Study on Online Social Sharing

ShareThis recently releases a new study that looked at online social sharing behaviors. The study looked at ShareThis data which compromised of seven billion sharing signals from over 300 million users across the top 1000 publisher websites. The study found several interesting takeaways:

• Sharing produces an estimated 10% of Internet traffic
• Sharing produces an estimated 31% of referral traffic to sites
• Twitter accounts for 11% of all sharing referral traffic (Facebook 38% & Email 17%) for those that clicked through
• Twitter accounted for 8% (down from12%) in regards to raw sharing.

I also want to mention a recent study, 2011 Search Engine Ranking Factors, that took a look at social metrics that affected search engine rankings. From this study they found that Facebook shares were considered more influential (.28) versus the shared URLs in Tweets (.17). 

Page Level Social Metrics

Twitter Stats 2011 - Pew Internet Study

 Pew Internet released their latest study on Twitter usage called Twitter Update 2011. The study provides some great insight into the demographics of Twitter users. One of the bigger takeaways was that 13% of online adults use Twitter. This was a 16.5% increase over the previous study done in 2010. The study also found that over half of respondents (54%) accessed Twitter from their phone. The biggest growth for any age segment was 25-34 years old. This group grew from 9% in 2010 to 19% in 2011.

Here is a breakdown of the demographics from the study based on the 13% of online adults that use Twitter:

Gender

• Men  / 14% 
• Female / 11%

Age

• 18-29 / 18%
• 30-49 / 14%
• 50-64 / 8%
• 65+ / 6%

Race/Ethnicity

• White, non-Hispanic / 9%
• Black, non-Hispanic / 25%
• Hispanic / 19%

Household Income

• Less than $30,000 / 12%
• $30,000 - $49,999 / 15%
• $50,000 - $74,999 / 12%
• $75,000+ / 15%

Education Level

• High School Grad / 8%
• Some College / 12%
• College+ / 16%

Geographic Location

• Urban / 15%
• Suburban / 14%
• Rural / 7%

How To Find Twitter RSS Feed

Twitter recently removed the RSS feed links on all of their account pages. The move is to push the use of their API instead of using RSS, which is more labor intensive to keep up. I for one was disappointed in this move because the RSS feed was much easier to code for versus the Twitter API. But Twitter did not officially kill the RSS feed for Twitter profiles. There is a little hack that will allow you to access any user's RSS feed.

1. You will need the RSS feed URL structure, http://twitter.com/statuses/user_timeline/0000000.rss
2. Next you will need to locate the Twitter profile number. This number represents the actual position of when you signed up for Twitter. The lower the number the older the account. To find this number you will need to download the Twitter app on your tablet or phone. Once downloaded you will need to navigate to the individual's account profile. Right under their name and Twitter handle you will see a number (i.e. #17,269,569).
3. Replace the 0000000 with this user number (without commas and the # sign).

Twitter iPhone Integration with Next IOS Update

It has been speculated that the next iPhone update will have better Twitter integration. With the soon-to-launch Twitter's own photo sharing service, some are speculating that we will see a "Post to Twitter" for photos. It looks like Apple may add a shortcut menu item to the camera that will allow the user to easily share their photos on Twitter right from their own iPhone.

There is even more speculation that with the oAuth for Direct Messages roll out, that Apple maybe integrating the phone calendar, iTunes music, or even allow for in-app social connectivity. This could potentially allow the iPhone user to send direct message calendar reminders, song recommendations, or game invites to other Twitter followers.