Facebook and YouTube receive the most Business traffic

Apr 19, 2010 by Dan Taylor    1 Comment     Posted under: Social Media, Technology

Every week I hear from Marketing and PR folks that their ‘official’ company policy blocks access to Facebook, YouTube, and a host of other social networking-esque sites. While the concept boggles my mind, as to date, I’ve been hard pressed to find solid numbers to present to upper management, making the case for this epic fail.

Thanks to a new report issued by Network Box, management might have to block out a few hours this week to review/rethink this policy. The Network Box report indicates that more business traffic lands on Facebook that any other website.

The report analyzed over 13 billion URLs used by businesses in Q1 2010, and found that 6.8 percent of all business internet traffic ended up at Facebook, indicating a 1 percent growth from Q4 2009. In terms of bandwidth pull, video sharing Goliath YouTube garnered 10 percent of all corporate bandwidth, a 2 percent jump from Q4 2009.

250 IT managers were surveyed, no data was provided as to their geography or professional sector, about their biggest security concerns in the year ahead. 43 percent reported “employees using applications on social networks” as their biggest headache.

In a separate question, 36 percent of those surveyed indicated that they were concerned about malware passed via networks such as LinkedIn or Twitter, as employees are likely to trust links sent by those they’re connected to on the aforementioned platforms.

It’s been my experience that there’s often a great disconnect between the IT department, the HR staff, and the Marketing and Sales folks. While I certainly don’t critique the IT professionals from wanting to keep their systems free and clear of troubles (it’s their job, after all), I do believe that many companies could benefit from a “know the internetz” series of regular in-house trainings. I.e., how to spot a phish, how to check a shortened URL, etc. Remember, it’s not guns that kill people, it’s people that kill people.

In today’s rapidly changing face of business, cutting off your marketing and sales engagement, is exactly like that age old adage, Cutting off your nose to spite your face. Or more clearly, by restricting access, are employers, thus, restricting innovation?

With a little bit of personal internet security training, I’d imagine that those IT managers might find themselves with a few more problems; balancing server load do to the landslide of inbound company interest – thanks to social media engagement, for example.

Additional stats from the Network Box report:

The top five websites visited by businesses in Q1 2010 were:

1. Facebook – 6.8 per cent of all traffic
2. Google – 3.4 per cent of all traffic
3. Yimg (Yahoo!’s image server) – 2.8 per cent of all traffic
4. Yahoo! – 2.4 per cent of all traffic
5. Doubleclick – 1.7 per cent of all traffic.

The top five websites using the most bandwidth in Q1 2010 were:

1. YouTube – 10 per cent of all bandwidth used
2. Facebook – 4.5 per cent of all bandwidth used
3. Windows Update – 3.3 per cent of all bandwidth used
4. Yimg (Yahoo!’s image server) – 2.7 per cent of all bandwidth used
5. Google – 2.5 per cent of all bandwidth used.

Bonus thought: With the inclusion of Google’s Buzz, are IT professionals planning on restricting access to Google as well?  Score for Bing?

Social Media Statistics

Feb 2, 2010 by Dan Taylor    9 Comments    Posted under: Social Media

Opinions abound on Social Media. How it works, where it works best, how individuals and businesses can use it best, etc. Each of these opinions have their own intrinsic value, but sometimes, nothing beats cold hard numbers. As Joe Friday said, “All we want are the facts, ma’am,”- let’s take a look at some Social Media statistics.

• Facebook receives and shares more than 3.5 billion pieces of content (links, news stories, blog posts) on a weekly basis.
• Facebook pages have generated more than 5.3 billion fans.
• Approximately 700,000 local businesses have active Facebook fan pages.
• Approximately 70 percent of Facebook users arrive from outside the United States.
• Over 250 Facebook applications have over 1 million combined users each month.
• Since December 2008, more than 80,000 websites have integrated Facebook Connect. More than 60 million Facebook users actively use this service across any number of these 80,000+ sites that offer the feature.
• 55-65 year old females make up the fastest growing segment on Facebook
• Facebook paid $0 to have their entire site translated into Spanish via a crowdsourced Wiki. The site was translated in less than 4 weeks.

• LinkedIn has approximately 11 million active users in Europe.
• The largest growing geographic region for LinkedIn is India, with over 3 million total users.

• At the close of 2009, the average tweets per day was over 27.3 million, making the average tweets per hour 1.14 million.
• If the current tweet per time ratio were to remain constant, this would generate over 10 billion tweets per year.
• 80 percent of Twitter usage is on mobile devices.

• 70 percent of bloggers engage in corporate brand discussions.
• 54 percent of bloggers post content or tweet daily.
• 38 percent of bloggers regularly post brand or product reviews.

• Social Media has overtaken porn as the #1 web activity.
• 12.5 percent of all couples married in the US last year met via social media.
• comScore data points to Russia as having the most engaged social media audience with participants spending 6.6 hours view 1,307 pages per month. The leading social networking site in Russia is NOT Facebook, but vKontakte.ru.
• YouTube is the world’s second largest search engine.

One-quarter of all search results for the World’s Top 20 largest brands point to user-generated content.

Obviously, these are some serious numbers for serious business. Corporations spend millions of dollars in advertising annually, but yet, 25 percent of all search results on these corporations yield user generated content. Social Media is everywhere, making Brand image and the associated conversations surrounding this image vital to today’s business.   What does this say about the way YOU are advertising and managing YOUR online image?

If you’d like to learn more about how and what a Social Media Campaign can do for your company, please get in touch!