Sweden is the 4th most socially devoted country on Facebook

Socialbakers have introduced a concept called “socially devoted“, aiming to describe brands and pages on Facebook that excel in fan engagement and social customer care. That same label has now been applied on a country basis to see what countries are the most socially devoted. It turns out that Guatemala is ranked first in Q1, 2013, with an average Response Rate of 93.54% for local brand pages.

Norway is ranked second, followed by the Netherlands and Sweden in fourth place. The complete Top 25 country rankings, based on percentage of answered questions, can be found below:

 

Norwegian paper offers online version without info from mass murder trial

The trial against the Norwegian mass murderer Anders Behring Breivik started today and the media coverage, especially in Norway, is massive. The online news sites are filled with interviews, articles, photos and video coverage. The events that took place on July 22 this year in Oslo and Utøya were nothing short of horrific. For many people in Norway, there may of course be a number of reasons why you would not want to read the detailed reports from the trial, including photos and videos of the murderer. Dagbladet.no solved that issue by offering a “trial free” button, i. e. a version of the site that is stripped from any articles of the murder trial. By clicking the button “front page without the July 22 event” you get a completely different front page.

Here are the screen shots of the regular site and the special version.

Normal first page of site Special version of front page

2.5 million LinkedIn members in the Nordic countries

The social network LinkedIn has grown to more than 135 million members and there are now 2.5 million members in the Nordic countries, according to statistics from Socialbakers.com. Sweden has the highest number of users, 862,000, but the highest penetration can be found in Denmark (14.62%).

linkedin statistics sweden denmark norway finland

More Americans find jobs via Facebook than LinkedIn
With its career focus, LinkedIn is often mentioned as an important social network for job hunting and recruiting. New statistics show, however, that more Americans claim to have gotten their current job through Facebook than through LinkedIn: 18.4 million compared to 10.4 million. Either way, social networks are increasingly playing a vital role in connecting the work force with available jobs.

Note: Iceland is not yet included in Socialbakers’ statistics.

Social media behind decrease in Christmas text messages

The last few years it has become quite common to send greetings to friends and family on Christmas Eve via text messages, SMS. But this year telecom operators in Sweden, Norway and Denmark report a significant decrease in the number of messages. In Sweden, the four operators Tre (3), Tele 2, Telia and Telenor distributed a total of 72.5 million text messages on Christmas Eve, down from 76.5 million in 2009. In Norway, Telenor report a decrease with 5 million text messages compared to 2008, this year Norwegian customers sent 17.1 million SMS. The same pattern can be found in Denmark, where Telia report a decrease by 1 million SMS.

The operators claim that the reason behind the lower volumes is an increased use of Facebook and other social media. The conclusion is supported by the fact that data traffic has increased during this Christmas compared to previous years, most likely because customers are taking photos and uploading them to Facebook and other social networks, where they share it with friends.

How to lose 5,000 inlinks per month and alienate bloggers

If you have been blogging a few years, you may have noticed a change in the way other bloggers react to your content. Back then when I started, in 2004 and 2005, all you had to do is write a witty comment to some news story and five other bloggers would link to your post, possibly adding a few views of their own. Nowadays, you can spend weeks on research for a specific blog post and “all you get back” are a number of retweets, and maybe maybe one or two blog links. I’m not saying it’s a bad thing, especially for me who have an old blog with thousands of old links to it, I already have a high page rank. And it’s great that Twitter and Facebook have made it increadibly easy for your thoughts to travel across the web. But it was easier back then to get link love and, since a link is a “vote” on your content in Google, thereby building a good page rank for your blog.

So I will try to more often reward really good blog posts with a link back from my blog, not “only a retweet”.

“Good content deserves more than a retweet.”

Here is a good example that ties in well with the link love theme of this post. Simon Sundén, a great Swedish SEO expert, wrote a story the other day about how one Norwegian daily voluntarily turned down 5,000 natural inlinks per month. In short, Dagbladet.no used to use Twingly to show which blog posts link back to a given article. Since this concept is a win-win for both the paper and the blogger, many Scandinavian news sites have introduced Twingly. The news site gets lots of links and some traffic, while the blogger gets traffic back and some recognition.

What Sundén noticed was that Dagbladet.no stopped using Twingly some time late in 2009 and as you can see from the red columns in the graph below, the effect was that the number of inlinks per month dropped drastically from 5,000-6,000 to a measly 1,000. Meanwhile, competing daily VG.no kept Twingly and has enjoyed a steady level of links from bloggers (see blue columns below).

In the long run, VG.no will probably become a stronger site from a search perspective, compared to Dagbladet.no because bloggers are more likely to link to a similar article on VG.no than on Dagbladet.no.

twingly-inlinks-vg-vs-dagbl

Image credit: Simon Sundén.

Top 10 Twitter Cities in Europe

Twitter Grader analyzes Twitter users’ Location settings and ranks the top countries and cities in the world. Of course, this is a blunt tool since people don’t always reveal their true location and some cities are spelled differently in different languages (Gothenburg vs Göteborg). Nevertheless, it’s still interesting to see the locations with most users. From Twitter Grader’s list of top cities, I’ve created this list of Top Twitter Cities in Europe.

1. London, United Kingdom (over all rank #1)
2. Paris, France (#28)
3. Manchester, United Kingdom (#35)
4. Amsterdam, the Netherlands (#37)
5. Berlin, Germany (#38)
6. Dublin, Ireland (#51)
7. Stockholm, Sweden (#56)
8. Glasgow, United Kingdom (#59)
9. Madrid, Spain (#60)
10. Oslo, Norway (#67)

Footnote: Follow me on Twitter at @kullin

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