Maybe it’s time for a wrap up of ’08: Winner for the social media of the year would be … Twitter, I guess … With 5000 to 10 000 new users everyday, about 5 millions new users have joined twitter in 08. I’ve attached for reference hereunder the full study by Hubspot, if you have haven’t already seen it.
“A year ago Twitter was a relatively small community of techies and Web 2.0 geeks, now it is going mainstream,” the report said.
“Twitter is not only being talked about and used by a lot more people, but more and more marketing industry events and conferences are using Twitter as a standard means of communication,” it said.
HubSpot said 35 percent of Twitter users have 10 or fewer “followers” — people who subscribe to receive their 140-characters-or-less messages — while nine percent of Twitter users follow no one at all.
The average number of followers for a Twitter user is 70, it said, and the average person follows 69 people.
The report said Twitter traffic was the highest on Wednesdays and Thursdays and dropped off by about 30 percent over the weekend.
Source
And what now if you want to look for someone ?
For a long time, finding new people to follow on Twitter was really painful. But recently, Twitter relaunched the search engine for people, which is way more efficient (if people have given their real name).
http://twitter.com/search/users
Another tool that appeared recently : The Twitter Grade, which measures the reach and authority of a Twitter user
http://twitter.grader.com
Pretty convenient to sort out people.
Especially since they released a very interesting ranking – the Twitter “Elite” : http://twitter.grader.com/topusers
Chris has already covered in the past tools such as twellow to identify users
In the news category : http://www.twellow.com/category_users/cat_id/50)
In the bloggers category : http://www.twellow.com/category_users/cat_id/78
Worth to be mentioned : this wiki with people from the media on twitter.
http://mediaontwitter.pbwiki.com/
I also liked very much Twitdir, which seems to be off for maintenance these days …
http://twitdir.com
And to conclude, the shorty awards indicated by Erica will also be a good way to explore new contacts.
http://disruptionblog.com/?p=559