TwitsMag Canada

Article Source: Mashable

While the World Cup remains at the top of the Twitter charts again this week, entertainment (especially of the American variety) has muscled its way back into the running with two big movie releases and the 2010 BET Awards.

As always, our partners in data at What The Trend have provided the complete chart below. Because this is a topical list, hashtag memes and games have been omitted from the chart.

You can check past Twitter trends in our Top Twitter Topics section as well as read more about this past week’s trends on What The Trend.

Top Twitter Trends This Week: 6/26 – 7/2

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Rank	Topic	Top Index This Week	Previous Peak Index	Description
#1	FIFA World Cup	1	1	The United States, England, Mexico and a number of other popular teams are out. Next step, the quarter-finals.
#2	Harry Potter ()	1		The full-length trailer for “Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows” was released.
#3	2010 BET Awards	1		Annual awards show hosted by TV network B.E.T. Chris Brown () performed a rendition of the Michael Jackson () hit “Billie Jean” as in tribute to MJ. Prince recieved a lifetime achievement award.
#4	The Last Airbender (Movie ())	1	8	“The Last Airbender” is a movie adapted from Nickelodeon’s animated series “Avatar: The Last Airbender.” It is in theaters this weekend.
#5	NBA Draft	1	3	60 players were drafted by the NBA this week. John Wall was the #1 pick in the draft.
#6	Philippine Inauguration	1		President Benigno Simeon C. Aquino III of the Philippines took his oath earlier this week at the Quirino Grandstand, Manila to become the official 15th President of the Republic of the Philippines.
#7	Edward Scissorhands	1		Rumor is that Tim Burton’s movie, starring Johnny Depp, is getting remade with Robert Pattinson as Edward.
#8	NBA	1		LeBron James, one of the top players in the league, became a free agent this week, and people are wondering what team he might sign with.
#9	Drake	1		“Oh You Fancy Huh” is a quote from the new song titled “Fancy” by Drake, off his debut album “Thank Me Later.”
#10	Super Junior	1		The leader of Super Junior (a popular boy band in S. Korea) is having his 28th Birthday.

The “forced follow” bug discovered on Twitter earlier this week gives us yet another way to gauge which Tweeters are the most popular.

For those who didn’t see the exploit, the bug allowed a user to force another Twitterer to follow his or her account, just by tweeting “accept [username]” (i.e. “accept HuffPostTech”).

Word of the glitch spread quickly over Twitter, and users rapidly began exploiting the bug to force others to follow them (although Twitter later undid any of the forced follows).

Data from the auto-follow glitch reveals whom users were most eager to have follow them and offers another way to measure who are the most popular people on Twitter.

Rowfeeder has compiled data to create a graphic showing which Twitter users received the most “accept” requests (see the chart here).

Check out the top 20 Tweeters who received the most “forced follows” in the list below.

Interestingly, @BarackObama got just a quarter of the requests @Oprah garnered, and was out-ranked by @JustinBieber, @LadyGaGa, and @PerezHilton, among others

1. @Oprah
2. @LadyGaGa
3. @JustinBieber
4. @ConanOBrien
5. @PerezHilton
6. @Aplusk [Ashton Kutcher]
7. @BillGates
8. @KimKardashian
9. @JoeJonas
10. @Ddlovato [Demetria Lovato]
11. @NickJonas
12. @PhillyD
13. @BarackObama
14. @BritneySpears
15. @JimCarrey
16. @SelenaGomez
17. @TaylorSwift13
18. @HugoGloss
19. @YelyahWilliams
20. @KevinJonas

Article Source: The Huffington Post

VANCOUVER – Canada is a hit with Twitter followers of guidebook publisher Lonely Planet in the wake of the Vancouver Olympics, according to a poll conducted this month by the Canadian Tourism Commission.

Almost three-quarters of the 735 respondents felt Canada was No. 1 in the world among countries that “have it all,” including wilderness escapes, cosmopolitan cities and a friendly population, said a CTC news release.

As well, just over 60 per cent felt that more people are now considering Canada for their next vacation as a result of the Olympics.

The unscientific poll of the international publisher’s Twitter audience was intended as a “temperature check post-Olympics,” said CTC publicist James Loftus.

The commission released the poll results Thursday along with picks by Canadian Olympic athletes for “gold medal” vacations.

Alexandre Bilodeau, winner in the 2010 men’s moguls, chose Victoria: “I went there recently for training and went cycling, road biking, surfing and played hockey all in the same place, which is great.”

Jon Montgomery, who won in skeleton, said his idea of a gold medal itinerary is to go home to Russell, Man.Continue >>>

Article Source: SFGate

Most Americans know about Twitter, but the vast majority of people don’t use the microblogging service because they don’t see the need, according to a study released this week.

The percentage of Americans who have heard about Twitter exploded from 5 percent in February 2008 to 87 percent in February 2010, nearly equal to the 88 percent who are aware of social-networking king Facebook, according to the report by Edison Research.

Most of that awareness increase came last year after Twitter received mass market exposure from celebrities Oprah Winfrey and Ashton Kutcher and from news outlets such as CNN.

Yet only 7 percent, about 17 million people, actually use Twitter, according to the study. Twitter Inc., however, says 40 percent of its 105 million registered members are from the United States.

Still, the Edison report said Facebook, which has more than 400 million users worldwide, remains the clear leader.

“Twitter has really yet to articulate its value to mainstream Americans,” said Tom Watson, vice president of strategy and marketing for Edison Research, which also conducts exit polling during elections.

Edison has taken the pulse of Twitter, launched in San Francisco in 2006, each February since 2008, but has not released its data until now. The newest information was extrapolated from a telephone survey of 1,753 Americans ages 12 and over conducted in February.

Among the other results, Edison Research said:

– Twenty-four percent of Twitter users are African American, double the percentage of African Americans in the overall population. “Many of the trending topics on Twitter on a typical day are reflective of African American culture, memes and topics,” the report said.

– Fifty-one percent are white, 17 percent Latino and 3 percent Asian, while 5 percent were listed as “other.”

– Forty-eight percent have a personal profile page on Facebook, MySpace, LinkedIn or other social network, compared with 24 percent in 2008.

– Twitter users are more likely to live in higher-income households and more likely to have college degrees.

Also, the research showed only 15 percent would stop using Twitter, and 19 percent said they would cut back, if Twitter added targeted advertising to its service.

For Twitter, that result could be vital to its future because the company last month launched a business model hoping to generate revenue from “promoted tweets,” Twitter messages that are sponsored by businesses like Sony Pictures and Starbucks Coffee Co.

In other news, Twitter on Friday released its first official app for mobile phones that run on Google’s Android platform. The app works with Android 2.1 and above. The company recently purchased the maker of a popular iPhone app and plans to re-release it as Twitter for iPhone.

And Amazon.com Inc. said a software upgrade that will be sent in late May to owners of its Kindle e-reader devices will include the ability to directly share book passages with friends on Twitter and Facebook.

trendistic.com

Trendistic is one of many tools that allows users to track trends taking place on twitter. It gathers posted tweets,  filters redundant ones and compiles the rest into one-hour intervals. Twitter users can enter any 2 or more word phrases and search how its frequency fluctuate overtime resulting in a visualization of what is popular and what is not among Twitter users, and how certain events are reflected or even predicted by the microblogosphere. Trendistic provide hourly, daily, weekly and even monthly charts to follow up with trends and keep all of us updated on the history and future of a certain trend during a specific span of time.  Do not hesitate to search any topic your interested in to see how other people react to this topic as well.

Article Source: Mashable

Some think Google Buzz could be the next huge social platform. Others think it’s one big privacy nightmare. With its launch week drawing to an end, we pinged our friends at Crimson Hexagon for analysis of Twitter user’s opinions.

The results, not surprisingly, are incredibly mixed. 16 percent of the tweets analyzed were characterized as positive, while 14 percent simply express curiosity. The much talked about privacy issues that Google has already moved to address garnered 15 percent of the tweet activity, though a full 50 percent either don’t like Buzz or are already claiming to be done with it. Somewhat surprisingly, 6 percent expressed loyalty to Twitter in their comments – a sign that some view Buzz as a competitive threat.

The overall buzz, one way or another, has been plentiful. According to another analytics firm – Trendrr – Buzz garnered more tweet volume than Google’s Nexus One launch, with a peak of nearly a quarter of a million tweets on Tuesday.

Article Source: direct traffic media

Social networking sites are continuing to absorb more of people’s time online as Facebook and Twitter grow in online dominance.Global analysis conducted by Nielsen Online found that consumers spend over five and a half hours on social networking sites per month on average. The results from December 2009 showed a dramatic increase of the amount of time spent using social sites from previous years.

In the last two years the average amount of time spent on sites like Facebook has more than doubled, with the average user spending just two hours and ten minutes a month on social networks in December 2007. By December 2008 that had risen to just over three hours a month, but the 2009 figures show an impressive 82 per cent increase since the previous year.

The take-up of social media users is growing as more people join the online phenomenon, but importantly, networks like Facebook are retaining their populations and encouraging people to spend significant amounts of time online each month. Two thirds of global social media users visited Facebook at least once a month, with the average user spending six hours a month on the site.

From an online advertising perspective, harnessing the marketing power of captive audiences on social networks is a smart move for those companies experiencing high traffic volumes. In the US the total minutes spent on social sites increased by 210 per cent year on year.

Twitter continued to be the fastest growing social site online with a 579 per cent growth in the US alone, one of Twitter’s most prolific markets.

Article Source: Tech Crunch

For several months now, all we’ve heard is how Twitter’s growth, once rapid, is flatlining. And all indications are from the various third-party measuring sources is that this is true. But Twitter co-founder Evan Williams just tweeted a little surprise for everyone today: Apparently, yesterday was Twitter’s highest-usage day ever. And today will be even bigger, he continues.

While this is very interesting, it shouldn’t be all that surprising. Twitter’s new growth may be stalled, but the users that are already on the site seem to be using it more rabidly than ever. Remember too that a lot of the third-party measuring sites do not count the people who access and use Twitter through the service’s APIs. That means that all the mobile clients, all the desktop clients, and also all those who simply use Twitter via text message are not counted.

The fact that there was nothing that huge happened news-wise yesterday is also a good sign for Twitter. Unless Twitter users are directly correlated with those who care about Mark McGwire and/or steroids, it would seem this was just a naturally huge day. Twitter is no stranger to seeing spikes of growth during huge events (Michael Jackson’s death, for example), but that doesn’t seem to be the case here.

All that said, Twitter’s lack of web growth remains an issue because at the very least it means that there are probably less people signing up for the site than there once were. But some new numbers from Hitwise in December indicate that Twitter saw a bump (4%) in the right direction once again. Obviously, they’re going to want to build off of that.

Twitter’s news follows the news that another hot web property, Foursquare, saw record numbers recently as well.

6S Marketing, a Vancouver-based Internet marketing firm conducted a survey to its database of over 10,000 people on their use of social media.

Here’s some interesting data from 6S Marketing,

• 70% of Canadians say they use social media.
• Facebook is the most popular social networking site with 70% of people surveyed currently having an account.
• 47% of Canadians use Twitter and the majority of users are 19 – 25 years of age.
• Only 20% of people surveyed currently use MySpace.
• YouTube & Flickr are the most popular social media sites with 38% & 29% (respectively) of people surveyed using the sites.
• 42% of Canadians do not blog, while 58% do blog.
• 74% of people who blog, do so for personal purposes, 57% blog for work and 35% blog for both.
• 9% of people surveyed have hired an employee online and 22% have received a job offer online. 69% have done neither.
• 61% of businesses said they track what people are saying about their brand online.

Article Source: princanada.com