Category: Statistics

Sweden beats Nordic rivals in social media Olympics

The Olympic games in Rio 2016 are engaging large audiences in social media. However, some reports suggest that the volume of interactions in social channels are lower than expected. A survey of US viewers shows that fewer people are following the Olympic Games via social networks than had said they expected to.

But many people are commenting and sharing views on Twitter for example. According to statistics from Socialbakers, the US and Brazil are the countries that most people are tweeting about, followed by India.

Most interactions about Sweden
If we look at Twitter conversations about the Nordic countries, Sweden is clearly in the lead before Denmark (Aug 5 – Aug 16). Almost 100,000 tweets about Sweden and 57,000 about Denmark. There are significantly fewer comments about Norway and Finland. The peak for Sweden came after the women’s football team beat USA in the quarter finals on penalties.

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(click for larger image)

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More statistics on social media at the Olympics can be found here.

Popular hashtags temporarily suspended on Instagram

One of the most common advices on how to get more likes and followers on Instagram is to use popular hashtags on your photos. By doing that, your photos and videos can be discovered by other people than just the ones that follow you.

Instagram removes recent photos from some popular hashtags
But for quite some time, Instagram has had major problems with spam and inappropriate content. Some of the most commonly used hashtags have been flooded with offensive content that do not follow the community guidelines. That can for example be nudity, threats or hate speech.

Instagram’s response to this problem has been to completely remove the “Most Recent” section from the app/site for that hashtag and only show Top Posts. This is done for a limited period.

Some of the top hashtags that have been affected by this problem recently are:

#fun
#swag
#cute
#sun
#sunrise
#sunset
#clouds

cute_hashtag

sunset_hashtag

sunrise_hashtag

sun_hashtag

clouds_hashtag

These are among the most used hashtags and if you use them in order to increase visibility for your photos, there is a real risk that it will not work. Only top posts will be visible under these hashtags and no new users will see your photos.

My advice is that before you tag a photo on Instagram with a popular hashtag, always check if the tag has been temporarily suspended. If not, then it’s ok. But if it has, choose other tags.

To find relevant tags to use you can for example:

  • Find top 100 hashtags on Websta.me
  • Go to the search tab on Instagram and see trending hashtags
  • Visit a hashtag page on Instagram and find up to five related hashtags on that topic

Note: find me on Instagram at @kullin

Top 10 Swedish Instagram accounts

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My favourite photo app Instagram continues to grow and reached 400 million active users per month last fall. Many Swedish brands, celebrities and skilled photographers have been able to build huge followings on Instagram.

The 20 largest Swedish accounts added approximately 5 percent more followers last month (between Dec 4, 2015 and Jan 4, 2016).

18 Instagram accounts now have at least a million followers

You now have to have more than 100,000 followers to be among the top 100 Instagram accounts in Sweden. At least 18 of them have more than a million followers, not bad for a country of less than 10 million people. But then again, the most successful users all have an international audience.

The Swedish brand with most followers is H&M – 11.8 million (global account, they have several local accounts too).

Among individuals, PSG’s Zlatan Ibrahimovic and Swedish Youtuber Felix “Pewdiepie” Kjellberg are in a league of their own. Excluding businesses, the top 10 accounts in Sweden are (data collected on Jan 4, 2016):

  1. Zlatan Ibrahimovic – 10.7 million
  2. Pewdiepie – 6,900,000
  3. Tattoos of Instagram – 3,200,000
  4. Avicii – 3 million
  5. Men with class – 2,700,000
  6. Anna Nyström – 2,100,000
  7. Elsa Hosk – 2 million
  8. Maher Zain – 1,800,000
  9. Rachel “Yoga Girl” Bråthén – 1,700,000
  10. Alesso – 1,600,000

Note: I am @kullin on Instagram

One in ten posts on my social networks are ads

LinkedIn sponsored postOver the last few years most major social networks have introduced some form of advertsing as a revenue source. Even Instagram has now started to insert sponsored posts in the feeds for Swedish users. As social media users transfer from desktop use to mobile use, it becomes more and more important to place ads or sponsored posts in the news feeds instead of in a sidebar on the desktop site.

The more ads that the networks can display, the more revenue they can make. However, if ads become too frequent, users will dislike it and eventually stop using the service. So balancing the number of ads is a delicate task. Too few and you aren’t making as much revenue as you could, too many and users will leave, also lowering your profit.

One in ten posts in my feeds were social ads
So the billion dollar question is, how much ads are users prepared to take? The answer, it seems, could be somewhere around 10%.

LinkedIn new mobile app
LinkedIn just released a major update to its mobile app, making it look a lot like Facebook. What first struck me was how many ads there were in the feed and that they appeared early. The second post in the feed was always sponsored. So I decided to study the ad frequency of the big four social networks.

I looked at the percentage of posts in each feed that was sponsored and found that approximately 10% of all posts were ads. Twitter had a slightly lower share of ads at about 8%. On LinkedIn, Facebook and Instagram, 10% of posts in the feed were ads.

Since I only looked at my own feeds we must not make general conclusions. To do that one would have to look at a much larger statistical sample. However, I find it interesting that all four social networks have about the same share of ads in my feeds and it will be a topic to follow in the coming months to see if the ten percent figure is accurate or not.

Take a look at your own feeds and see if you see the same pattern.

Note: Just to give you an idea of when ads appear in feeds, I looked at 100 posts on Instagram, LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter via their respective mobile (iOS) apps.

Worth noting is that ads stopped appearing on Instagram after 70 posts. Also, ads on LinkedIn appear on the exact same spots in the feed on mobile as on desktop even if I checked several days apart. LinkedIn ads also appear earlier, so after looking at 20 posts you are already exposed to 3 ads. Over 100 posts it still is at 10%.  So to study this topic in more detail you need to know how far back users normally scroll. I think most users don’t ever reach 100.

social ads

How to find your most engaging tweets

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You can learn a lot from looking at statistics and that’s why it may be a good idea to take a look at your Twitter Analytics page now and then. I looked at my stats from September 2014 to May 2015 and learned a few things like:

  • Average engagement rate is decreasing
  • I have been tweeting a lot less in the last five months compared to last fall
  • I get a lot less link clicks now than in 2014
  • The number of monthly retweets vary a lot from month to month
  • Although I tweet less and engagement rate is decreasing, the average daily reach is actually increasing

I can now use this knowledge to improve my Twitter presence by trying to increase the number of tweets, improve the content so that it engages more people, include more links to increase link clicks for example. That is, if you think these are important numbers. The reason daily reach continues to increase is probably an effect of a continuous increase in followers.

The tweets with highest reach per month
Other interesting things that you can find in Twitter Analytics are for example the tweets with highest reach for the last few months. Some of my top tweets are in Swedish which is not surprising since about 80% of my followers are from Sweden.

May 2015: Instagram photo
Reach 12,100

April 2015: News article
Reach 1,500

March 2015: Blog post
Reach 14,200

Feb 2015: Blog post
Reach 2,800

Jan 2015: News article
Reach 4,400

Dec 2014: News article
Reach 19,100

Nov 2014: Blog post
Reach 18,300

Conclusions
There are a few conclusions to be made from looking at these tweets.

  • Inspiring images help your tweets get noticed and shared, but you may also reach out without images
  • Getting retweeted by an influencer increases reach a lot
  • Twitter cards for your blog posts or for news articles may increase engagement
  • If the link you are sharing doesn’t use Twitter cards, it helps to add an image manually
  • Hashtags on trending topics also help in getting reach
  • Blog posts and news articles create a lot of engagement

Now take a look at your Twitter Analytics, you may learn a few things that could help you reach out to more people on Twitter.

14 percent of Swedish teens use Vine

Twitter’s video sharing service Vine recently announced that it has 100 million monthly active users. Until now we have not had any statistics about how many local Vine users there are in Sweden, but according to a new survey by GlobalWebIndex, at least 3% of Swedish mobile internet users age 16-64 use Vine on a montly basis. Among teens (age 16-19) the penetration is much higher as 14% say they have used Vine last month.

The highest penetration among teens in the surveyed countries can be found in USA and Canada (25% and 22%).

teens-using-Vine

 

There are no further details about how the survey was conducted.