September 2012 – Media Culpa

A Facebook Timeline that’s 1,000 years long

Have you added a lot of historical dates to your Facebook timeline? Well, even if you have added dates all the way back to your birth or the year your company was founded, I doubt many can match the timeline of the Tower of London in England. It’s timeline goes back almost 1,000 years, starting in 1066 when the first fortress was being established after the battle of Hastings. Impressive!

Via Social Media Today.

The most retweeted tweet of all time

Yesterday, the NFL reached an agreement with the NFL Referees Association to end an ongoing lockout. Before that agreement was reached, temporary referees were used during the start of the season. But some calls by replacement referees were criticized. After one such questionable decision, Green Bay Packers lost a game on Monday evening, which lead Packers’ guard T.J. Lang to tweet this message.

This tweet has now become one of the most retweeted tweets of all time, currently at close to 100,000 retweets. One older tweet that had thousands of retweets, is the same-sex marriage tweet by Barack Obama that has been retweeted more than 61,000 times. (Update: I forgot about Justin Bieber. Never forget Bieber. As you see below, one of his tweets has 120k RTs).

However, the tweet that is still the most retweeted is this one by Justin Bieber with 120,000 retweets (found via Buzzfeed):

The impact of images on Facebook engagement

The Swedish candy producer Bubs sells a raspberry licorice candy called Hallonlakritsskalle (Raspberry Licorice Head) that is very popular on Facebook. For a while it has been one of the Swedish brands with most fans on Facebook, currently about 360,000. But getting a lot of followers is one thing, getting them engaged in your content is another. The last four months, Hallonlakritsskalle has only posted about one new update per month. On the other hand, those posts generate a lot of likes and comments.

What I wanted to show was how one single creative image can spark a lot of engagement, but also that the engagement is short lived. The image below was posted on Aug 23 and generated about 5,600 likes and 100+ comments. This equals an engagement rate of 1.9% which is good, but not spectacular.

But note that the engagement after the first few days plummeted and is now considerably lower than it was before the post.

Keeping your fans engaged is difficult and one lucky post doesn’t take you far. Apart from being creative and relevant it also requires frequency and perseverance to keep the page going.

The dramatic growth of Instagram – reaches 5 billion twice as fast as Flickr

In just a little more than two years, Instagram has gone from zero to 5 billion shared photos. The popular photo sharing app announced yesterday that it had surpassed 80 million users and 5 billion photos uploaded by its users. As a comparison, it took Flickr 4 years and 7 months to reach 5 billion photos. Instagram has reached that milestone in less than half that time.

Growth in recent months has been fuelled by the release of an Android app, which went live in April 2012.

“The combination of Android and network effects as more people use Instagram mean that we’re able to grow faster now more than ever,” Instagram creator Kevin Systrom told VentureBeat in July.

To illustrate just how fast Instagram has been growing, I made the graph below based on photo ID numbers (up to 550m, when Instagram changed how photos were identified) and official statements (4bn and 5bn).

If you want a graph with the individual data points, click here instead.

Here are the sources for each of the data points in the graph.

For a similar graph of Flickr’s growth from zero to 5 billion photos, see this blog post.

Note: I am @kullin on Instagram if you’d like to follow me.