promote older content too. This is particularly useful for sites that cover evergreen content and seasonal topics but it can be applied to any publication. You can also use Twitter to give a boost to underperforming sections and content types.

8. On-site promotion – most publishers promote their main Twitter profiles through things like sidebar modules and footer links but not always prominently enough. You don’t want to go overboard but you do want to make it easy for people to learn about and follow your profiles. The New York Times created a Twitter page to showcase its profiles and Twitter Lists. Adding Twitter links to staff bios and bylines is also a good idea. Twitter @Anywhere makes it easy to do this without taking users off-site; just keep eye on how it affects site performance.

9. Optimize your Twitter buttons – the biggest on-site issue I come across is the way that Twitter share buttons are implemented and the tweet text that is automatically generated. The most common tweet text mistakes are things like not referencing the Twitter profile, including the profile of a third-party tool instead of your own, exceeding 140 characters, not using shortened URLs or showing the full length URL and nothing else. It’s also common to see 2-3 different Twitter buttons on the same page, each generating different tweet text and/or a different shortened URL. Many users will choose to customize the tweet text, but give them a strong default choice and minimize the work they need to do.

10. Incorporate Twitter content on-site – tweets are transitory in nature so look for ways to extend their value by incorporating them into your own site experience. Entertainment and sports sites sometimes stream tweets from celebrities and athletes. News sites can showcase user reactions around a story or event on individual articles or even the home page and section fronts. User contributions solicited though Twitter can be turned into special features (or at least used for content ideas). Rand Fishkin offered a good suggestion for turning tweets into SEO-friendly on-site content.

Each of these tips could warrant a separate post and there are many more things to consider, but hopefully this list gives you some things to think about.

What Twitter tips would you add?

Related posts:

1. 7 Conversion Rate Optimization Tips for Publishers
2. Diversified Twitter Strategies for News Sites
3. Fortune 100 Need to Get More Creative with Twitter

What gets more traction for publishers: content shared on Facebook or Twitter? According to the Social Media Sharing Trends 2010 report from SocialTwist, Facebook dominates content sharing among social media sites but links shared on Twitter have a much higher click-through rate.

SocialTwist examined content shared with its Tell-a-Friend widget from August 2009 to July 2010.

Among social networks Facebook accounted for 78% of shares, well more than any other choice. Twitter was third with just 5%:

But in looking at click-through rate Twitter’s CTR was 1904% compared to 287% for Facebook:

That means that on average Twitter shares got 19.04 clicks vs. only 2.87 clicks per share on Facebook.

This makes sense since by design Twitter usage is focused on short comments/exchanges and sharing links while there is a lot more happening on Facebook that can take up users’ attention. But the sheer volume of Facebook sharing means that total referrals from Facebook shares are still higher for many publishers.

Another thing worth noting from the study is that email still dominates content sharing though it is starting to lose ground:

Related posts:

1. 7 Conversion Rate Optimization Tips for Publishers
2. The Most Popular MLB Teams on Twitter and Facebook
3. Press Releases Do Get Shared on Google News

It is safe to say that most news sites are now experimenting with various forms of user engagement and content promotion through social media. In recent years many larger news organizations were still coming to terms with the need for a social presence and the nature of their participation. Now the focus is decidedly more tactical with sites looking to understand how to maximize the benefits of their efforts and better integrate them with other marketing initiatives.

So which news sites are getting the most out of their social media efforts?

That’s not an easy question to answer without having access to each site’s analytics data and knowing their goals and objectives. But it is possible to make some basic comparisons using data from some of the free tools that are available.

Since I’ve been comparing major news sites in variety of areas (Facebook and Twitter impact; YouTube and new Digg activity; site speed and domain authority, among others) I thought I’d look at overall social media engagement too.

PostRank has a comparison tool that uses its Domain Activity API to measure total engagement based on user participation across multiple social platforms. So I ran 30+ news sites through the tool.

PostRank counts “engagement events” which it defines as individual activities such as a tweet, like, comment, digg, RSS view, etc. It then assigns “engagement points” to each event; events that demonstrate a higher level of effort and engagement are given higher values. These points are combined into a total engagement score (for more information see What is Engagement? on their site).

So which news sites are getting the most social media engagement?

The New York Times leads the pack by a considerable margin. CNN, BBC News, Yahoo News, The Guardian and The Huffington Post form the next tier. The top 15 sites earned scored over 1 million; from that point the scores begin to drop considerably.

Here is a head-to-head look at the top three (click to enlarge):

The BBC News score is somewhat inflated because the PostRank tool cannot isolate by subdirectory so I had to measure all of bbc.co.uk, not just bbc.co.uk/news/. But in going through the site a substantial portion of the content is news so I opted to include it.

In looking at these figures it is important to note that sites with larger audiences have greater opportunities for engagement, so bigger brands are likely to have larger numbers. But reach and total engagement do still matter so I wanted to make that comparison.

More important is the quality of the engagement and the actions that are triggered by it. A smaller number of engagement points that directly lead to traffic, links, fans, signups, revenue or any other desired action can be much more valuable than just raw user activity across social platforms.

Related posts:

1. Facebook Pages: Which News Sites Get the Most Engagement?
2. My Top 10 Posts of 2009 on News Media, SEO and Social Media
3. The Top News Sites on Blekko

With a new football season under way I thought I’d take a look again at the NFL teams that have attracted the largest following to their official Twitter profiles and Facebook pages.

The usual caveats:

• Social media isn’t a popularity contest and reach does not equal influence, engagement or action
• These figures will quickly be out-of-date (they probably were before I could hit the “publish” button)

But those things aside, it is interesting to take a snapshot at various times for the purposes of comparison. And since I did the same thing in November 2009 I can now provide some growth percentages too.

Twitter

Let’s start with Twitter. Here are the 32 NFL teams’ official profiles ranked by number of followers:

The New England Patriots are still #1 (they held first place last season too) with the San Diego Chargers and the Dallas Cowboys close behind. From there the follower numbers start slowing dropping. Quite a few teams have fewer than 20K followers and several are still below 10K.

The Philadelphia Eagles have yet to reach 2K followers which seems very low for a sports-crazy town, but their official profile is fairly new. An EaglesInsider profile (that looks semi-official) with 5,300+ followers has been around longer.

It was surprising to see four teams still without official profiles. The Giants and Cardinals do have official representatives on Twitter (giantspathanlon and cardschatter) but no official team profiles. And I’m not sure what’s up with the Steelers and Colts (please correct me if I somehow missed theirs).

In terms of percentage increase since last year the Cowboys have seen the largest growth. The Detroit Lions and Houston Texans have also grown considerably but their total counts are still comparatively low. The Saints and Redskins did not have official profiles last November so I did not include a growth percentage for them.

Facebook

So how about Facebook? Here are the NFL team pages ranked by number of fans:

The Cowboys are dominating, which is interesting because in November 2009 they did not even have an official page (at least that I could find). The Steelers, Saints, Bears and Patriots also have significant followings. After the Vikings at 500K+ the counts start to drop down.

The Oakland Raiders are interesting in that their official page has only 23,075 fans but an unofficial Raider Nation page has 184,199. I guess that’s a fitting testament to that Oakland fans and their reputation for being a little out of the ordinary.

Once again the New York Giants do not have an official presence which is really surprising. There is an unofficial page with over 50K fans but I could not find an official page for the team.

In terms of growth, nearly every NFL team has considerably higher fan counts than last year. This is likely connected to the launch of the external Facebook “like” button and the fact that Facebook page promotion is much more prevalent than it was even a year ago.

One exception is the Raiders, but I believe this is because I used the figure from the unofficial Raiders page in my 2009 post. I don’t think they had an official page at that time.

League-wide the Facebook numbers are much higher than Twitter which makes sense considering Facebook’s larger user base and adoption rate.

Combined Reach

For one final comparison I’ve ranked the NFL teams by combined Twitter and Facebook following:

The Cowboys’ large Facebook fan base was more than enough to give them the #1 overall spot. The Steelers, Saints, Patriots and Bears are also doing very well. That’s impressive considering the Steelers do not have an official Twitter profile and the Saints did not have an official presence on either Twitter or Facebook last year.

All the teams have seen significant total growth since last November (excluding the Raiders exception), and the Cowboys and Panthers percentages are through the roof.

Related posts:

1. The Most Popular NFL Teams on Twitter and Facebook
2. The Most Popular NBA Teams on Twitter and Facebook
3. The Most Popular MLB Teams on Twitter and Facebook

YouTube is both a major opportunity and an interesting challenge for news sites. News organizations want to drive video impressions to their own sites but since YouTube dominates the online video world they need to have a presence there. So whether they see it as a necessarily evil or a great chance to reach new audiences, YouTube is in the social media mix.

In my ongoing look at mainstream media outlets and social media I have done multiple posts on news sites and Twitter, Facebook and Digg but I’ve yet to look at YouTube. So I thought I’d investigate how well news sites are doing at building channel subscribers and video views.

I compiled the figures by looking at the profile boxes on channel pages and from YouTube’s search results, for example:

——————–

Not every site shares the same information in its profile but I pulled as much data as I could. As a side note the subscriber counts shown in YouTube’s search results tend to lag behind the counts shown on the actual channel pages. For this post I used the larger of the numbers.

Here is a selection of mainstream media sites ranked by subscribers to their channel pages:

The Associated Press leads every category by a considerable margin. The New York Times, CBS News, BBC World News (see note below), CNN, Fox News, ABC News and Reuters have also attracted significant followings.

But subscribers are one thing and actual video views are another, so for further comparison here are the news sites ranked by total upload views:

AP again dominates the competition though it is important to note that having 36K+ videos on YouTube gives them a lot more opportunity for views.

Interestingly the Los Angeles Times is #10 in subscribers but it jumps to #3 in total upload views with only 2,745 videos. Alternatively CNN has 19,514 videos and is #5 in subscribers but it falls to #10 in total upload views.

Some additional notes:

1) Surprisingly I did not find a channel for NBC News. There is a main channel for the network and multiple channels for local affiliate stations but I could not find one for NBC News.

2) I also did not find a channel for Yahoo! News or AOL News although there is a general channel for Yahoo! that does include some news videos.

3) When I try to click through on the BBC World News channel included in the table above I get a “This channel is not available” message. I’m not sure if it is because US users are not allowed to access it (as with the main BBC channel) or if the channel has been taken down. But since the 21,839 subscribers reported in YouTube’s search results make it a top 5 news channel I included it in the table. There is also a BBC World News America channel but its most recent video is from 2008. So I wonder if BBC has stopped maintaining its news channels on YouTube.

4) I also could not find a current channel for MSNBC. There is an MSNBC.com profile (called msnbcReporter) that has not been updated since 2008. And it looks like an individual grabbed the msnbc username back in 2006 for his own purposes:

Since “jonathan” was apparently hoping to use the channel to show off his dance moves I thought it only appropriate to end this post with one of his videos:

Related posts:

1. Which News Sites Get the Most Social Media Engagement?
2. Blog Tag Optimization Tips for News Sites
3. The Most Buried News Sites on Digg

Over on All Facebook there is an interesting post on how JVC USA is using a “Like it to Win it” sweepstakes to rapidly build up fans and drive frequent engagement on the JVC Facebook Page. Developed with RFI Studios (part of Ruder Finn), the campaign has been a great success. But does it violate Facebook’s promotions guidelines?

The format of the 60 day sweepstakes is simple and compelling. Users just “like” the JVC page, submit their email address and then come back every day to “like” the wall post of the day for a chance to win a featured prize (a JVC product).

Here is a screenshot of the signup tab from their page in case it gets taken down:

With valuable prizes like TVs, camcorders and stereo equipment the “Like it to Win it” promotion is definitely working. Prior to the start of the sweepstakes in early July the JVC page reportedly had about 1,000 fans. As of today it has 36,782 fans. And many fans are coming back regularly. According to Ruder Finn the page currently has a daily active user base of over 10,000 fans.

In looking at recent posts of the day, most are getting more than 2,000 “likes” and a considerable number of comments:

If there are 10,000 active fans daily you would think they’d all be “liking” the post of the day since that is primarily what is driving the repeat visits. But 2,000+ likes per wall post is impressive.

There are some great charts from Facebook Insights in the All Facebook post that demonstrate the dramatic increase in “likes” and user interaction since the start of the sweepstakes; check those out. The high level of engagement is pushing JVC’s quality scores through the roof, giving them more exposure and creating a viral loop that brings in more fans and more interaction.

The challenge is how to keep that momentum going once the campaign is over. It is hard to imagine many users coming back to the page on regular basis without such a compelling incentive. But the promotion has worked very well in the short term and it will be interesting to see how JVC and Ruder Finn try to sustain a realistic amount of growth and engagement after it is finished.

So all this sounds great, but does it violate Facebook’s guidelines?

Apparently it does. In the comments of the All Facebook post two people involved in the promotion (author Dennis Yu of BlitzLocal and Ruder Finn’s Andy Pray) have insisted that the sweepstakes was implemented with Facebook’s knowledge and approval. But the post was later updated by Yu to say that Facebook had notified them that the sweepstakes does in fact violate its Promotions Guidelines.

Which part of the Facebook guidelines JVC USA is violating was not specified. There are some possibilities in section three “Administering a Promotion through the Facebook Platform” but this item from the fourth section “Publicizing a Promotion on Facebook” may be the one:

4.2 In the rules of the promotion, or otherwise, you will not condition entry to the promotion upon taking any action on Facebook, for example, updating a status, posting on a profile or Page, or uploading a photo. You may, however, condition entry to the promotion upon becoming a fan of a Page.

So it is ok for JVC to require fans to “like” their page, but it may not be ok to require them to “like” individual wall posts to be eligible to win specific prizes.

The current Promotions Guidelines were instituted a while back as part of a crack down on the use of sweepstakes and contests. Some marketers have felt that the guidelines are too limiting or controlling but among other things Facebook is trying to prevent significant manipulation of the news feed.

Of course everyone tries to facilitate engagement on their Facebook Pages and increase exposure in users’ news feeds; that’s a basic component of Facebook marketing. But tying this to the ability to win prizes appears to be crossing the line.

The All Facebook post was updated about the violation on Friday August 14th so I can only assume that JVC USA and RFI Studios were notified as well. But as of today (Monday) the sweepstakes content is still up on the JVC USA page and the promotion is still running.

So what gives? I’ll update this post if anything changes on the JVC Facebook page or I learn more. And if anyone has any additional information please let me know.

UPDATE:
I contacted Dennis Yu, who gave me this information:

Facebook requires that brands get approval in advance and spend at least $10k, which is what JVC did. Anything outside of that is a violation of the TOS. Facebook has some internal miscommunication where our rep didn’t tell others about this campaign– so these uninformed reps had jumped on us. It’s since been cleared.

This likely explains why the sweepstakes is still active on the JVC Facebook page. It is a clever promotion that has done well for JVC so I am glad to see it continue. But based on Dennis’ input it sounds like the promotions guidelines change based on how much money a company is willing to spend on Facebook for a particular promotion. Does that seem right?

Related posts:

1. Grateful Dead Facebook Page: Great Use of Interactive Content
2. A Closer Look at Fan Engagement on the Fox News Facebook Page
3. NBA Playoff Teams Ranked by Facebook Page Engagement

Through branded profiles and the personalized “My News” feature on the new Digg, publishers are hoping that building up followers who view them as a preferred or trusted source will enable them to reach a larger number of users on a regular basis. This is particularly appealing for publishers with content that may be of interest to specific audiences as opposed to the wider Digg user base. Will it work with local news? NBC is trying to find out.

In my post on news sites on the new Digg I noted that NBC has created a series of city-specific profiles to target local markets. There are 10 local profiles for owned & operated stations around the country. These are anchored by the main NBC Local profile that highlights the best local content with a better chance of having a wide appeal.

To find out more about NBC’s efforts I contacted Lauren Bertolini, Social Media Editor for NBC Local Media. Here’s what Lauren had to say about the NBC profiles:

Q: Are the 10 O&O station profiles managed by you or each station individually?

Lauren: The ten profiles are a joint effort between myself and the social media lead in each of the 10 markets. Since the new Digg is so, well, new, we’re still figuring out the best way to stay active.

Q: Is all content from the sites being automatically submitted or just select stories?

Lauren: As of now, the content from the sites is automatically submitted using a feed from our front page.

Q: Creating separate profiles for each market seems like a good approach since the content is location specific. But how have users responded so far? Has there been interest/demand for market-specific content?

Lauren: I think it’s still too soon to tell how people are responding – the new Digg is still picking up steam and I don’t think users have really figured out the best way to get what they want out of it. Since the new Digg prioritizes a more personal connection to what you’re digging, we think that users will enjoy seeing local news in their “My News” feed.

Q: The main NBC Local profile has attracted a fair number of followers. What are your aims for that profile?

Lauren: Our team started the NBCLocal account a little over a year ago because we wanted to be part of the Digg community in the most transparent way possible, and we wanted to connect the national and international Digg community with interesting local stories. It serves as an aggregator of our best local content. A lot of the quirky stories that show up in Digg’s “Offbeat” section are really local news items when you think about it, and we felt that a lot of our content fit into what the Digg community already finds interesting.

———-

As can be seen it is still early days for the new Digg (at the moment it is still in alpha) so NBC and other news sites are still in the initial phases of experimentation.

A look at the follower counts on the NBC Local profiles today shows that the city-specific profiles are just getting going:

The main NBC Local profile, which has been around longer, is doing fairly well and Lauren has done a good job of bringing a human element to it:

For the time being at least it has more followers than CNN, although it is important to note that to-date CNN does not appear to be actively managing its profile (see additional note #3 on my new Digg post).

As for user activity, in going through all of the NBC Local profiles most of the automatically submitted articles have not attracted a high volume of diggs. But that is the case for many of the news media profiles that are auto-submitting, so at this point it does not provide much insight into the viability of NBC’s market-specific approach.

Once the new Digg moves out of alpha and has some time to gain traction we’ll get a better sense of how interested users are in drilling down on specific sources, topics and locations. I’ll do a follow-up post when there is more data to report on.

Related posts:

1. News Sites on the New Digg: Who is Active, Who is Gaining Followers?
2. Official Publisher Profiles on Digg One Year Later: Followers up 720% But Have They Died on the Vine?
3. The Most Buried News Sites on Digg

The new Digg has gotten a lot of attention for the opportunities it creates for publishers (see ReadWriteWeb and BlueGlass for details). First and foremost is the ability to create official profiles and automatically submit content, which publishers are hoping will turn Digg into a friendlier place for mainstream media. But how will users respond to the new format? Do they want to follow and interact with specific media sites? Or will publisher profiles end up full of self-submitted stories with only one digg (their own)?

Now that the alpha version has been going for a while (update: the new Digg v4 went live to everyone on August 25th) I thought I’d take a look at how news organizations are faring thus far. Using the new Find Profiles page (it is behind the login wall so I won’t link to it) I went through the World News and Business categories to look for major news sites.

Here is the reported data on 30 media profiles, ranked by number of followers (as of today):

The New York Times has the most followers with The Wall Street Journal and BBC News close behind. Currently only seven of the 30 sites have crossed 2,000 followers but The Washington Post, The Los Angeles Times and USA Today are getting close.

You have to feel for The Economist, Chicago Tribune and United Press International down at the bottom of the pack. You’d think UPI could at least attract a follower or two from its own organization. To be fair though there are quite a few other profiles in the World News category with few or no followers that did not make the table. (For example Phoenix New Times, WGNTV and Seattle Weekly all have 0 followers as of today).

Time appears to have the most active profile. They are following 964 people (far more than any of the others) and have dugg over 6,000 submissions. They also made 29 comments; that’s a very low number but most of the other sites have not made any.

I did not see a main profile for Fox News in the World News section but they do have a profile in the Business section (foxbusiness). In cross checking against the news sites in my posts on Twitter impact and Facebook Page valuation I also did not see Digg profiles for Newsweek, ABC News, AP, NPR, PBS, The Financial Times or The Guardian. I couldn’t find them through Digg’s internal search either; if I’ve missed one or there are other major news site profiles that you are aware of please let me know.

Some additional notes:

1) It is not clear yet how well using an RSS feed to automatically submit articles is working. In going through the various profiles I saw a lot of submissions with just one digg. It will be interesting to see if sites that auto-submit in volume will end up drowning out the select articles from their site each day that have a better chance of attracting diggs.

2) I did not include sites from the Technology category but several in that group have attracted decent followings including Engadget (24,011 followers), Gizmodo (17,546) Mashable (14,528), Wired (9,695) and Ars Technica (7,724). While it is not surprising that tech sites are doing well it is encouraging that some of the top mainstream news sites above fall within in the middle of this group.

3) Of the publisher profiles examined only CNN and USA Today had not yet been customized with logos and/or descriptive text. Compare the CNN profile to Time:

———-

4) Forbes has opted to create quite a few additional profiles covering various sections and topics, as shown in this partial list:

This may help to attract more followers overall since users will be able to drill down on the specific topics that they are interested in. But there is also a risk that Forbes will spread itself too thin and weaken the value of its main profile.

5) NBC is also taking a multi-profile approach to target specific markets, for example:

The market-specific logos all match so this appears to be a coordinated effort.

UPDATE:
I got more information on NBC Local’s efforts from their Social Media Editor: NBC Targets Local Markets on the New Digg

UPDATE – February 2011:
After six months of negative response from users, low engagement and abuse by spammers Digg has decided to discontinue RSS auto-submissions for publishers. According to Digg product manager Mike Cieri only 4.5% of all Top News content came from RSS submissions. See Mashable for the details: Digg Bans RSS Submissions.

Related posts:

1. Official Publisher Profiles on Digg One Year Later: Followers up 720% But Have They Died on the Vine?
2. The Most Buried News Sites on Digg
3. NBC Targets Local Markets on the New Digg

I have done several posts on news organizations and Facebook recently so I thought it was time to switch things up and look at Twitter again. There is of course much more to the social media universe than just The Bobbsey Twins. But Twitter, Facebook in some cases Digg still represent the majority of social media referrals to many news sites, so they continue to be a priority.

Since I have ranked news sites in various areas in the past (Facebook Pages, page speed and domain authority) I thought I’d do something similar for their Twitter profiles. The easiest thing to compare is reach based on Twitter followers and I’ve included that data below. But which news sites are making the most of their Twitter presence?

To help answer that question I used Twitalyzer to evaluate the main Twitter profile of 30+ major news organizations including a mix of newspapers, magazines, TV and online-only outlets. There are many different Twitter analysis tools out there but I’ve seen Twitalyzer mentioned several times recently so I decided to try it out.

The data point they make available without a subscription is called “Impact.” Impact is calculated by combining the following factors:

• The number of followers a user has
• The number of unique references and citations of the user in Twitter
• The frequency at which the user is uniquely retweeted
• The frequency at which the user is uniquely retweeting other people
• The relative frequency at which the user posts updates

A paid Twitalyzer account also provides Influence and Engagement scores which would be interesting to look at another time.

Please accept the usual caveats about the accuracy of the data, methodology of the tool, etc. What I am most interested in is making a relative comparison between the various news sites. With that in mind here are the main Twitter profiles for 30+ news organizations ranked by Impact score:

@nytimes takes #1 by a small margin but the top nine Twitter profiles are all closely bunched together with Impact scores between 75.8% and 78.5%. Starting with #10 things begin to drop off. At the bottom of the table poor @BW, @csmonitoronline and @aolnews each got scores below 10%.

I thought @ColonelTribune would have scored much higher than 23% since they have a decent number of followers and it is a dynamic, popular Twitter profile. It is also interesting that despite that low score the profile is still in the 99.4th percentile:

Perhaps @ColonelTribune is more popular among industry professionals (as an example of a great Twitter persona) than typical users and news consumers. Or maybe Twitalyzer missed the boat on that one. What do you think?

UPDATE:
Jeff Katz, Twitalyzer’s Product Lead, gave me some more information on how Impact scores are calculated and how this would factor into @ColonelTribune’s 23%:

“As you pointed in your post, the Impact score is calculated (and weighted) based on a few variables. While I would have to dig in a bit further, I did notice that @ColonelTribune does many things well on Twitter, but he (or she) does not retweet others, which is one of the factors of the Impact score. In fact, @ColonelTribune only RT’d someone else just once in the past 90 days. That said, @ColonelTribune is in the 99.4th % in terms of Impact and given that it is the only regional account (kind of hard to argue that NY Times is not a bigger national and international account) in the top 25 speaks volume.”

So specific to Impact, it is important not only to be retweeted but to retweet others as well. This also shows that despite its lack of retweeting and the fact that the Chicago Tribune is somewhat regional in nature (they do also compete for national news online) @ColonelTribune has done well to reach the 99.4th percentile.

Jeff also pointed out that because the free version of Twitalyzer is an on-demand service they only processes scores when someone manually requests a particular profile to be updated. This has an impact on the way the various metrics are calculated. The scores are based on 30 day averages so profiles that are updated more often are working with a larger data set than profiles that may have been updated only once. So the number of times that @ColonelTribune has been updated in the last 30 days will also factor into its Impact score and other metrics.

Related posts:

1. Diversified Twitter Strategies for News Sites
2. News Sites Not Making Much Use of Static FBML on Facebook Pages
3. Super Bowl XLV: Packers and Steelers Battle it Out on Twitter

Between privacy issues, a sweaty CEO and technical problems with its “Like” buttons Facebook is having a rough time lately. But Facebook Pages remain a key audience development and content promotion opportunity for publishers so it is important to make the most of them. A good way to enhance Facebook Pages is by using Static FBML to customize tabs for an improved visual experience and greater functionality.

I have seen plenty of blog posts and conference presentations on how to utilize Static FBML but I rarely see news sites highlighted among the examples of good usage. So I thought I’d take a look at a selection of news organizations to see how many are taking advantage of FBML.

The short answer? Not so many. I revisited the 25 pages covered in Which News Sites Have the Most Valuable Facebook Pages? and found that the majority are making little or no use of Static FBML. There are a handful of examples however that are worth pointing out.

The Economist

The Economist has multiple customized tabs for subscription, featured articles and a news quiz:

Fox News

Fox News offers a more visual and interactive experience through its “Fun Stuff” tab:

Chicago Tribune

Chicago Tribune uses a welcome tab to highlight sections and features from its main site:

Yahoo! News

Compare the Fox News and Chicago Tribune tabs to Yahoo! News‘ welcome tab, which could certainly use a bit more pizzazz:

To be fair Yahoo! News is just using the welcome tab to establish some rules of conduct. But I think there is a middle ground between the Fox News and Yahoo! News tabs that would work well for most organizations.

The New York Times

I did not see any custom tabs on The New York Times page this week but in the past they have added them for major events such as the Winter Olympics:

Newsweek and Time

In going through the Facebook Pages I also noticed that several organizations are utilizing professional applications from Involver for things like Twitter and news feed integration, as seen in these examples from Newsweek and Time:

I don’t know much about Involver but it looks like they offer some good options for companies that prefer to outsource.

So the bottom line is that news organizations are dabbling with Static FBML on their Facebook Pages but few are doing anything that is noteworthy. Much of what I came across will not be particularly compelling to users or do much to drive repeat visits.

News sites have a big advantage over other companies on Facebook because they regularly produce breaking news and other forms of quality content that can be featured on their pages and placed in user news feeds. So perhaps they have less of a need to add extra bells and whistles. But the average Facebook user is only going to “Like” so many news pages so it is important to offer a strong user experience and stand out from the competition.

For more information on using Static FBML check out:

• How to Customize Your Facebook Page Using Static FBML
• How To Create the Perfect Facebook Fan Page
• Facebook Static FBML FAQ / Tutorial

Related posts:

1. News Sites on Twitter: Who is Making the Most Impact?
2. Which News Sites Have the Most Valuable Facebook Pages?
3. Facebook Pages: Which News Sites Get the Most Engagement?

Maintaining a Facebook Page is now a fundamental part of most news organizations’ social media presence. News sites utilize Facebook Pages to increase brand visibility, promote content, interact with users and drive traffic back to their main sites. But how much are these pages really worth to them, and which news sites are getting the most value for their efforts?

Only the news organizations themselves can fully answer that question; their own analytics data combined with internal estimates of the value of fans and various actions will paint the clearest picture. But when I came across Vitrue’s new Social Page Evaluator I thought it would be interesting to compare ballpark valuation figures for selection of major news sites.

The Social Page Evaluator (SPE) provides an estimated “Annual Page Value” for any single Facebook Page based on the last 30 days of activity. According to its disclaimer the SPE factors in fan count, user activity, brand activity and “a proprietary engagement multiplier” and then calculates an “Earned Media Value” using a default CPM of $5. The CPM can be adjusted between $1 and $25.

While the methodology and accuracy can be debated the tool does offer way to make a relative comparison of various Facebook Pages, so that is all I am attempting to do.

Here is a ranking of major news organization Facebook Pages based on activity in the last 30 days and using the default $5 CPM:

CNN earns the #1 spot by a considerable margin but The New York Times, Fox News and NPR also have impressive valuations.

In looking at the table, total number of fans certainly plays a large role but posts and interactions matter too. Fox News getting 67,808 interactions from just 41 posts is impressive, although the quality of those interactions is not measured. I had previously pointed out the high level of engagement that Fox News gets on its Facebook page; this data supports that further.

Additional Notes

I also wanted to point out a few things that I noticed while doing the analysis.

CBS News and Reuters are the only two news organizations in the group that have not created a short, customized URL for their page (e.g. www.facebook.com/nytimes):

That is a missed opportunity.

While on Facebook the page URL shown to users in the browser changes radically depending on how it was navigated to. For example when I went to the CNN page by searching “CNN” while on the Fox News page I ended up on this URL:

There are multiple combinations that can occur. If you paste those funky URLs into a new browser tab they redirect to a better URL (in the CNN example www.facebook.com/cnn?ref=ts). But it is still not the main URL for the page and the redirects themselves do not appear to be permanent.

Also for Facebook Pages that were set with capital letters in the name (e.g. www.facebook.com/TheEconomist) the lower case version has a 302 redirect:

The same is true for capitalized URLs that were set in lower case.

So to minimize user confusion and maximize inbound links to the actual Facebook Page URL it is a good idea to display the main URL in a couple places on the page.

Some organizations do this on their Info tab:

Related posts:

1. Facebook Pages: Which News Sites Get the Most Engagement?
2. News Sites Not Making Much Use of Static FBML on Facebook Pages
3. An Early Look at Facebook Open Graph Protocol Integration on News Sites

So Lebron and Kobe may (or may not) be heading towards a much-hyped NBA Finals matchup, but the real question on fans’ minds is: Which NBA playoff teams have the most user engagement on their Facebook Pages?

Ok fans could care less about that, but for myself and some sports and social media marketers out there it’s an interesting question.

In my post on the most popular NBA teams on Twitter and Facebook (and the more recent one on MLB teams) I looked strictly at the following each team has built up. This time I’ll compare user engagement on each team’s Facebook page.

With the second round of the playoffs recently under way I thought now was a good time to pull the numbers since all 16 teams were still recently active. So I checked the number of likes and comments for each team’s last 10 updates. I was going to go back to the first day of the playoffs but that turned out to be quite a few updates, so I’m using 10 as a representative sample.

I realize that counting likes and comments is a very limited measurement of engagement but it offers a simple way to compare user activity on each team’s Facebook Page.

So here are the 16 NBA playoff teams ranked by the average number of likes and comments on their last 10 updates (through Monday night prior to the start of any games):

The Lakers are dominating but more fans mean more opportunities for engagement so they do have an advantage. Denver makes a strong showing at #2 despite having fewer fans than four other teams. Orlando having a long lay-off between the first and second rounds had a negative impact on their numbers. Their most recent 10 updates got limited feedback but the 10 before that fared much better.

Oklahoma City was a surprise at #15; I expected them to do better after their impressive effort in the first round. The Charlotte Bobcats came in last; unless they can get Michael Jordan to start making updates they’ve got their work cut out for them.

So what types of updates drew the most user feedback? Here are the wall posts that received the most likes for each team:

Related posts:

1. The Most Popular NBA Teams on Twitter and Facebook
2. Which NBA Teams Have Seen the Most Growth on Twitter and Facebook?
3. The Most Popular NFL Teams on Twitter and Facebook

There has been a lot of news and reaction around Facebook’s new additions to the Facebook Platform: Social Plugins, the Open Graph protocol and the Graph API. News and content sites are a natural fit for participation and Facebook is encouraging news site adoption by showcasing sites that are already experimenting with it. So I thought I’d take a look at some early examples of Facebook Open Graph integration on news sites.

(You can jump to the end for the Takeaways).

The Huffington Post

The Huffington Post has added a “Hot on Facebook” module to its home page and in a sidebar on posts:

I like this and think it will do a good job of encouraging user clicks, similar to the Digg widget that has worked well on news sites. Seeing that stories have been liked thousands of times certainly caught my interest.

They have also added the Like button to their post template:

At least to-date a prominent Share button is still present too. Users may be unsure which button to use, and since the like and share numbers are different it creates the impression of things being out of sync (even though they are two different things). Add in the Facebook chiclet below the headline and I’d say they are going a little overboard:

I’m also not sure why the Hot on Facebook module shows 4,241 likes while the post itself shows only 1,363.

Time.com

Time.com is selectively applying the Like button in the “Must Reads” module on its home page:

It is not clear why in this particular case only one of four stories has the button. And interestingly when you click through on that story the Like button does not appear on the page:

Since this is a blog post it is likely that Time just hasn’t rolled out integration across all editorial templates yet.

The Like button does appear on their article template:

But at least on my computer it was a little slow to load and once loaded it added some extra white space before the start of the editorial text. Like The Huffington Post there are also competing Facebook buttons at work.

The Washington Post

The Washington Post is using Facebook to create a branded featured called Network News that takes the form of a small widget on their home page and on editorial templates:

This looks like a nice, simple, useful integration but apparently it has caused user uproar to the point where they had to add an opt-out feature to the widget (the red X):

Over the weekend the situation was serious enough that they felt the need to feature an article explaining the widget and how to opt-out right at the top of their home page:

CNN.com

CNN.com has a “Friends Activity” module on their home page that shows stories that friends liked and those shared in high volume:

Clicking on “View more friends’ activity” brings up a full page version with more links and friend information:

As for button integration on articles, CNN has decided to go with “recommend” instead of “like”:

It would be interesting to learn what impact that difference in language has on usage.

Takeaways

• At this early stage news sites are still experimenting with various forms of integration, location and functionality. Start simple to see how users respond and measure the impact on Facebook referrals.
• Many users are still unfamiliar with the new offerings and concerns about privacy seem to be a common first reaction. So tread carefully and provide clear instructions, settings and (when relevant) opt-out functionality.
• Consider the impact that Facebook Open Graph protocol integration will have on your existing on-site community features and social functionality. This ReadWriteWeb article is a good resource: Facebook Open Graph: The Definitive Guide For Publishers, Users and Competitors.
• When adding to editorial templates make sure the new Like button compliments any existing Facebook implementations. Avoid button overkill and the potential user confusion that goes with it.
• It is also important to note that the Like button functions differently than the various Share buttons that many sites are already using, and at least in its basic form creates a less compelling output. (See Facebook Like Button Vs. Facebook Share: Why I’m Keeping Both from Danny Sullivan). Using the XFBML version instead of an iFrame allows for more customization.
• Carefully monitor the effect of any integration on page load time. Site speed is now a ranking factor so this impacts SEO as well as usability.
• Not covered in my examples above is the fact that Open Graph protocol can also provide sites with additional reporting data. This Inside Facebook post has the details: With the Open Graph Protocol, Any URL Can Be Treated Just Like a Facebook Page

Related posts:

1. Facebook Pages: Which News Sites Get the Most Engagement?
2. An Early Look at News Media Twitter Lists: Not Much Traction
3. Which News Sites Have the Most Valuable Facebook Pages?

A new baseball season is underway and we are in that wonderfully brief period when fans all over the country still believe this could actually be the year for their team. Enjoy it while you can.

But while major market teams have a big advantage in the real game, social media is the great equalizer online, so I thought I’d see which teams have attracted the largest following on Twitter and Facebook. After getting good response to the posts I did on NFL and NBA teams I wanted to add MLB to the mix.

So without further ado here are the 30 Major League Baseball teams ranked by total number of Twitter followers and Facebook fans:

I’ll add the usual caveats: these numbers change very quickly but I find taking a snapshot at various points useful for comparison (perhaps I’ll update this at the All Star break and the end of the season). And of course social media is not a popularity contest; it’s how you engage your followers/fans that really matters. But reach has value too and I like to see which teams are faring best in that area.

Baseball is a game of statistics after all, so looking at numbers seems fitting. I could take it further and come up with analogies for batting average and on-base percentage like average tweets per day or retweet percentages, but maybe another time.

Not surprisingly the Yankees and Red Sox are at the top of the standings, although Boston is far behind the Yankees and Phillies in Twitter followers. I believe that playing in the World Series got the Yankees and Phillies added to the previous version of Twitter’s Suggested Users list, which is likely why their numbers are so much higher.

In looking at the figures above, it is clear that teams are attracting much larger audiences through Facebook than Twitter at this point.

Related posts:

1. The Most Popular NFL Teams on Twitter and Facebook
2. The Most Popular NBA Teams on Twitter and Facebook
3. The Most Popular NFL Teams on Twitter and Facebook: 2010 Season

It has been a couple months since Google Social Search was made available in beta to all users on Google.com so I thought I would revisit it from a marketing perspective.

As I covered when Social Search initially launched in Google Labs, for companies the main objective in social search optimization is to get included in their target audiences’ social circles. That’s great for marketers, but is it what Google wants?

On The Current State of Social Search panel at SMX West a few weeks ago I asked Johanna Wright, Google’s Director of Product Management, Web Search, about this. Johanna said she could understand why brands would want to connect with users through Social Search but that Google had developed it with individuals in mind, not companies.

Thus there isn’t any type of official Google profile for companies as there is with Facebook Pages or branded YouTube channels. It is still possible for a company to set up a Google profile; Tad Miller offered tips on this last year. But the lack of an official corporate option complicates the process for businesses, particularly if someone else has already created a Gmail account with their brand. Danny Sullivan wrote about this in connection with Google Buzz last month.

Despite these challenges companies are experimenting with Social Search and the launch of Google Buzz has increased the number of brands setting up Google profiles, particularly news and content sites. But ultimately what companies need is for users to connect with them through various social media outlets and then link to those accounts from their own Google profiles.

So how well does this translate into brand visibility in Google Social Search?

To get a sense of how it’s working I took a look at my own social circle and Social Search results. I follow a number of different news sites (and other companies) on Twitter, Facebook and other social media, and each of those accounts is linked on my Google Profile. I’m also subscribed to 368 feeds in Google Reader including a wide range of blogs and news sites. So in theory I should have as good a chance as anyone of having brands and especially news sites in my social circle.

In the current “snapshot” of my social circle there are 432 direct connections and 28 secondary connections. Of those 460 connections 67 are companies, news sites or blogs, roughly 15%. (This information is available by clicking the “My social circle” link above your social results or going directly to this page while signed into your Google account).

So while Google created Social Search with individuals in mind at least in my own experience brands are not specifically being excluded although they are certainly a minority.

I was also curious how Google Social Search was connecting me to the 67 non-individuals. Here’s the breakdown:

• Twitter 42
• FriendFeed 19
• Digg 4
• Flickr 2

At least in my case following a brand on Twitter offers the best chance of having them added to my social circle. Content included in my social results through Google Reader subscriptions is not covered in Google’s social circle snapshot so I can’t tie any numbers to that.

Of the 67 brands in my social circle only five are major news sites or magazines: The Huffington Post, Sports Illustrated, Real Simple, Business Insider and Hürriyet (a national newspaper in Turkey). I’m not sure why these five made the cut. At least to-date the only one that frequently pops up in my social results is Sports Illustrated but it is nearly always just a link to their SI_24Seven Twitter profile or one of their Twitter Lists, as seen in these results for “nba”:

(By the way: go Bulls!)

In a couple months of checking I’ve never had a SI.com article appear in my social results. I can get the other four news sites to surface for branded searches but I’ve yet to see them come up for any non-branded queries. That seems odd since all five produce content every single day and I’m often shown outdated or not fully relevant listings from other members of my social circle. But I think this is more related to Social Search still being an early beta product than content from brands being intentionally de-emphasized.

The bottom line: Google Social Search does offer opportunities for brands but it is still early days and the results are mixed at best. In addition, having a news site in your social circle via Twitter does not necessarily mean that actual editorial content from the site will be included in your social results. But as the overall quality of Social Search improves I expect this to get better. And hopefully Google will decide to offer Google profiles for companies in the future.

How often are you seeing content from brands in your Social Search results?

Related posts:

1. Google Social Search: Are You in Your Target Audiences’ Social Circles?
2. Pew Research News Survey: Findings on Search Engines, Social Networks and Twitter
3. Do Google’s Expanded Domain Results Apply to News and Video Listings?

For my presentation on Twitter Marketing Tactics at SMX West this week I wanted to get a sense of just how much traffic Twitter is driving to major news sites. So I conducted an informal poll of 10 US newspaper and magazine sites that Define works with or I am friendly with.

The surveyed group included a mix of sites covering general and breaking news as well as specific topics such as lifestyle, sports or entertainment. Most organizations prefer to keep their figures private so I’m not able to share the actual sites but they are all well-known brands. I looked at referral data for 2008, 2009 and 2010 to-date and for comparison also included Facebook and Digg.

So what percentage of total site traffic came from Twitter and the other social sites? Here are the group averages:

To-date in 2010 Twitter represents an average of 0.7% of total site traffic.

10 newspaper and magazines sites is not a sufficient sample so take this survey for what it is, but the data does provide a rough idea of what major publishers are experiencing. Among the surveyed sites the highest Twitter percentage was 2.9% but the majority fell below 1%. The highs for Facebook and Digg were 2% and 7.2% respectively. The Digg percentages varied the most with straight news sites faring best.

Some notes:

• While all of the surveyed sites have some form of social media strategy none of them are doing as much as they could be. So these figures represent the experiences of typical news sites, not ones that have fully dialed in SMM.
• Despite the low percentages, to-date this year Twitter and Facebook are top 25 referrers for all of the sites and top 10 referrers for most. It is interesting that a top 10 referrer can represent such a small percentage of total site traffic. But since total monthly traffic for most of the group is in the millions, tens of millions or more those small percentages do represent substantial numbers. And if social media is bringing in traffic that the sites might not have otherwise received that’s a nice bump.
• Well-established brands still get a large portion of their traffic via direct navigation. Among the sites surveyed the figures ranged from 30-60%. Partnerships with other large content sites and cross-network promotions were another major driver.
• Natural search engine referrals ranged from about 10% to over 40% and Google.com was the #1 or #2 referring domain for nearly every site. So despite all the attention that social media deservedly gets, search is still its daddy.
• It is interesting that Digg is trending down this year. Not every site in the group was a natural fit for Digg and we are still in Q1 2010 so it is difficult to draw any strong conclusions. But even among the sites that do very well in Digg the numbers have dropped.

REQUEST:

I’d like to expand the size of the survey group, so if any newspaper or magazine professionals out there are willing to share their percentages it will be much appreciated. You can contact me via this form or direct message me on Twitter. Your anonymity will be maintained. Alternatively if anyone is willing to share their figures publicly please leave a comment below. Thanks!

Related posts:

1. Publisher Survey: Reddit Traffic Way Up, Digg Way Down
2. Social Media Visitors More Loyal But Still a Very Small Percentage of Site Traffic
3. Pew Research News Survey: Findings on Search Engines, Social Networks and Twitter

In working on my presentation for the Twitter Marketing Tactics session at SMX West next week I’ve been looking at the various types of share and retweet buttons used on news sites.

I’m partial to the Tweetmeme button although displaying the number of tweets is a double-edged sword. It looks great when there are a lot of retweets; when there aren’t many it can weaken user perceptions of the content.

But regardless of which tool is used the formatting of the tweet text is something that not every site is making the most of.

When users click a retweet button they expect to see something along the lines of:

RT @[brand] [headline] [URL]

That exact format does not need to be followed but you want to minimize the work that users need to do before sending out the tweet. You also want to guide them toward using compelling text that will encourage further retweeting.

Some tools automatically utilize the page’s title tag instead of the headline which can add unnecessary phrases to the tweet and force users to clean it up before sending.

In other cases no headline or descriptive text is provided, as in this example from Time:

On this Silicon Alley Insider article clicking the Twitter link in the share toolbar brings up nothing but the full length URL, which is interesting because a shortened bit.ly URL is also displayed in the toolbar:

If users click the “Share” link on that same toolbar they are shown a second Twitter link which produces this tweet:

The problem here is that there is no branding for Silicon Alley Insider and users are less likely to click through when they don’t know the source. Also since SAI opted to use all caps in this particular headline and title tag the resulting tweet comes off like shouting.

Finally, don’t forget to include the URL as Newsweek did on this page:

That one is probably a technical glitch, but it’s a big one.

Related posts:

1. 10 Practical Twitter Tips for Publishers
2. Should Browsers Display Only Canonical URLs to Users?
3. Does Google Freshness Update Make Online Reputation Management More Difficult?

Google Buzz has certainly gotten a lot of attention in the past week for privacy concerns, suggestions for improvements and its “Code Red” push to get things right. At this early stage how strong are the marketing opportunities for news sites?

Sharing and discussing content is a key component of Google Buzz so it’s a natural fit for article promotion and audience development. At a minimum news sites should set up an official profile and experiment with “buzz this” buttons on their templates.

Mashable was one of the first to set up a branded profile and they’ve done well in attracting more than 18K followers to date, although at least for now they are not choosing to follow their audience back:

Despite this their followers are actively engaging with the content; many Mashable submissions are getting a decent number of “likes” and comments:

I wouldn’t expect this to be driving significant traffic yet but as Google Buzz adoption and usage grows the traffic will grow with it.

To what degree that happens depends on how well Google does at improving the interface and functionality. Outside of the privacy issues, most of the current criticism lies with the fact that Buzz is simply too busy and overwhelming. Adding more filtering and organization options will help, and continuing to (safely and appropriately) tie it with Gmail will give Buzz a major leg up on services like Friendfeed that never made it mainstream.

But will it ever catch up with Facebook? That’s a much tougher road because Facebook has done a great job of gaining adoption across a wide range of demographics. And while there are many improvements that could be made to the interface, Facebook Pages offer a clean, simple way for news sites to promote their content and interact with readers. Facebook itself is making a push to get users to create personalized news channels that benefit both users and news sites.

So at least for now Facebook is the much stronger play.

Related posts:

1. Facebook Pages: Which News Sites Get the Most Engagement?
2. Which News Sites Have the Most Valuable Facebook Pages?
3. News Sites Not Making Much Use of Static FBML on Facebook Pages

Now that Foursquare is all the rage (or the bane of existence if you don’t like all those check-in and badge tweets invading your Twitter stream) news sites are looking at how best to leverage location-based social networks.

The recent partnership between Foursquare and Canada’s Metro is a good early example of the potential that exists. Metro will provide Foursquare with location-specific editorial content such as reviews, tips and articles on points of interest.

While the most natural opportunities for publishers will be tied to current news and information, there are also some compelling things that could be done with historical content.

I’d love to see a partnership between The New York Times and Foursquare. With content in the NYT Article Archive dating back to 1851, there is a world of fascinating stories that could be shared.

Imagine coming across Cooper Union in Manhattan and getting to read an article on Abraham Lincoln’s campaign speech there in 1860. Or walking past a nondescript building and learning that it was once the scene of a notorious crime or a landmark club. Not from a recent Wikipedia entry; from actual news coverage from that time.

I bet that nearly every location in Manhattan has been in the news at some point in the last 159 years. Foursquare and the NYT could bring that history to users in a powerful, personal way.

The NYT could also just build this functionality into their own mobile apps, but partnerships offer greater cross-promotional and audience development opportunities.

That’s just one idea. What else can news sites do with Foursquare and other forms of location-based social media?

UPDATE:
A few days after I posted this The New York Times and Foursquare launched partnership for the Winter Olympics. Foursquare users in Vancouver will have access to reviews, tips and recommendations provided by NYT travel and entertainment writers. While different from my archive idea, this is a great example of location-based opportunities for news sites. Check out The New York Times page on Foursquare to see it in action.

Related posts:

1. New York Times Plans to Implement Permanent Redirects on IHT.com URLs
2. Top 10 Reasons The New York Times is Really Putting up a Paywall
3. The Daily Show Visits The New York Times

A major newspaper is about to undergo another dreaded round of layoffs. After the first wave of buyouts, a tough choice has to be made been two journalists of equal talent and seniority. One journalist has a large following and active presence on several social media sites. The other does not. Who offers more value to their organization?

While things are not that simple, the fact is that being social media savvy is becoming an increasingly important part of a reporter’s skill set.

In developing social media strategies for news sites, marketing typically takes the lead on the audience development and content promotion aspects, while the editorial staff focuses more on using social media for sourcing, identifying trends, coming up with story ideas, etc. But there is actually a lot of overlap between the two groups.

Take content promotion. Who would readers rather interact with about a particular story – someone from marketing or the reporter who wrote the article?

A couple weeks ago Tom Foremski and Todd Defren looked at the question of whether or not PR firms could or should use their ability to drive exposure and traffic through social media as a carrot in media pitches. A similar question could be asked of news organizations. Could the strength of journalists’ social media presence impact their ability to get assignments? Will editors favor those who will bring greater exposure to the piece and the organization through their social networks?

That might be taking it too far, but there is no doubt that social media blurs the lines between marketing and editorial and offers a number of new ways to interact with audiences. News organizations that take advantage of these opportunities are putting themselves in a position to succeed.

This blurring benefits the journalists too. In an era where “journalist job security” is becoming an oxymoron, having a strong social media presence makes reporters less expendable and more marketable should they need to find new work.

So what should journalists do? At The Future Journalist session last night in New York, Sree Sreenivasan and Vadim Lavrusik talked about the skills and qualities that media professionals now need to possess. I wasn’t able to attend, but the powerpoint and the syllabus for Professor Sreenivasan’s “Social-media Skills for Journalists” course offer some insights into where they see things heading.

The bottom line: The ways that people consume news and define the “news media” are rapidly changing, and the role of the journalist is evolving with those changes. Journalists who are active in social media bring more value to their news organizations and strengthen their own job security.

Related posts:

1. Journalist Social Media Usage Increases, Concerns About Reliability of Information
2. Fewer PR Organizations Plan to Increase Focus on SEO and Social Media in 2011
3. Social Media News Releases Get 3x More Media Coverage

So the Indianapolis Colts and New Orleans Saints will meet in Miami for Super Bowl XLIV. NFL analysts and sports writers now have two weeks to dissect the matchup, talk about players and schemes and come up with good storylines. But I’m here to look at what really matters – which team has more reach via social media?

Now we all know that social media isn’t a numbers game. It’s not just about reach, it’s about making the most of your connections. Furthermore it’s not possible to fully quantify reach across all social media especially since that brings up the discussion of what should or shouldn’t be considered “social media.” So I’m going to gloss over all of that and just look at four things, one for each quarter in the Super Bowl.

1st Quarter: Blog mentions
Two days after the conference championships which team is being blogged about more?

Google Blog Search has 519,933 total results for “Indianapolis Colts” and 20,776 in the past week. For “New Orleans Saints” it’s 726,855 total and 31,215 in the past week.

On Icerocket the Colts have 24,526 total / 2,466 past week, and the Saints have 29,603 total / 3,666 past week.

And Technorati is showing 4,973 posts related to the Colts and 6,178 for the Saints.

Advantage: SAINTS

_________________

2nd Quarter: Digg
Ok, which team has seen the most activity on Digg? According to Digg’s search tool 1,549 Colts articles have been submitted with only eight being promoted to the front page and three receiving more than 500 diggs. That compares with 1,645 articles submitted, 11 promoted and two with 500+ diggs for the Saints.

Advantage: SAINTS

…At the half, the Saints head into the locker room ahead. Can Peyton Manning and the Colts pull out another come from behind victory?

_________________

3rd Quarter: Facebook
Facebook offers one of the best ways for teams to engage with their fan base, so which team is making the most of it? As of today the Colts’ official Facebook page has 249,481 fans and their wall posts are getting a good amount of “likes” and comments. But from what I can see, and I searched with both Facebook and Google, the Saints do not have an official page. There are several unofficial pages, the largest one with 368,365 fans, but since the Saints appear to be missing the opportunity to engage Facebook users in an official capacity this is a major fumble.

Advantage: COLTS

_________________

4th Quarter: Twitter
It gets worse on Twitter – from what I can see neither team has an official profile. So here we’ve got the equivalent of one team throwing an interception and then the other giving it right back.

There are several unofficial Twitter profiles for each team run by fans and media sites but I could not find any official accounts. @NOScom comes close for the Saints, but this appears to be run by the people managing the team’s website not the team itself. (Please correct me if I’m wrong).

[UPDATE: @NOScom has since been taken down, replaced by the official Twitter profile. But at the time of Super Bowl XLIV that was not the case.]

Too bad the teams aren’t choosing to directly engage their fans via Twitter.

How about the players? Twitter-athletes.com currently lists profiles for six Colts players and 15 Saints players. Plus I suppose the Saints can count Kim Kardashian as a “spokesperson” of sorts.

So the Saints have a small edge here but without an official presence from either team I’m calling this quarter a tie.

Advantage: NONE

_________________

WINNER:

Despite what looked like a Colts comeback, after a poor 4th quarter by both teams the winner of the Social Media Super Bowl is:

THE NEW ORLEANS SAINTS

It’ll be interesting to see how these figures increase as the hype builds over the next couple of weeks. Hopefully we’ll see some creative use of social media by both the teams and some of the players. And good luck to both teams in Super Bowl XLIV.

P.S. Vikings fans, I feel your pain. You had it.

Photo credit: Steven Snodgrass (it’s a Creative Commons photo on Flickr, but I couldn’t get WordPress to link to it directly above).

Related posts:

1. Super Bowl XLV: Packers and Steelers Battle it Out on Twitter
2. The Most Popular NFL Teams on Twitter and Facebook: 2010 Season
3. The Most Popular NFL Teams on Twitter and Facebook

Want to use your Facebook Page to build out your mailing list? Alicia Keys knows how to do it.

Users who go to the “Sign Up” tab on her Facebook Page get a personal appeal from Alicia Keys herself, extolling the virtues of her mailing list. Here’s how the video appears on the sign-up form (watch it here):

I have no idea what kind of following she’s built up but this direct, multimedia approach is certainly increasing the conversion rate on the form. Users who sign up see a second video with a thank you message from Keys.

Now not every business will have as engaging a representative but that does not mean a personal video appeal isn’t applicable beyond celebrity. The key takeaway: the more ways you can bring your Facebook Pages to life, the better.

I noticed that in addition to the email list users can sign up for text and voice updates via mobile phone. Perhaps for that Alicia Keys should adopt the same style as she did in her Saturday Night Live digital short:

Just saying.

Related posts:

1. Videos in Press Releases are Cool – If They Provide Meaningful Content
2. Newsweek’s Tim Geithner Interview Live on Facebook: Don’t Forget to Link to the Video Afterwards
3. JVC Facebook Page Sweepstakes a Big Success. But Does it Violate Facebook Guidelines?

NBA players, like many professional athletes, have taken social media by storm but what about their teams? Fans love hearing directly from players but they also identify strongly with the teams themselves. Twitter and Facebook offer a great opportunity for NBA teams to connect with their fans in a more personal, interactive way. So which NBA teams have the largest following on Twitter and Facebook and who is making the most of their presence?

I got good response when I looked at the most popular NFL teams on Facebook and Twitter back in November so today I thought I’d do the same for the NBA.

In the table below the 30 NBA teams are ranked by total followers/fans on their official Twitter accounts and Facebook pages. I realize these figures change quickly but the snapshot is useful for comparison.

The Lakers and Magic are well ahead in terms of total following, which isn’t surprising considering the popularity of the two teams and their stars and the fact that both teams were in the Finals last year.

While a number of smaller markets and weaker teams are at the bottom of the list I didn’t expect to see the Miami Heat down there. They are competitive on Twitter in terms of reach but their lack of a real presence on Facebook sent them down to #28. It doesn’t look like they even have an official page on Facebook; the one with 599 followers was the best that I could find.

But while building up followers is great it’s what you do with that following that really matters.

So what should NBA teams be doing on Twitter and Facebook? The most important thing is to communicate with the fans, plain and simple. Let them know what’s going on with the team and more importantly LISTEN to what they have to say.

Beyond that there’s no right or wrong answer but teams will certainly get a lot more traction by being compelling and interactive. Facebook pages offer a better opportunity for expanded content and extended conversations but there’s a lot you can do with Twitter too.

A simple thing that many teams do is providing in-game updates via Twitter. As a Bulls fan living outside of Chicago I don’t get to watch many games but I feel connected to the team when I see a scoring update:

Here are a few other things NBA teams should think about:

• Dish: offer insights and information that fans can’t get anywhere else
• Go behind the scenes: give them sense of what the organization is really like
• Humanize: not just the players, let them get to know the entire organization
• Speaking of players: the more they are involved with the team’s official social media activities, the less likely they’ll be to “go rogue” and say something regrettable on their own profiles
• Multimedia: photos and video bring sports content to life, and social media users love to share them
• Contests and promotions: tickets, gear, autographs, chances to meet players – you can quickly build buzz by giving away the good stuff
• Tie it to the community: let fans see that the team cares about the city and what’s going on there

Now if we could only get the NBA to change the first round playoff series back to five games…

Related posts:

1. The Most Popular NFL Teams on Twitter and Facebook
2. The Most Popular MLB Teams on Twitter and Facebook
3. Which NBA Teams Have Seen the Most Growth on Twitter and Facebook?

Awareness of Newsweek’s Tumblr site has been increasing of late. It’s actually been around for a while but Newsweek seems to have been giving it more attention over the past few months.

I like it. The layout is clean and simple, the content is interesting and Newsweek is mixing in plenty of items from other sources. That’s critical for giving the site stand-alone value as opposed to just being a feeder site to Newsweek.com.

In looking through the site though one thing stands out: nearly every item has no comments or reactions:

That seems odd but it’s not just a holiday season slowdown. I went back several months and it’s not easy to find items that have gotten comments. I don’t have any data on what kind of traffic the Tumblr site is getting but either it is fairly low or visitors simply aren’t starting discussions there.

To investigate further I did a quick check for Twitter activity. I didn’t find any shared newsweek.tumblr.com URLs through Bit.ly search and TweetMeme isn’t registering any recent activity:

A search right from Twitter doesn’t bring up much but there are some nice comments about the site itself:

So based on just this quick look it doesn’t seem like Newsweek is getting a lot of engagement with its Tumblr site yet. Some visitors are likely clicking through to the full articles on Newsweek.com and then commenting there and/or sharing the newsweek.com URLs which is also a good thing. But it would be nice to see the Tumblr site have a more interactive feel.

In terms of search engine visibility, as of today the Tumblr site is #9 in my Google results for “Newsweek” so it’s working its way up. Looks like they need to adjust the META description tag on their home page though:

UPDATE:
FishbowlNY did a good interview with Mark Coatney, the editor who is responsible for Newsweek’s Tumblr.

Related posts:

1. Newsweek’s Tim Geithner Interview Live on Facebook: Don’t Forget to Link to the Video Afterwards
2. A Closer Look at Fan Engagement on the Fox News Facebook Page
3. Facebook Pages: Which News Sites Get the Most Engagement?

Yesterday Facebook shared its Top Status Trends of 2009, providing insight into what terms most commonly occurred in users’ status updates. Last week Twitter gave us their Top Twitter Trends of 2009 for categories like news events, people, movies, etc. And throughout December we’ve gotten top 2009 searches lists from Google, Yahoo, Bing and Ask.

Data like this is interesting to check out and it can provide useful insights for marketers and content producers in getting a better understanding of user interest and activities in both search and social media.

But while you’re going through this year’s top trends don’t forget to apply the same practice to your own sites. Getting a clear understanding of how your target audiences locate and interact with your content and engage with your brand will give you actionable data to use next year and beyond

Things that news and content sites should look at include:

1. What terms and content types brought in the most search engine referral traffic?
2. What were your top referrers/trends in Web search, news search, image search, blog search and video search?
3. What sections, special features, individual articles, etc. were most (and least) popular?
4. What were your top internal search queries for the year?
5. What types of content generated the most social media sharing and inbound links?
6. Which social media sites brought in the most traffic and links, and how well represented are you in each?
7. Which Twitter profiles built up the most followers and engagement? (main profiles, personas, individual staff members, etc).
8. What types of stories got the most retweets?
9. What generated the most “likes” and comments on your Facebook Page?
10. What types of stories gained traction (or were buried) on social news sites like Digg and Reddit?

There is a lot more that you can look at but hopefully these 10 will get you pointed in the right direction. And while I focused on editorial sites the same general approach works for e-commerce, B2B and any other category.

Understanding user behavior in 2009 helps you to grow your audience or customer base and increase engagement in 2010.

Related posts:

1. Google Trends Graphs No Longer Embedded in Search Results?
2. My Top 10 Posts of 2009 on News Media, SEO and Social Media
3. Free Tools for Monitoring Hot Search Trends

UPDATE: There is a a newer post on this topic here: The Most Popular NFL Teams on Twitter and Facebook: 2010 Season

The role of social media in professional sports is getting a lot of attention these days, unfortunately mostly in the form of teams and leagues trying to clamp down on it or players making mistakes with it.

Despite this, fans are passionately supporting and discussing their teams through a range of social media outlets, in particular Twitter and Facebook. Since we’re in the heart of football season, I thought I’d take a look at which NFL teams have the largest following on both sites.

In the table below the 32 NFL teams are ranked by the total number of followers/fans on their official Twitter accounts and Facebook pages. These figures obviously change quickly but this current snapshot is useful for comparison.

Interestingly, despite no official presence on Twitter the Pittsburgh Steelers have the largest reach thanks to their large number of Facebook fans. I was also surprised that the Dallas Cowboys do not have an official Facebook page as they would certainly attract a significant number of fans.

I had expected all the teams to have more followers on Twitter. The San Diego Chargers lead the league with only 28K followers. (UPDATE: Thanks to Mike Blewitt for noticing that it is actually the New England Patriots that have the most Twitter followers at 30K+).

The New Orleans Saints and New York Giants are currently at the bottom of the social media heap with no official presence on either Twitter or Facebook. However an unofficial Saints page is very popular on Facebook with 163,760 fans.

Capturing data on only “official” accounts and pages was actually somewhat difficult (I welcome corrections if I’ve missed any). Twitter is a wild west for NFL teams right now – there are far more unofficial accounts, and even those that that claim to be official aren’t always actually so. Twitter should consider extending its “verified accounts” to team sites as well. On Facebook the official team pages are easier to identify, but they often face competition from other pages created by fans or local media. For several teams the unofficial pages have significantly more fans.

So the main takeaway is that NFL teams need to take better control of their social media presence and come up with more a cohesive engagement strategy. NFL fans are among the most passionate, so there is a great opportunity to leverage their loyalty and enthusiasm and further extend the relationships.

Related posts:

1. The Most Popular NFL Teams on Twitter and Facebook: 2010 Season
2. The Most Popular NBA Teams on Twitter and Facebook
3. The Most Popular MLB Teams on Twitter and Facebook

While many companies now have some form of presence on Twitter, how well are they utilizing it? According to a new study by Weber Shandwick, when it comes to the Fortune 100 the answer is not so well.

Among the Fortune 100 Twitter accounts analyzed by Weber Shandwick 53% did not convey any personality, tone or voice and 15% were either inactive or placeholders:

Additionally, 26% of the accounts were primarily used for a one-way flow of information that offered no engagement with followers and only 9% of the accounts focused on customer service:

The end result for the Fortune 100? No so many tweets and understandably not so many followers:

As I covered in my Diversified Twitter Strategies for News Sites post there’s no “right” way to utilize Twitter. Every company needs to come up with its own customized strategy that fits its corporate culture while meeting the needs of its customer base. But since a single Twitter account cannot be all things to all people it is important for companies to experiment with a diversified approach.

Corporations also need to make sure that the desire to play it safe does not rob their Twitter efforts of creativity. If you are not providing value to your followers (by being some combination of informative, interesting, engaging, insightful, valueable, etc.) you are going to lose your audience and the resulting opportunities from having that relationship.

Related posts:

1. The Most Popular NFL Teams on Twitter and Facebook
2. An Early Look at News Media Twitter Lists: Not Much Traction
3. Super Bowl XLV: Packers and Steelers Battle it Out on Twitter

With all the buzz about Twitter Lists I thought I’d take a look at how some major news sites are doing so far with their own Lists.

Looking at selection of Twitter accounts from 30 31 news sites, I checked the number of Lists that have been created and how many followers each has attracted to-date. These figures will change quite a bit in the weeks and months to come, but I wanted to capture an initial snapshot. (Note: currently Twitter allows users to create a maximum of 20 Lists.)

As can be seen it is still early days for both Twitter List creation and user adoption.

As of today half of the news sites have not created any Lists, and only four sites have more than 10. The average number of followers is still very low, and all of the Lists have less than 1,000 followers (many of them significantly less). The Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, The New York Times and The Huffington Post have done the most so far with List development.

It will be interesting to see how things evolve over time.

Related posts:

1. My Top 10 Posts of 2009 on News Media, SEO and Social Media
2. News Sites on Twitter: Who is Making the Most Impact?
3. Diversified Twitter Strategies for News Sites

This week Google unveiled Google Social Search, an opt-in feature that provides additional search results with content from a user’s “social circle” of friends and trusted sources. A limited number of listings will appear at the bottom of the main search result pages or users can drill down to see more extensive listings:

Currently a social circle is determined by the social media accounts linked from a user’s Google Profile, the feeds they subscribe to in Google Reader and their Google chat and Gmail contacts. So if you link to your Twitter account on your Google profile the people you’re following on Twitter become part of your social circle. The same goes for the sites and blogs you follow via Google Reader.

It’s still an experimental feature in Google Labs and users have to be signed into their Google account to use it so it’s safe to say that adoption of Social Search will be slow. But in case in takes off the questions businesses should be asking themselves now are: Are we in our target audiences’ social circles? If not how do we get there?

For news and content sites the task is fairly straightforward as lots of users are already subscribed to their RSS feeds, Twitter accounts, Facebook Pages, etc. Such sites also produce new content every day, so there are plenty of things that Google can pull from in creating social results. Other types of businesses will have to be more creative, which is where smart content marketing and social media strategies come into play.

I don’t believe it is currently possible for businesses to create Google Profiles in the same way that they can create Facebook Pages but the individual(s) responsible for their social media outreach can build up social circles through their own Profiles, just like they do in a variety of social media outlets.

There have been many Google features over the years that never gained traction – a few years ago Subscribed Links offered a similar opportunity for content sites but never found mainstream adoption. But Social Search has a better chance of making it, so it’s a good idea to start developing a strategy for it now.

Related posts:

1. Pew Research News Survey: Findings on Search Engines, Social Networks and Twitter
2. Does Google Want Brands in Your Social Circle?
3. Search Marketing Dwarfs Social Media in Interactive Marketing Budgets

Yesterday posts from eMarketer and Marketing Pilgrim called my attention to some interesting social media statistics put out by advertising network Chitika.

First, a study of 33 million unique users from Chitika’s network in September showed that visitors coming from Facebook and Digg were more loyal than those coming from the three major search engines and Twitter. Chitika defined “loyal” visitors as those who came to a site four or more times in the same week:

Facebook leading the pack isn’t much of a surprise since a high percentage of search engine referral traffic is “one and done” – searchers find what they were looking for and then move on. But I wouldn’t have expected Digg to be a strong second, since the social news site is known for sending large spikes of visitors that quickly scan the page and then move on.

It’s also important to note that while search engine visitors may be less loyal their volume is much greater, especially visitors from Google. Another Chitika study showed that social media represented only 0.55% of total referrals across their network, compared to nearly 98% for search engines:

This highlights the fact that there is more to SEO than just increasing search engine referral traffic; it is essential to convert those visitors once they arrive. In publishing that typically means additional page views and time on site, RSS and e-mail newsletter subscriptions, user account and on-site community sign-ups, etc.

I’d also like to point out that for major media sites search engine referral traffic is typically a much smaller percentage than Chitika’s network is receiving. According to a Hitwise US News & Media Report back in 2007 on average search engine referrals represent about 23% of traffic to print media sites. (Side note: Hitwise, you’re overdue for an updated version of that report!). That’s a pretty good figure considering that direct navigation still represents the lion’s share of traffic to newspaper and magazine sites. For many news sites (especially poorly optimized ones) search engine referrals are still considerably below 20% of total traffic.

As for social media traffic, while still quite small those figures are definitely trending up strongly for news and content sites especially when looked at year-over-year. Even just a year ago the majority of news sites were barely dabbling with things like Twitter – now most have Twitter mania.

For a social media presentation at the Publishing Business Conference earlier this year I surveyed 12 major magazine sites that Define works with, and found that in 2008 social media referrals ranged anywhere from 0.6% to 18% of total site traffic, the average being between 1-3%. This is more in line with the figures for Chitika’s network:

(Click on the image above to see the full size slide)

And while the figures for specific social media sites vary from site to site, total social media referral traffic is up considerably in 2009 to-date.

Related posts:

1. Hitwise Reports News and Media’s Share of Search-Referred Traffic Declining
2. Survey: Twitter Less than 1% of Traffic to Newspapers and Magazines; Facebook 1%
3. My Top Posts of 2010 on SEO, PR and Social Media for News and Sports

My post on Facebook Page engagement for news sites has drawn some interest in the fact that Fox News averages many more “likes” and comments per update than any other news site despite having significantly fewer fans than CNN, NPR or The New York Times. So I thought I’d take a closer look at what Fox News is doing on its Facebook Page as well as some engagement examples.

After reviewing several days’ worth of activity I have to say that nearly anything Fox News posts to its page ends up getting a decent amount of likes and comments from fans. Even more mundane news items still manage to spark a round of commenting. So it seems to me that it is the strong, passionate opinions of the fans themselves more than anything specific that Fox News is doing

That said Fox News does attempt to solicit fan opinions, particularly on more controversial topics, which certainly helps to encourage participation:

Referencing political figures that are known to generate strong reactions from their user base is also working for them:

As for the type and quality of comments being posted, I’ll share this sampling of today’s comments on Barak Obama’s address to the UN General Assembly and let you make your own assessment:

Related posts:

1. Facebook Pages: Which News Sites Get the Most Engagement?
2. NBA Playoff Teams Ranked by Facebook Page Engagement
3. News Organizations on Google+: Which Pages Get the Most Engagement?

Now that the improved Facebook Pages have been around for a while I wanted to check the level of engagement that major news sites are achieving with them.

Most news sites have an official Facebook Page now, with the typical approach being to add a daily stream of links to new content while promoting site features, apps, feeds, etc. in the sidebars and subpages. Some news sites are supplementing content links with direct questions and comments to users, but this does not appear to be happening in any significant volume.

Using a sampling of 15 16 news sites, I captured the total number of fans on their Facebook Pages as of today. To judge user engagement and activity, I also calculated the average number of “likes” and comments that the last 10 updates/links to each page received.

CNN currently has the most fans, with The New York Times not too far beyond. Fox News and The Economist have crossed six figures, after which the figures start dropping quickly.

Fox News is strongly ahead in terms of fan engagement and activity – their like and comment numbers are significantly greater than any of the other sites. This is not surprising based on the reactions that Fox News reporting tends to generate from both sides of the political fence.

A couple of notes: The Guardian’s page has only 4 updates total, so their averages are based on a smaller selection. The Daily Telegraph has N/A for likes and comments because they do not appear to posting any updates or links at this time.

UPDATE:
After seeing Matt Gallivan’s comment I added NPR to the table today. They are indeed #2 in terms of total fans (among the group of news sites that I looked at). Their fan engagement figures also rank high.

Related posts:

1. News Organizations on Google+: Which Pages Get the Most Engagement?
2. Which News Sites Get the Most Social Media Engagement?
3. Which News Sites Have the Most Valuable Facebook Pages?

This week’s Sysomos study of the 5% most active users on Twitter includes a list of the top 25 users (with more than 50,000 followers) ranked by average tweets per day.

@foxnews tops the list averaging 135.85 tweets per day. @nytimes and @time also made the top 25, averaging 39.25 and 29.22 tweets respectively.

Is 135.85 tweets a day too much? It certainly seems excessive, but the 99,703 followers of @foxnews don’t seem to think so.

While I wouldn’t go to that extreme, it does emphasize the point that just like everyone else, news organizations can use Twitter however they see fit, and Twitter users can choose to follow or not follow them accordingly.

With this in mind, it is beneficial for news and content sites to take a diversified approach to Twitter, offering a range options for users to subscribe to. While the variations are limitless, the main opportunities include:

• Content Broadcasting – this is essentially RSS feeds on Twitter, used for simply pushing out links to new content. A main profile can be set up as well as separate profiles for site sections or specific topics. While the opportunity for engagement is limited, these types of accounts do tend to attract large numbers of followers and the links do get retweeted. So there’s no reason not to set up them up as a foundation building step.
• Brand Ambassador / Personality – a person or persona that officially represents the company on Twitter. It’s a more humanized approach that offers much greater opportunity for direct engagement with users. Some sites give this responsibility to a specific individual, others create a persona – @ColonelTribune is good example of this approach. The advantage of using a persona is that multiple people can share the work, and it’s easier to make a transition when the people behind it move on.
• Individual Journalists and Bloggers – participation by the editorial staff offers a great way to engage users on a more specific, personal level. Letting readers “behind the curtain” by sharing insights into the story development process, soliciting input and providing previews or exclusive tidbits (such as additional information that didn’t make it into a particular article) is a great way to build relationships and gain a loyal following. There should certainly be policies in place to prevent missteps in this area, but there is a big upside to encouraging editorial participation.

Of course the PR and marketing staff should also play an active role in your Twitter strategy, and company employees of all kinds should be considered in the overall social media plan. But for the purposes of sharing news content and interacting with users, these three approaches offer a great start for news organizations looking to get more traction from Twitter.

Related posts:

1. News Sites on Twitter: Who is Making the Most Impact?
2. Real-time Search Optimization for News Sites
3. An Early Look at News Media Twitter Lists: Not Much Traction

It’s no secret that mainstream news sites are experiencing increased exposure on social news sites like Digg. Back in March Soshable noted that 46% of the Digg front page is controlled by 50 websites.

Major news sites have seen strong increases in social media referral traffic over the past couple years, and Digg continues to be among the top referrers. But I was curious what kind of push back some of these sites might be experiencing from Digg users.

Using di66.net’s list of the top sources in Digg in the past 30 days, I pulled out 22 general news sites from the top 100 or so sources. Then using Digg’s advanced search I checked how many submissions from each domain had been buried.

CNN wins the prize for the most buried news site, with Yahoo News not too far behind:

Of course some news sites have a lot more content submitted to Digg than others, so it stands to reason that sites with more submissions will have more buries. So I also looked up the total submissions for each, and ranked the news sites by percentage of submissions that were buried.

CNN and Yahoo News are still the most buried news sites by percentage of content, but ABC News and MSNBC are pretty close:

Going back to the di66.net list of top Digg sources, out of the 22 news sites I pulled out, CNN was the 10th most popular source and Yahoo News was 9th. So their bury rankings are probably higher than they should be. By contrast Telegraph.co.uk was the 2nd most popular source but it ranks 19th in bury percentage in this group. BBC News was the most popular source out of the 22; its bury percentage is right in the middle at #11.

It should also be noted that what’s most important is social news success is quality of content and user appeal, not to mention who the submitter is. But it does appear that some major news sites are more likely to be buried than others.

Related posts:

1. News Sites on the New Digg: Who is Active, Who is Gaining Followers?
2. Which News Sites Get the Most Social Media Engagement?
3. My Top 10 Posts of 2009 on News Media, SEO and Social Media