Posts Tagged 'פייסבוק'



Twitter/Facebook gave me 1000% boost

Relax, not me personally, my blog got that boost.
With June (and 2Q) wrapping up last week, it’s an excellent time to gather some statistics around my blog, and I decided to make a comparison to the previous period, and maybe identify some trends. The period I looked at is 1H08 vs. 1H09.

Google Analytics is truly a powerful tool, and I was able to go very deep (drill-down) and round up some interesting figures. I wanted to verify 2 assumptions I made since Jan 2008:

The results supported both assumptions.
Traffic-wise, the first 6 months of 2009 generated 13,004 visits and 18,660 page views, almost twice than the 2008 period. The increase was expected, but the sources breakdown amazed me. I have a 3-step process for pushing my blog’s content: update my twitter, post to facebook and save to del.icio.us – between those 3 networks I cover almost 5,000 eyeballs (directly). It did the trick, big time!
Facebook generated 5 times more visits – 76 in 1H08 to 480 in 1H09, and twitter generated roughly the same growth – 82 in 1H08 to 490 in 1H09. Direct traffic from Google also increased, by 110%, from 2,800 in 1H08 to 6,030 in 1H09.

Location-wise, I got 3 times more visits from Israel, jumping from 930 in 1H08 to just under 3,000 in 1H09. The US remains my main source of readers, with 4,050 visits in 1H09 (comapred to 2,700 in 1H08). The EU were also loyal readers, with +50% increase in France, UK, Germany, Netherlands and Italy. Australia, India and Canada showed similar increases.

To be honest, I expected those results. With the explosion of new media, facebook, twitter, friendfeed and others, I would be surprised to see a lower figure from those 2 sources, especially when taking into account the amount of self-marketing I did these past 18 months.

Looking into the near future, I wonder what my 1H10 vs 1H09 will look like.. what source will show the most increase in visits? will blogs still rule the world or will we all lifestream our lives? What do you think?

Twitter grew 1,444% in a year

If someone here needed another proof to the change twitter has made, Nielsen released its Social Media QuickTake for May 2009, showing an amazing 1,444% growth in Twitter.com visitors – from 1.2m in May 2008 to 18.2m in May 2009. Wow! Time spent on twitter.com per person (not factoring the twitter apps I imagine) has also risen – from 6min in May 2008 to 17min a year later (+175%). Both are amazing figures, showcasing the revolution twitter has made in 2008/9 – starting with The US Presidential Election, the Earthquakes in China and the Elections in Iran.

The question now is ‘what’s next’, for twitter, facebook and others, as they reach super-mass adoption, and would (obviously) prefer to avoid ‘the myspace phenomenon‘. Nielsen already noticed that the ‘month-over-month’ rate is very minor: +7% in # of users and -1% in time spent – which in social networking terms is bad. That halt in growth has to do in part to the business model, or lack of it.

Twitter is a lot of things, and I salute the guys for providing the platform and building an impressive ecosystem, but at some point in time someone at Twitter HQ will need to step up and present what they plan for twitter in 2010.

My facebook identity

At noon Saturday I picked my new facebook vanity url and from now on I’m facebook.com/dvirreznik. Simple and precise. According to facebook, 15min into the action, some 500,000 people registered their urls, at a staggering rate of 550 per second!

The question you need to ask is ‘what facebook has in store for us next?’ Having your own vanity url has been around for couple of years now, with LinkedIn, Flickr, SlideShare, Gmail, Twitter, Qik and many more. Being a number is so 1984, and facebook realized that. In my opinion (and others) facebook are working on something bigger, that would increase the loyalty of its friends – something like an email service.

And why the heck not? According to recent data facebook has some 200,000,000 loyal users and growing, built-in chat services, strong eco-system of developers – the only thing missing is messaging. And when you pick your vanity url you basically decide your email address: dvirreznik@facebook.com.

If you have other suggestions I’d love to hear them – drop a comment below.

The list: Israeli companies on twitter

Since Ashton and CNN battled out over who’ll reach 1m followers first, Twitter has been gaining ground in Israel. And although the micro-blogging service is still no match to facebook in terms of # of users, the awareness is definitely growing, globally and locally alike.

According to twittercounter there are about 2324 Israeli twitter users, my guess is a bit higher, closer to 3,500-4,000, as opposed to over 600,000 facebook users – some even say 750,000. Twitter is still relatively un-known in Israel, and we’re waiting for it to make its leap, but already I’m seeing more and more businesses entering this space, opening accounts on twitter. The reason is simple: it’s easy to manage and update, and doesn’t require too much of your time. The question is what value (or ROI) you expect from such activities, and the answers here vary, a lot.

In an effort to make some order in all the cluter, I’ve created a list over at newsgeek, of Israeli companies on twitter: media and communication, government and retail, hi-tech and VCs, leasure and sport, food and beverages and others. The list is dynamic, and 3 hours after the initial posting I had some 15 comments (and 20-30 new followers) of new accounts that needed to be inserted into the list. My goal is to create a place where people can find the company and contact person, that would enable them to start a conversation faster, meeting the demand of the ever-changing-business-world (aka – Innovation). The only 2 rules are:
a) an updated account (less than 20 days since your last twit) and
b) full bio available for contact and details.

Although the entire post is in Hebrew, by hovering over the names you can get the feeling of ‘who’s who’ in the Israeli E2.0 arena. I’m sure the list will continue to grow (by at least 1 more) in the future.

Link:
The List: Israeli Companies on Twitter (Hebrew)

My Nokia E71 Story

Over the past 2 weeks I’ve been experiencing some problems with our new Nokia E71 device. It appears that the snooze option at the alarm clock is ‘unreliable when phone is switched off‘. We learned that the hard way, twice, by not waking up in time in the morning. The only thing I wanted to verify is whether the problem is model-related (all the E71’s in the world) or device-related (mine only). There’s a simple way to sort it out – by giving me a new device.

As a social media evangelist, I’ve decided to put the tools and services I know to the test, as I’ve done in the past. My cellular provider, Cellcom, received low score for not monitoring this space, failing to reply to my updates and twits. After 3 separate visits to the lab, trying to figure out what the problem is, a friend suggested I’ll ring Amos Shapira, Cellcom CEO, who in an effort to imporve customer service opened up a dedicated line for customers with a complaint. Recently they started showing some improvement, as my friend Hillel outlines.

As for me, during my 3rd visit to the lab on Tuesday, I was contacted by one of Cellcom account manager, as my number is a business account. When she heard I’m at the lab, she rang the lab manager, and 20min later I had a new Nokia E71 (that I’ve asked for from the beginning) in my hand. The next day a Cellcom rep called me back, following the voicemail I left at Amos’s phone, asking if the problem was solved with the new E71 and if there’s another device I might consider.

So, although it took 3 trips to the lab and numerous calls to the customer service, I finally got my request. I hoped Cellcom would have reached me earlier, as I was pretty annoyed during my previous visits to the lab, and my updates proved it, but hey, you can’t have it all.

BTW – the problem still happens. If you set the alarm clock and shut off your phone for several hours (like at night), the snooze won’t work. Changing sim cards hasn’t solved it, but I will try setting the alarm without any sim card (same as the lab technician did in my 2nd visit – and obviously the snooze worked fine) and let you know the result.

And here’s the proof for Nokia developers: set the clock for 07:30 and shut the phone off. Come 07:30 the alarm rang, I hit ‘snooze’ and the phone should have ranged again at 07:35. It didn’t. When I turned the phone on (manually, not the alarm) you can see the time is 08:04, but the phone thinks it’s 07:35, which means ‘snooze time’. A work around is leaving the phone on but putting it at ‘flight mode’, which shuts down all connections (cell/wifi/gps). If you hear of a possible solution, give me a heads up.

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Mobile & Media Consultant. I help startup companies launch products to the consumer market. Reach out: dvir.reznik [at] gmail.com
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This is my personal blog. The postings here do not represent the thoughts, intentions, plans or strategies of my past employers or of my clients. It is solely my opinion.