FreshNetworks Blog

Old Trafford, Manchester (Photo credit: Sean MacEntee)

At 09:20 this morning Sir Alex Ferguson retired after 26 years in charge of Manchester United. The club, and the manager, are respected and supported far from the city of Manchester, and reaction was quick to spread on Twitter. In many analyses of event and how Twitter reacts to them, the focus is on volume – just how many people are talking about an issue. But more interesting than this is what people are saying.

There is a hypothesis that when there is ‘breaking news’ (at least on Twitter), most of the discussions convey the same information – people either retweeting the original message or people conveying the same information to their followers that lots of others are doing at the same time. So in this case immediately after the announcement, whilst they may use different words, we would expect people to be conveying the simple message: Sir Alex Ferguson has retired.

But is this true – what did people actually discuss on Twitter in the first hour after his retirement was announced?

What we did

We captured every Tweet that clearly discussed Sir Alex Ferguson during the first hour after his retirement was announced shortly before 09:20 this morning. Using Datasift, we captured all Tweets that included the terms “Alex Ferguson” or “#fergie’ or ‘#mufc’.

In total we captured 95,312 Tweets in the first hour of discussion on Twitter – or about 26 Tweets every second.

What we found

First some basic stats about the discussions on Twitter in the first hour after the announcement:

• 68% of people discussing the retirement were male (16% were female and the remaining 16% had genders that could not be determined from Twitter)
• With 4.3% of all discussions, the news was actually discussed most in Manchester; London came second (3.8%). The global impact of the club is reflected with Indonesia, Singapore, Malaysia and South Africa being in the top 10 locations for discussions
• 22% of Tweets were people retweeting other people’s content; the remaining 78% were original Tweets
• The most retweeted account was the club themselves. This was followed by a number of accounts in Indonesia (UtdIndonesia and detiksport). The most mentioned UK news provider during the first hour was SkySportsNews.

With only 22% of Tweets as clear retweets, there was a lot of original Twitter content being produced. So what were people actually discussing:

• Just over one third of Tweets (34%) were simple statements that Sir Alex Ferguson had retired
• The next largest group (26% of Tweets) were reflecting on their own experiences or thoughts – memories of the club and what Sir Alex’s time there meant for them
• A further 14% of Tweets were thanking Sir Alex for what he had done for the club or indeed for their own experiences (a trend started by the club themselves in their announcement)

Some topics were less popular but noteworthy:

• 360 people (0.7% of all Tweets) were wishing Sir Alex luck in or sending their best wishes for his future
• 53 people (0.01%) were worried that Sir Alex might have died

So the first hour on Twitter was an interesting place, and the discussions were more varied than just retweeting or repeating the simple fact of Sir Alex Ferguson’s retirement. In fact a significant proportion of Tweets were reflecting on what his role as manager had meant to them and the memories they had of his time with the club. This kind of reflection and content is altogether more interesting than mere retweets and statements of fact and shows Twitter at its best – connecting personal experiences and opinions to larger events.

Just say no to evil (Photo credit: Jean-François Chénier)

Facebook yesterday launched a significant refresh of its News Feed – the main way most people interact with content on the social network. The changes give images a more central role in the user experience (which makes sense as almost 50% of the content shared on Facebook is now visual). And there are now more options to tailor your feed – including the option to get updates just from your friends. Herein lies the real challenge to brands – Facebook has just created a way for people to filter out all your content.

There are many benefits of the new Facebook News Feed for brands that are being discussed, notably:

1. Having a wider canvas to play with – by hiding the left hand navigation content behind a tab (like on the Facebook mobile app), they are offering everybody more space to play with. For brands this will create more space for them to be creative with the content they post and will increase the importance of imagery in their content plan.
2. Creating a similar experience across mobile and web – the new design unifies the experience across web and mobile – making it simpler for brands to design campaigns that work across platforms.

But, will these benefits be realised if people can just filter out your content in the first place?

Given the option to filter to just see updates from actual Friends, we must expect that many users would opt for this. Indeed research shows that the users unlike brands on Facebook because they ‘clutter up my News Feed’ – Facebook has just given people an easy way to remove this ‘clutter’.

This is serious for brands  who are using Facebook as an engagement mechanism – people consume brand information from the News Feed and not from individual brand pages. Now they might not consume your information at all. Unless, of course, you pay.

Advertising and sponsored posts will now also look more beautiful and be able to take advantage of the greater space available to them. For many brands these may now be the vehicle to make people aware of their page and of the content they share on Facebook.

Swing time (Photo credit: Dave-F)

Are you spending less time on Facebook than you once did? According to a recent report from Pew Research, over a quarter of all Facebook users in the USA (27%) plan to spend less time on the social network in 2013 than in 2012. And 61% of users report having taken a ‘Facebook vacation’ where they stopped using the site for several weeks.

Overall it appears that US users of Facebook are becoming more nuanced in their use of the social network – happily spending time away from the site and expecting to spend less time on it overall.

This is not necessarily a sign of them abandoning the site, or indeed that Facebook has ‘had its day’ as some may report. But it does suggest that the role Facebook plays in their life is changing. New tools, site and networks are fulfilling needs that were once served by Facebook. And users are becoming more mature in the way that they use social media tools and the ways they engage with people.

To understand more about this report it is worth exploring the motivations of people who take Facebook vacation, as well as of those who plan to spend less time on Facebook.

Why take a Facebook vacation?

61% of US Facebook users report having taken a break from the site that lasted ‘several weeks’. The most popular reason for the vacation was that they were ‘just to0 busy’ (21%) of users; with 10% saying they were just ‘not interested’ and another 10% that they thought it was a ‘waste of time’.

The reasons that we might expect for taking a break from Facebook (such as being on an actually vacation) were less frequently cited (only 8% of users in this case).

So for the majority of users taking a Facebook vacation, the site became irrelevant for them (for the period of the vacation). There was either nothing to tempt them onto it during a busy period in their life, or they felt somewhat disenchanted with the site and just wanted a break from it, possibly feeling they wouldn’t lose something.

This is significant for Facebook and shows the potentially precarious nature of social networks. People use it because it is relevant – either because of the content that is shared on it or because of the people they can communicate with through it. If people feel that the site is becoming less relevant they will drift away. Taking a Facebook vacation here and there, but ultimately using the site less and less unless it becomes more relevant to them again.

Why spend less time on the site?

When asked to think about the role they expect Facebook to play in their life in 2013, just 3% of US users of the social network expected to spend more time on it this year; 27% of users expected to spend less time on the social network. But perhaps the more interesting is to explore how this breaks down by age:

• 38% of those aged 18-29 expect to spend less time on Facebook in 2013 than in 2012
• 26% of those aged 30-49
• 17% of those aged 50+

So the younger Facebook users are the ones planning to spend less time using the social network. This is not necessarily a problem for Facebook, the younger audience is more likely to try out new sites and tools when they emerge and to develop a place for them in their life. They will be more promiscuous than some of the older (and it would appear more loyal) Facebook users and social networks may have to learn to live with this promiscuity.

A recent IBM report on Black Friday sales figures stated that social media generated only 0.34% of online sales, with  Twitter generating an outright 0% of revenue. Shocking headlines aside, what can we actually take away from the statistics?

When you look at them like this, it does look rather bleak – if there were red figures for declines, it would be a bit of a bloodbath.

But this really doesn’t tell the full story. When I’m on Twitter or Facebook, it’s rare that I personally click on any sort of promoted Tweet or sponsored story, but that’s not to say that it doesn’t pique my interest. Often I will then go on Google and search for the promotion, or go directly to the website of the brand to find out more. If I then go on to make a purchase, this wouldn’t be attributed to social.

The most interesting part of the report for me referenced the positive mentions that people expressed post purchase; “Shoppers expressed positive consumer sentiment on promotions, shipping and convenience as well as the retailers themselves at a three to one ratio”.

So how could retailers find the true value that social attributed towards Black Friday?

A simple way would be combine social data with sales data. The chart in the IBM report, is a good start, breaking down over time the sales, but if a brand was able to break this data down and plot social discussions of products alongside it, it would be far more powerful. We would then be able to demonstrate if there were peaks in conversation about specific products and assess if these were driven by social mentions/conversations.

Tracking links through to sales is great, but the reality is that we have to make some assumptions. Brands are willing to pay £110,000 for a 30 second advert slot during the X Factor and use Marketing Mix Modelling to determine the impact on sales that the adverts have had, and social should be treated no differently.

If we are to judge the value of social, then we do need to use methods such as tracking links, but this should be one of a number of measures to make sure that we are accurately reflecting the value of any social activity and that it is comparable with other marketing disciplines.

The first Reuters Institute Digital Report has attracted much coverage in the UK for the finding that 16-24 year olds in this country now use social media as their primary news source. This highlights the changing way that consumers are getting information, and what they are doing with it. But perhaps more interesting for us to learn from is how social media as a new source varies by country – showing not only how consumer behaviour changes by market, but how traditional brands are innovating.

Traditional brands vs aggregators vs social media

The research, conducted by YouGov, compares news consumption in the UK, USA, Germany, France and Denmark, looking at how traditional brands (online news and broadcasters) compares with aggregators (such as Google News) and social media (blogs, Facebook, Twitter and the like).

Behaviour in these countries varies, with the USA leading for use of social media as a news source (41% of all consumers), followed by Germany (30%) and Denmark (28%) before the UK (22%) and France (21%). So when compared against these countries, use of social media for news in the UK appears to be less developed than reports are suggesting. However, the truth is probably a little more complex than this.

In the UK, traditional news sources are still very strong – with 86% of consumers having used them in the previous week; and it is striking to compare this with Germany and France where only 69% of consumers have gone to these sources. Perhaps there is a connection between the relatively high use of traditional news sources in the UK, and the relatively low use of social media when compared to the other countries in the study.

The study distinguishes social media sites (Facebook, blogs and Twitter) from traditional brands – focusing on the different places that people get information. However, how social media is changing consumer behaviour is often less about the places people go and more about the changed behaviour itself. And in the UK, the more traditional news brands have been fast to change the way they engage with their audiences – the BBC and Guardian, for example, have been quick to innovate with live blogging, data journalism and other ways to adapt their delivery of information as consumer behaviours change.

So, in the UK at least it is these ‘traditional’ news brands that are offering the new ways of engaging with people and content that better reflect how consumer behaviour itself is changing.

The impact of social media on news, as with any industry, should not just be measured in how many people go to new destinations for content and information. Perhaps even more important is to look at how traditional players in the market innovate and change as consumer behaviour itself changes; how they offer new and engaging services which mean that consumers don’t look elsewhere for their needs.