When we talk about social media, we often reduce it down to Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn. But the 2010 presence report from over 100,000 business users unearth a very different picture. For instance here are the 25 top sites my connections visited me on. The biggest part is “others” meaning out of the approximately 35 sites I am present on there are a bunch more which are still relevant.
It was pretty surprising to see the rather equal distribution of many of the social presences I’ve been on. It was also amazing to see the strength of SlideShare, Stumble, and even FriendFeed who is now integrated in Facebook has a rather interesting portion of the visits. Honestly I haven’t done anything on FriendFeed for a long time.
I asked other Xeesm users whether they are willing to share their reports:
Thanks to Jon Henry, Michaela Conley, Hans-Gerlach Woudboer, Robert Hatcher, Nikos Tsantanis, Jackie Coughlan, Cathleen Tyson, Geoff Sharp, Kirsi Dahl, Wendy Soucie, Matthias Caesar, Mike Dubrall, Marita Roebkes and Jennifer Meltzer who also published their respective site visit reports for everybody to review on our Facebook page we see an interesting kaleidoscope of reports that all have the same pattern: not one single dominating site.
– Social media still enjoys a huge variety of social engagement tools where people chose to connect.
– We are far a way from yet another world dominating monopoly.
– Once we see what people select to connect with us we have a much better idea about what networks we need to take care of.
– Once business teams understand how they are approached on the social web, they know where their customers are.
– If we provide a contact with the option to connect with us on all places we are on, we support the cross pollination of our networks in a very powerful way.
– Our contacts may spend 100 times as much time on Facebook compared to Stumpble but the above presence shows the importance of Stumble – as an example.
– As we compare data now, I see a big increase of business users also using Facebook now.
– Skype as the largest of al platforms with 800 Million users shows a pretty important role here too.
– Even so a website is not necessarily a social platform it remains to be an important part in the profile analysis play.
– Groups show a huge presence on those who actually share with other the groups they are on.
Here is how these reports are actually generated:
Instead of adding only the LinkedIn or Twitter handle to the email signature or any other communication, Xeesm users share their entire ecosystem with a contact so the contact can select how THEY want to get in touch with the person. And as such we track every single visit FROM a Xeesm TO the respective social site. That way every user is able to see how often their contacts visited them on all their social presence.
Limitations of this report:
– Obviously we can only track visits FROM a Xeesm to any of the sites. But with over 10 Million visits in aggregate we have a pretty good idea.
– Only sites that are exposed on a persons Xeesm can be chosen to be visited from here and be part of the report.
– We just recently added new sites like Quora to the list of trackable site so they don’t show up yet
– While we integrated over 100 social network sites in Xeesm we still don’t capture all of the approximately 10,000 networks world wide.
– The audience is almost exclusively business users
– The report is primarily from the Americas, Europe, India and Australia. The rest of APAC is underrepresented in our Ecosystem.
The site visit report indicates that we continue having a great diversity in the social web and our ever growing trend to more individualism seems to rather support this in the future as well. It makes it pretty apparent that we are better of watching where our customers and contacts approach us, rather than deciding what network we want to be on – at least as long as we leverage social media for business.
