Instagram Surprises in Active Users Surge

Dec 21, 14 Instagram Surprises in Active Users Surge

Posted by in Social Media

Instagram has recently surprised quite a few with their surge in active users to reach 300 million users. This figure is not only significant in itself. It also marked the fact that Instagram has now surpassed Twitter in active users. The latter is at 284 million users now. This brought speculations about whether Instagram is on its way to un-crown Twitter when it comes to be the best social news provider. Speculations have been going haywire and some social analytics experts have even chimed in to remind marketers that Instagram has already surpassed Twitter when it comes to user engagement. The social analytics firm Socialbakers has, for instance, compared the top 25 brands for Instagram and Twitter engagement. The survey has demonstrated that engagement rates per post were nearly 50 times higher on Instagram. The firm analyzed data for the 3-months period ending December 9 and found that the average engagement rate on Instagram was 3.31% per post for a major brand (taking into consideration likes and comments). For Twitter, however, the rate was at 0.07% per tweet and this took into consideration retweets, replies and favorites. During the 3 months period, brands had on average 38 times more interactions on Instagram than on Twitter. For a comparative figure on Instagram the interactions amounted to 6.5 million a month while that on Twitter was about 167,000. Some of these brands were Starbucks, GoPro, Aeropostale, Victoria’s Secret and Forever21. Speculations even considered whether Instagram would soon rise to be able to keep up with...

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Twitter’s New Focus on SEO has Generated more traffic

Nov 18, 14 Twitter’s New Focus on SEO has Generated more traffic

Posted by in Social Media

Social media sites more than ever rely on search engines to drive traffic. Recently, during the Twitter Analyst Day event, Twitter has shared information regarding the success of their recent SEO strategy. This renewed SEO focus has helped the site generate a staggering 10 times more traffic to Twitter’s website. Trevor O’Brien, director of product management at Twitter confirmed that the social media giant had earlier this year brought a change enabling popular search engines such as Google and Bing to gain a better access to their popular hashtag pages. Hashtag pages are specific pages on Twitter to help users keep track of a particular hashtag and all tweets and information related to it. For instance, a user searching for a particular hashtag on Google, such as the viral #AlexFromTarget tag, would be presented with Twitter hashtag pages on the top result, if the page exists. According to figures provided by Twitter, the change has brought an increase in the number of unlogged users by 10 times. The current monthly figure is estimated at 75 million as compared to 7.5 million previously. This certainly shows the effectiveness of Twitter’s new SEO initiatives. The main call-to-action that Twitter expects from these logged-out users is for them to sign up on the site. Twitter is also considering ways to monetize these hashtag pages. Twitter previously had a deal with Google which was cancelled in 2011. This deal had been one of the leading reasons of great traffic from Google on the social media...

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