You are more likely to be reading this than sleeping (statistically)
Posted by Jan in 
That’s right. Also more time than you employed folks happen to be working.
“Citing a new Ipsos OTX study of 7,000 online consumers ages 13 to 74, Friend said that thanks to smartphones and laptops, people are now spending one-half of their waking days interacting with media, and have increased their media consumption by an hour per day over the last two years. That’s more time than they spend working or sleeping,”
The implications of this are obviously momentous for social media advertising. According to a recent 2010 study, the average American watches only four hours of television a day, compared to over eight as recently as 2006.
So, is it the multimillion dollar television campaign consumer products manufacturers want to look at, or the riskier but much more rewarding social media campaign, with easily accessible analytics, clickstream and continuous presence?
Twitter’s upcoming move on analytics
Ross Hoffman of Twitter’s Business Development team has recently announced plans to release a free analytics dashboard in the last quarter of 2010. The dashboard will have full functionality for those looking to see how their network functions in terms of retweets and the overall effectiveness of their communications. Tools for analyzing individual users, networks and influence will be included.
Although the service was announced at a summit for sports management, it is sure to be of use to all sorts of businesses seeking to interact through twitter. Now analytics will be available past abstract measures of success beyond followers and number of retweets.
The decision is an interesting one on twitter’s part. The company, which has had trouble with coming up with monetization as part of its business plan, is currently planning to offer the new analytic functions for free. The question is, will it stay this way? It wouldn’t be surprising to see Twitter rolling out another version of the analytic software with improved functionality a few months down the line, or starting to charge for the current analytics package (although this would likely cause a loss in good will that would be dangerous for a social network company)
Photo courtesy of Keven Lin