Phil Bradley's weblog

My library related Twitter lists

Twitter lists are a really powerful tool, but one that lots of people don't seem to know about. Basically you can add an account to a list that you create. You don't need to follow the person, but it's really easy to just add people when they start following you. Start off by going to https://twitter.com/your_name/followers and you'll see a list of people that are following you. Each person will be in their own little box with a 'Follow' option and next to that, 3 vertical dots. You can choose to follow the person (obviously) and you can also click on the 3 dots. This will give you an option of adding people to a list - 'Add or remove from lists'. 

If you click on this you may find absolutely nothing - this will be the case if you haven't set a list up yet. Simply choose the option to create a list and then call it whatever you would like to. For example, I have lists for 'UK Librarians', 'Search Engine accounts' 'Libraries' 'Friends' and so on. You can make the list publicly accessible or you can keep it private. Once you've set up a few of these lists you can then start adding people to them. One account can be added to multiple lists if so desired, so I'll quite often add someone to my UK librarians list and also my Schools library and librarians list as well. 

Unfortunately you can't just tweet TO a list, but you can see tweets FROM that list. That's really useful if you've spent the day being busy and just want to catch up on what a particular segment of the people that you've listed have been tweeting about. You can either do this directly from the Twitter interface or you can add lists to packages such as Hootsuite. Simply click on your avatar at Twitter.com and the second option will be 'Lists'. Click on that, see the lists you've got, click on one of them, and lo and behold - just tweets from the accounts on that list. 

Of course, you'll quite possibly be on some lists yourself. Click to go to your profile and in the top menu is a section called unsurprisingly 'Lists'. Click on that, then choose 'member of' and you'll see what you've been added to. What you can also do, which is very neat, is to subscribe to any of those lists or others that you find. This means that you don't have to actually follow all of those people - the list will appear in your own collection (though of course you can't add people to it since you don't own it), but you can then just see the tweets from the accounts on the list. So my UK librarians list currently has 1915 accounts on it and you can find it at https://twitter.com/Philbradley/lists/uk-librarians and if you want to, you can subscribe to it. It currently has over 300 subscribers - so this means that you can automatically see what these accounts are tweeting without having to follow them all. 

If you have any questions, do post them. However I'll try and answer a few before we start. You can create as many as you like, with as many members as you want. I do seem to recall a limit of 5,000 but I could be wrong on that. You can keep them private or public. I don't think you can force not being on a list, but of course you could ask the list owner to remove you. You're entirely free to add people, even if you're not following them. Your lists, your choice. 

I've got lots of lists - you can see them at https://twitter.com/Philbradley/lists/ and feel free to subscribe to and use any of them that you want to. The ones that might be of particular interest are:

UK Librarians and this is my guesstimate from people who follow me that they're a)library folk and b)based in the UK. I may be wrong on either or both counts!

School libraries and librarians is a list of school library accounts and school librarians where I've been able to identify them as such. Global in coverage.

Libraries from around the world which could be public, academic (university etc), specialist - anything except school.

Library Associations is a list of professional or voluntary groups that are obviously library related.

There are plenty of others, many of which won't interest you, but feel free to take a look. 

 

Icerocket social media search engine closing its doors

Sad to report that Icerocket, which has been around for years, is finally closing its doors. There's a note on the home page which says "Icerocket.com will be shutdown permanently on March 8th, 2017. Please switch over to other search engines. Thank you for all the years together!" No reason has been given for the closure.

On the other hand, Socialmention* has reappeared. I feared that it had died, but it's suddenly come back online, though what the story behind its comings and goings is I don't know!

Another social media search engine dies

Thanks to my correspondent Sam, who alerted me to the fact that it seems another social media search engine, Smashfuse, has died. I wrote about this one back in May 2014 and it was a neat little search engine, providing access to a wide variety of social networks with results delivered in a tile based format. Not one that I used a great deal myself, but it's always sad to see more engines disappearing. 

Social Mention search engine dead?

It looks as thought Social Mention - real time search engine may well have died. I've been trying it every day for the last week, and I have been unable to reach it. I've tried a few of the services to see if the site is up or down, and they've all come back and said that it's unavailable. This will be a real blow to social media searchers, as it's always been an excellent engine, and it will be sorely missed if it has closed. There have been a few queries on their Facebook page, but no response from the company. If anyone knows anything official - please add it into the comments!

Metro 5 - a basic search engine with a twitter tweak

Metro5 is fairly straightforward in that it's an engine that just searches the web or news. It then displays the top 50 results that it finds in a basic text format. The unique point that it has is that you as the searcher can rate a site, by saying that you like it or dislike it, and 6 different reasons why that may be the case. Your ranking is confirmed by tweeting the rank for everyone that you follow to see. That's what makes this one interesting, since you could easily set up a filter and/or edit your tweet to allow other people to follow it. It would be great at a conference for example if someone was able to do that - of course you could just tweet it, but this is a nice simple way of doing that for you.

However, other than that, it's a very basic engine with the usual search functionality that you could expect. 

40 Social media statistics

If you're a trainer, educator, librarian or geek, statistics on social media are a must. Here are a few that I've found recently, together with sources. 

1) Global Active Internet Users now totals 3.175 Billion, that’s nearly half of the world’s population (7.357 Billion).

2) As for Social Media, there are over 2.206 Billion active users, a global penetration of 30%.

3) There are 3.734 Billion Unique Mobile Users as of this quarter, accounting for a 51% worldwide penetration. 

4) 1.925 Billion users utilise their mobiles for Social Media platforms.

5) Social Media users have risen by 176 Million in the last year. 

6) 365 Million active mobile social users have been added over the same time span, an incredible total growth of 541 Million.

7) Facebook adds ½ million new users every day; 6 new profiles every second. An ever-expanding market worth tapping into.

8) Mobile users constitute half of the world’s population, and 2 million smart phones are sold worldwide every single day. 

9) 12 new active mobile social users are added every second, that’s 1 Million per day.

10)  WhatsApp has gained 300 Million new users since this time last year (August 2014), a year on year growth of 60%.

(From http://www.socialmediatoday.com/social-networks/kadie-regan/2015-08-10/10-amazing-social-media-growth-stats-2015)

11) 75% increase in Facebook video posts since 2014

12) 3 million videos shared on Facebook every day

13) 350 million stickers shared each day on Facebook

14) Tumblr has 230.5 million blogs

15) With 107.9 million posts per day

16) and 300 million unique monthly visitors

17) Instagram had a 50% growth between March/December 2014

18) with 30 billion photographs shared

19) and 70 million photographs posted per day

20) and 2.5 billion likes per day

(From http://www.shoutlet.com/blog/2015/05/visual-social-media-evolution-infographic/)

21) 8,195 tweets sent per second

22) 1,558 Instagram photos uploaded per second

22) 1,636 Tumblr posts created per second

23) 46,701 Google searches run per second

24) 92,841 YouTube videos viewed per second

25) 54,806 likes on Facebook per second

26) 1,120 hours of music listened to on Pandora per second

(From: http://www.adweek.com/prnewser/wp-content/uploads/sites/8/2015/03/internet-second-infographic.jpg)

27) There are nearly 1.4 billion Facebook users

28) 47% of all internet users are on Facebook is hit 5 billion times per day

29) The Google+ button The +1 button is hit 5 billion times per day

30) LinkedIn has 347 million registered members

(From:http://www.jeffbullas.com/2015/04/08/33-social-media-facts-and-statistics-you-should-know-in-2015/)

31) Approximately 81 percent of Twitter’s advertising revenue comes from mobile and there is a $200,000 cost estimated for a 24-Hour Promoted Trend on Twitter.

32) YouTube is expected to generate $5.6 billion in gross revenue in 2016. Currently, there are 6 billion hours of video watched on YouTube per month and 1 billion videos watched over mobile phones per day.

33) Flickr has over 3.5 million images uploaded daily by users

(From: http://smallbiztrends.com/2015/07/social-media-sites-statistics.html)

34) In an average month, 1.28 billion users are active on Facebook.

35) 30% of the U.S. population gets its daily news on Facebook. 

36) Twitter drives just over 1% of all website traffic. While that’s considerably less than Facebook or Pinterest, it’s more visits than are driven by StumbleUpon, Reddit, Google+, YouTube, and LinkedIn–combined. 

(From: https://www.meltwater.com/blog/35-stupendous-social-networking-facts-and-stats/)

37) 323 days worth of YouTube videos are viewed on Facebook every minute

(From: http://wp.me/p1vfs3-4lD)

38) 400 hours of video are now uploaded to YouTube every minute.

39) More online content is created every 2 days than in the whole of human history prior to 2003.

(From: http://www.havashivemind.com/2015/08/03/vidcon-2015-what-you-can-learn-from-youtube/)

40) The number of people watching YouTube per day has increased by 40% since last year

(From: http://www.networkedindia.com/2015/07/27/mobile-is-driving-half-of-youtubes-views-susan-wojcicki/)

Hope that you find those interesting - but remember, they're just statistics, and they mean whatever you want them to mean!

Tweet Binder - search Twitter differently

Tweet Binder is a really interesting tool which does a number of different things. Rather than bang on about them, let's take a look, using the example #CILIP hashtag. 

We get to see how many tweets there have been over the last month or so. The figures show us that the hashtag could have been seen over 25K times, by over 17K users. Really useful information if you need to see how far your message is actually going. 

The colours indicate original tweets, retweets, replies, links and pictures. You can narrow down the time period if you wish to using the small slider under the main image.

We can then look at individuals who are posting material. Who is most active, who generates the most impact (tweets x followers), who sent the most original tweets, not including retweets. This is also really helpful information since you can see who the key players are, the influencers and the people that you need to get on your side if you want help spreading your message. 

We can go even further into this information - who has the most followers, who retweets the most and who adds in the most images. 

There are other charts that show you how many contributors have tweeted how many tweets, and the influence of followers to contributors. Finally you can see what client people used to tweet, and there's a collection of images for the period in question.

This is an absolutely fantastic tool to really analyse what you're doing on Twitter and how effective your campaign is. Now, what I've given above is what's available for free, but as you'd expect there is a commercial element to the package, but it's really only companies with large budgets that are going to be interested; one month tracking for a term is €39.99 and that's the same price for a historical 30 day report. A professional plan with bells and whistles and unlimited searches and time periods is €218 and the event plan is €430. For most of us however, a straightforward search is probably all that we'll need. It's worth exploring and putting into your Twitter search locker.

The Tagged social network; not a good idea

I spend quite a bit of time trying out new resources as you know - I blog the good stuff, ignore the rubbish but seldom remark on it. However, I'm making an exception for www.tagged.com which states on its opening screen "Millions of people are having fun and making new friends on Tagged every day. You can too!" Always interested in trying out a new social network, so I signed up for it. What I didn't expect was a bunch of emails from them that sounded exactly like a a dating site. For example: "Phil, open this email for 12 people you should meet :)" and "Phil, these people clicked YES on you in Meet Me! :)" Oddly enough, lots of them seem to be very attractive nubile young ladies, and to be honest - I have my doubts!

Waste of time and space. Don't touch it with a bargepole.

Social Searcher

describes itself as a Free Social Media Search Engine and it's been around for a while; in fact I blogged it back in August of 2012 and thought favourably of it. It's now undertaken a really massive overhaul, and it's entered my list of 'social media search engines to watch'. You can use it without registering, but if you register, you can save your searches. Results are in three columns - Facebook, Twitter and Google+ - I haven't seen any other search engines give content in that mix before, and I found the comparision element really useful.

However, there is a lot more useful material than just recent postings. There's a helpful analytics section, with sections on sentiment, users, domains, types of post, keywords, popular results and much more besides. It does seem to have a few bugs - it didn't want to search for #hashtags - or if it did, it took so long I wasn't waiting any longer, and some of the results seem to be incorrect, but that could easily be because the tool they're using (eg Facebook search) is the one failing, not them.

In summary, it's a good addition to the collection of social media search engines out there, and worth a look.

Hashtagify.me for Twitter Hashtags

One of the things that does cause people problems with Twitter is the use of hashtags. I don't think that it's because they're difficult - it's because they can't believe that they're so easy to use! A hashtag is a controlled vocabulary keyword preceded by the hashtag (#) symbol. Except that it's not very well controlled, since people can just make them up for themselves to emphasis something - a little like emboldening or underlining, while others use them in a far more controlled manner in order to gather together tweets from an unknown group of people who are all tweeting about the same thing.

There are tools out there which help you make sense of them, and one such has Hashtagify.me which has a number of helpful features. You can simply put in the name of a hashtag, and it will find related tags, key influencers (those tweeting most and using the tag), languages and in the commercial version, more detailed analytics. They currently have quite a lot in Beta mode, and you can see an example of that below, and they're busy signing up people to get involved with their program. It's a really nice tool and if you're a keen Tweeter, something you should check out.

via hashtagify.me