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55 fascinating statistics about social media in Sweden

Sweden is ranked first of 138 countries in its use of computing and communications technology, according to an annual study from the World Economic Forum. So perhaps it’s no surprise that Swedes are quick to adopt social media and for example the Swedish blogosphere has been very lively for several years with top blogs that attract as many as one million visits per week.

In order to give you a better view of the Swedish social media landscape, I have compiled a presentation with 55 fascinating statistics. Enjoy!

Statistics: 55 facts about social media in Sweden

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Amtrak doubles number of Twitter followers with Promoted Accounts

Ever wondered if those sponsored accounts or tweets on Twitter pay off? Well, here are some fresh numbers from Amtrak, the US passenger train service operator which started using Twitter’s Promoted Accounts ad placement on April 12. At that time the @Amtrak account had 10,000 followers and added between 20 and 60 new followers per day. With the ad on Promoted Accounts Amtrak started gaining a lot more followers, as you can see by the graph below.

According to the article, Amtrak tracked 8,000 new followers from the Promoted Accounts campaign. The company also tried the Promoted Tweets ad placement and today boasts some 22,000 followers.

It is not clear from the article when Amtrak used Promoted Tweets (it says during last month) or if they ran the two campaigns simultaneously at some point. It would have been interesting to see which type attracted the most followers.

Manchester United vs FC Barcelona – the Social Media Champions League

Manchester United’s manager Sir Alex Ferguson recently hinted that his players may be banned from using Twitter. Tonight his club will face FC Barcelona in the UEFA Champions League final on Wembley in London. This game between two of the world’s most popular football teams is predicted to be one of the best finals in a long time. Discussions and opinions about the game will be all over social media and it will probably dominate the trending topics on Twitter today.

In spite of Ferguson’s hesitancy towards Twitter, both clubs have managed to gather quite a large following in social media. The question is, how does Man Utd stand in comparison to FC Barcelona, in terms of presence in social media?

Facebook – close win for Barcelona
Both teams are very active and a typical status update can draw as many as 30,000 likes and 3,000 comments. Man Utd has 14,418,000 fans on Facebook, Barcelona has 15,311,000 fans. United is also growing its fanbase slightly faster during the last month.

Twitter – a clear win for Barcelona
The teams are also active on Twitter. Man Utd has 282,900 followers, FC Barcelona has two major Twitter accounts, one in Spanish with 826,200 followers and one in English with 719,200 followers. The Spanish Barca account has been growing more rapidly than the Man Utd account.

YouTube – Barcelona wins on walk over
Manchester United publish videos on MUTV, on its own web page and from what I can find, the club is not active on YouTube. Barcelona on the other hand, has an active YouTube channel with 82,600 subscribers and a total of 42.2 million views. But Man Utd frequently posts videos on Facebook, so the English team has merely chosen a slightly different strategy.

Conclusion: both teams have millions of fans that follow them via social media, but FC Barcelona is slightly more popular. This has probably no impact on tonight’s Champions League final, but be sure that fans will actively cheer for their teams tonight and celebrate (or mourn) the outcome. May the best team win!

Footnote: stats from Wildfire App.

See influence on Twitter with improved Chrome extension from PeerIndex

I use Chrome as my default web browser and I have added two different Chrome extensions that let me determine the influence of a Twitter account directly on Twitter.com. The first one is by Klout and it lets you see the Klout score of a Twitter user, right next to the user’s name.

I have also used a Chrome extension for PeerIndex, but it only displayed the score if you clicked on a person’s profile.

Today I noticed that PeerIndex have upgraded their extension and now when I visit Twitter.com I see this in my feed:

I now see the PeerIndex score next to each account’s Twitter handle, but also all the other accounts that are mentioned in each tweet. If you click on it you are taken directly to the account page on PeerIndex for more details. Also, if I drag the mouse over the score box, it shows a more detailed score of authority, activity and audience, and also some tags that represent the top topics by this Twitter user. This may be used to more quickly get a better picture of different Twitter users and people you may or may not want to follow. If Klout and PeerIndex scores are accurate tools for determining real influence, well that’s an entirely different blog post.

Footnote: My PeerIndex profile is here.

My personal URL shortener

I was lucky to get hold of a domain name with the Indian top domain .IN. So now I have created my own URL shortener using kull.in and it works exactly like bit.ly but with my domain instead. I created the shortener with Bit.ly Pro and if you want to get your own, please follow this guide. It takes a few days to get approved but once you have it, it’s pretty cool.

Wired: Personal URL shortener

Tired: Facebook vanity URL

Expired: Custom Myspace URL

Avatars of 500 Swedish corporate Twitter accounts

Back in February there was a discussion among a few bloggers about whether it was best for brands to have their logo or a face as avatar on Twitter. I commented that most of the Swedish corporate accounts on Twitter have logos as avatars, and many of them still manage to engage in meaningful conversations with stakeholders.

When you are about to decide on what avatar to choose for your corporate account, remember that many Twitter users are following hundreds of other accounts, who tweet several times per day. Their feeds become a continuing stream of updates from different sources and if you want to improve your chances of getting your tweets read, you should make your avatar easily recognizable. Since most users are individuals, my bet is that most avatars on Twitter are faces. That would mean that brands could easily stand out from the crowd if they branded their account in a way, logo or otherwise, that users quickly can recognize.

Do you need some inspiration? Well, to celebrate that the list of Swedish businesses on Twitter now has reached 500, here is a collection of avatars of 500 Swedish corporate Twitter accounts (in order of number of followers to the account). How many can you identify? (Note: the image is made out of two columns with 250 accounts in each, which for example means that Pingdom is #11. For completely accurate ranking, check the list.)

Follow me on Twitter @kullin.