*supercollider

Twitter FTW!

Seriously though, if you have been wondering why your client/boss/mother was asking “what is our Twitter strategy?” (despite your 17-24 audience being completely MIA from the platform) here is one answer. It’s our fault.

According to Nielsen Blogpulse, Twitter now gets a mention in 1.2% of all blog posts on the web. That’s 50% more than Facebook, and 4x more than MySpace.

This domination of our attention is despite the fact that Facebook is still:

• 5-10 times the size of Twitter (19 million users for Twitter.com vs 200 million users for Facebook, question is how many people only use Twitter via mobile or desktop apps and never the website)
• Making big headlines, like say hitting 200 million users, and making huge headway with older audience segments and international markets
• A much more viable marketing platform at this stage (in my opinion, anyway)

So what accounts for this obsession with our favourite micro-blogging platform?

For starters it’s the growth rate. Twitter grew a staggering 1382% in the U.S. last year. Even more scary, traffic to Twitter.com nearly doubled in March alone.

Then there’s the natural attention that all the celebrities are bringing to the party, especially the recent TV-friendly advocacy from Ashton and Oprah. Ashton went from 7,800 to one million twitters in less than three months.

The big question now is clearly “what next”? Is the celebrity endorsement poised to push Twitter into the mainstream? Or are we looking at the next Second Life?

It’s an unfair comparison in the sense that Twitter already has more penetration than Second Life ever did, but it’s reasonable in the sense that Second Life’s true near-term potential, especially as a marketing vehicle, was blown way out of proportion to any sense of reality.

But it made for great articles and TV, and the bandwagon grew, and then seemingly overnight everybody looked around and said “uh, what?” and that was that.

I suspect Twitter is not Second Life, mainly because it has hit a certain critical mass, is growing meteorically, is easy to use, and has a utility as well as entertainment value. However I’m still not sure it’s slightly overblown.

Here’s another couple of fun charts from Google Trends. Note that these following charts show search results instead of blog posts, which is a key and important difference as we’ll see in a sec.

This first one shows a couple things. First is that Twitter has gotten a lot more attention from people than Second Life ever did. Except that literally all of that attention has come in the last three months. Which maybe means “about to be mainstream” and maybe means “bubble”.

This second chart shows searches for Facebook, MySpace and Twitter:

Although Twitter has overtaken Facebook in both news references and blog posts, Facebook is still massively more popular in terms of what people are actually searching for on Google. It’s an interesting comparison, although possibly this can be slightly explained away by way of illustrating how terrible Facebook’s search engine is. Although on the other hand, it correlates nicely with Facebook’s real usage vs Twitter.

So there is your buzz showdown concluded, with Twitter taking the victory despite Facebook coming in as the heavily favoured incumbent. Let’s visit again in 6 months for a rematch. Though at that point who knows, Twitter may be part of Facebook.

Last question for the debate, and I’m asking this seriously because I’m not sure I get it: why couldn’t Facebook’s status updates simply replace Twitter?

• You already have your whole social graph set up on Facebook.
• There are permissions controlling who sees what.
• It’s where you manage all the rest of your social life, including photos, events, etc.
• There is a rich development platform allowing Facebook to be used for all sorts of things
• The same people and brands that are getting on Twitter to promote things are also building their own branded Facebook pages. Which have status updates, just like Twitter. But also a ton of other functionality.

I scratch my head a bit about this. Twitter is definitely fully optimized to do one thing well, but it just seems easier for Facebook to replace Twitter than vice-versa. And so the question is whether the tens of millions of people already on Facebook would simply use Facebook to do their status updates / twitterings, or whether they really do need a new platform in Twitter. Does it all come down to volume control, and is Facebook simply not good enough at this?

Curious to hear your thoughts!

So in part I of this look at brands and Facebook apps, it quickly became clear that while there are lots of fans creating apps around brands on Facebook, very few brands are creating their own apps and getting any traction.

How few? Out of the top 4000 apps, I counted just 40 that were created by big-name brands themselves. And out of those 40, once you cut out simple extensions of existing web 2.0 services (like iMeem or Reverbnation), then you’re left with a grand total of 12.

12 out of 4,000. That’s 0.03%.

Considering all the talk about brands trying to get social media, that’s pretty dismal results.

On a more positive note, lets look at the potential results if you get it right:

#1 Travel Channel - Kidnap!

The most popular app in our list is a social game promoting cable television the Travel Channel, and comes in as the 30th most popular app on all of Facebook, with a staggering 2.9 million monthly average users.

Rapp Collins case study has a good synopsis of the goals and results for the game. Beyond the brand exposure on Facebook, a game mechanism that drove people to get clues from TravelChannel.com saw an eye-watering 81% click-through, increasing site visits 28% and page views 38%.

Launch: July 2008
Current MAU: 2.9 million (30th overall)
90-day high: 3.2 million

#2 TripAdvisor - Cities I’ve Visited

TripAdvisor’s “Cities I’ve Visited” is one of the more familiar examples of a successful branded Facebook app. The proposition was simple: easily create a map of the places you’ve traveled, and share it with friends.

By getting in early back in 2007 and providing an easy to use and compelling mechanism for identity expression on Facebook, TripAdvisor were rewarded by an install base of 7.8 million people at its peak, driving 6.7% of all traffic to their site.

However as BusinessWeek points out, there’s a an equally key lesson to be learned from TripAdvisor’s subsequent effort, a quiz app called “What Obnoxious Traveler Are You?”. After a month it had a meager 500 users, which is where most apps end up. It’s not a science by any stretch.

Launch: July 2007
Current MAU: 1.9 million (49th overall)
90-day high: 1.9 million

#3 A&E - Parking Wars

Business Week wrote about the Parking Wars app a year ago, in March 2008, when A&E was searching for a way to generate buzz about it’s new series Parking Wars, and reached out to area/code to tap into social media.

A year later and it’s still chugging along with hundreds of thousands of monthly users. Gamasutra has a good write-up on what makes it an effective social game.

Launch: March 2008
Current MAU (monthly average users): 224,987
90-day high: 307,792

Other metrics: 250,000,000 page views in two months, 30-40% players active in a given day (from area/code)

#4 TripAdvisor - Local Picks

TripAdvisor’s second app in the top 4,000 is a much more modest success, with just 16.8k monthly average users, down from a high of 100k in December 2007.

Local Picks is billed as personalized recommendations from your friends, with 2.4 million reviews of 535k restaurants.

Launch: November 2007
Current MAU: 16,788
90-day high: 33,500

#5 A&E - Possem Tossem

A&E has followed TripAdvisor into the territory modest sophomore success that fails to get the lightning to strike twice.

While Parking Wars is still going strong a year later with 250k users, Possem Tossem, launched in December to promote the Exterminators, peaked at 70k users before sliding down to just under 20k.

Still, the reality is even those numbers make it one of the most successful consumer brand-owned apps on Facebook. Mainly because there just aren’t that many. So kudos are still deserved by A&E for continuing to experiment and get results.

Launch: December 2008
Current MAU: 19,708
90-day high: 60,586

Takeaways

A few thoughts from these case studies:

• When you get it right, the results can be fantastic
  The top apps above have incredible stats. Huge, sustained monthly traffic from users opting in to engage with these brands, and helping spread the word with their friends. Plus, there is massive traffic being driven back to the brand websites. These apps are more effective than a banner campaign ever would be.
• There’s a huge gap between the winners and losers
  If you just looked at the top 3 case studies in a presentation, you’d think that branded apps were the holy grail. However, between the #1 to #5th most popular apps, there is a massive drop-off in usage. And below that, it starts to look ugly.
• It’s not a science
  A&E and TripAdvisor, who had very successful hits with their first two apps, struggled with follow-ups. Even if you’ve done it once, doesn’t mean you can do it again. Success with brand apps is by no means guaranteed.

In the next post, we’re going to look at every single branded app I could find, and see if we can look at whether there are some models emerging on how brands are using Facebook apps.