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Hitwise Intelligence - Heather Dougherty - North America
Analyst Weblog
Facebook Reaches Top Ranking in US
March 15, 2010
Facebook reached an important milestone for the week ending March 13, 2010 and surpassed Google in the US to become the most visited website for the week. Facebook.com recently reached the #1 ranking on Christmas Eve, Christmas Day, and New Year’s Day as well as the weekend of March 6th and 7th. The market share of visits to Facebook.com increased 185% last week as compared to the same week in 2009, while visits to Google.com increased 9% during the same time frame. Together Facebook.com and Google.com accounted for 14% of all US Internet visits last week.
Posted by Heather Dougherty at 11:24 AM
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1 Year Anniversary for Foursquare
March 12, 2010
Location-based services have been a popular topic this week, as Twitter enabled geo-location features and Facebook announced the launch of a new location-based feature in April. Another location-based social network, Foursquare, marked their one year anniversary of their launch yesterday. While the primary use of the service is to ‘check-in’ with mobile devices at local businesses like bars, restaurants, stores or nearly any location - however, a visit to the website is needed for the initial sign-up for Foursquare. As the service has grown, the visits to Foursquare.com have increased since the official launch at the SXSW conference in Austin, TX last year and the volume of visits have increased 5x for the week ending March 6, 2010 as compared to the week ending September 19, 2009. Partnerships with major brands such as Bravo, Zagat, The New York Times and Lucky magazine have also helped drive traffic to the website, and thus new users.
The main source of traffic to Foursquare.com is Facebook, which accounted for 33% of the upstream visits last week. Google and Twitter followed with 22% and 8%, respectively, with these top 3 websites accounting for nearly 2/3 of all traffic. Users are able to link both Facebook and Twitter to include check-ins in updates and tweets.
Searches for a portfolio of Foursquare-related terms have also grown over the past 24 weeks, spiking the week of February 20, 2010 and have remained fairly consistent over the past 3 weeks.
Yesterday, Foursquare announced breaking their record for the most check-ins in one day, exceeding 275,000 and we can expect that trend to continue with the start of the SXSW conference today.
Posted by Heather Dougherty at 03:21 PM
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In Categories Facebook | Mobile | Social Media | Social Networking | Twitter
Thank You Mom campaign from Procter & Gamble
March 09, 2010
During the 2010 Winter Olympic Games, P&G started a campaign called ‘Thank You Mom’ to help with the cost of travel and accommodations for the mom (or important supporter) of all of the Team USA athletes so they could see their children compete. The accompanying website, Thankyoumom.com provided content from blogs, videos and tweets from parents of the athletes along with coupons and links to other P&G products. The website experienced higher shares of visits on the weekends, beginning on Fridays during the Olympic Games. The peak day for the website was Friday, February 19, 2010, where Thankyoumom.com reached the top 1000 websites and ranked 989th out of all websites visited that day.
The most commonly visited website following a visit to Thankyoumom.com during the week ending February 20, 2010 was P&G Everyday Solutions, a promotional website that offers coupons and samples from P&G along with content on Health & Wellness. Visitors to Thankyoumom.com had a strong interest in coupons, with Adobe as the 7th ranked website in the downstream traffic, most likely to download Adobe Acrobat Reader to print the savings form in pdf format. Additionally, Facebook ranked 2nd in the downstream websites visited after Thankyoumom.com due to several fan pages on Facebook for P&G brands such as Secret and Vicks NyQuil to tie-in additional social campaigns.
Posted by Heather Dougherty at 05:50 PM
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In Categories CPG | Coupons | Facebook | Olympics | Social Media | Social Networking
Social networks displacing e-cards
February 25, 2010
We’re often thinking about what people are doing on social networks and one of the most common uses is keeping in touch with friends and family, especially for birthday greetings and holiday messages. Once the domain of e-greetings, social networks have instead become the common place to send & post messages. While the traffic to social networks continues to climb, the market share of visits to websites in the E-Greetings has declined each month year-over-year each month from January 2009 through January 2010. During the two peak months for E-Greetings category, February and December, visits decreased 24% and 16%, respectively.
On specific holidays, the same trend occurred, with the market share of visits to E-Greetings websites down, while the Social Networking category has increased. The only exception is Mother’s Day, where both are down and more people may be spending the day with their mothers rather than using social networks. Key holidays for the E-Greetings category, Valentine’s Day and Christmas Day, were both down 29% and 27%, respectively. Holidays have historically been a popular day for using social networks and Facebook, for example, became the most visited website on both Christmas Day and New Year’s Day, surpassing Google.
While there are many activities taking place on social networking websites like Facebook and Twitter, birthday (easy to remember the dates when other friends post messages) and holiday greetings appear to be eroding traffic away from the E-Greetings category.
Posted by Heather Dougherty at 05:23 PM
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In Categories Egreetings | Facebook | Social Networking
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