Category: Social Media Marketing

Comscore announces explosive growth in social networking websites

Posted by Robert Gentel – August 12, 2008

Not to be outdone by the other web metrics companies releasing their traffic analysis articles in the last few days, Comscore announced today that “Social Networking Explodes Worldwide“, citing a 25% growth worldwide in the last year.

Naturally, the growth is largely coming outside of North America whose 9% growth rate for the year is the lowest globally and emerging internet markets were responsible for most of the growth.

Additionally, they released information about specific sites showing MySpace nearly stalled at 3% growth with Facebook and Hi5 the fastest growing social networks at the moment. Also of interest to the social media marketer is that they are showing Facebook as having overtaken MySpace in monthly uniques. But then again, only a blind social media marketer wouldn’t have noticed Facebook’s meteoric rise.

Yahoo claims that Yahoo Buzz is social bookmarking leader over Digg

Posted by Robert Gentel – August 3, 2008

On Friday Yahoo held its annual shareholder meeting, and while the Yahoo board’s deal with Carl Icahn’s opposing slate of directors has removed a lot of the drama from the meeting it was still interesting. And one of the things I’d like to highlight is a claim made by Yahoo president Susan Decker about Yahoo Buzz, Yahoo’s social media site that’s currently in BETA.

Steven Shankland blogs on CNET that at around 11:13 am Decker boasted that Yahoo Buzz has “displaced Digg as the top way to find content across the entire Internet”.

Without supporting information it’s hard to assess the validity of this claim, but given Yahoo’s size and audience it would be foolish for Social Media Marketers to ignore this service in their online marketing efforts.

Right now, it is a bit of a walled garden, and it seems that they will differ from Digg in that some editorial control comes from relying on trusted publishers. Whether relying on feeds from screened publishers is a BETA restriction or a long-term approach to Yahoo Buzz is unclear. But you can get a head start and apply to be a publisher with Yahoo Buzz here.

The new del.icio.us at Delicious.com

Posted by Robert Gentel – August 1, 2008

Yahoo launched the new del.icio.us at Delicious.com, releasing its long-awaited new version of the popular social bookmarking website. According to their blog, the release focuses on changes to:

  • Speed – Yahoo claims to have addressed scalability issues for Delicious and improved page loading times.
  • Search – The search feature has been rewritten to work better and handle more social filtering of the search results.
  • Design – The site has had a complete design overhaul. They have a what’s new page to explain the new navigation and layout.