No Power Outage? Twitter Still Takes the Grammys

 |  written by  |  Features & Tips
0

Did you watch the Grammys this weekend? From debut performances to Hunger Games like costuming, the program was as much a string of concerts as awards show. As usual, we took a look at what was happening across the web during the show. Humor me while I geek out for a moment, because this is super interesting. First, some overall social trends:

  • Twitter drove the most Grammy related activity during the show, much like post-power-outtage Super Bowl. Tweeting was 20% more popular than commenting on Facebook and drove 2X more social referrals than the other social services combined.
  • Check out the velocity of social mentions related to “Grammys” below. In general, social mentions taper off as the show goes on potentially in favor of more specific commentary.
  • The most shared moments during the show were Chris Brown’s Snub of Frank Ocean, Ellen Degeneres’ reaction to Katy Perry’s dress and Justin Timberlake’s performance. (Note: these moments were the most shared, not necessarily these particular links)

grammy_velocity

This word cloud shows the most popular terms used in social mentions during the Grammys. So, the more emphasized the word the more popular it was in social commentary, searches, clicks, etc. Not surprising that people were buzzing about who was nominations, fashion and performances. Look a little closer and it’s interesting to note that despite not being part of the show Miley Cyrus and Britney Spears are mentioned. Despite winning a non-televised award, people were all about Rihanna. And, Lena Dunham’s appearance – merely attending with her Grammy winning boyfriend after cleaning up at her own awards shows – didn’t go unnoticed.

Screen Shot 2013-02-11 at 9.08.17 PM

We’re fortunate at AddThis to have unique insight into what’s happening on the web during events like these. I love to see what I’ve missed by comparing my own ideas to what was keeping the web buzzing. Hope you enjoyed the show!

Super Bowl Recap

 |  written by  |  Features & Tips
0

Now that the victory parade has wrapped up, it’s time to recap this year’s Super Bowl. This year’s game definitely will be remembered for the power outage, the big lead the Ravens built, the great comeback that fell just short for the 49ers and, of course, the ads.

The Power Outage
The 34 minutes the Superdome in New Orleans was dark created huge buzz as everyone’s eyes moved away from the game and on to their 2nd screen devices. Brands took advantage of that moment and leveraged Twitter to promote their messages (e.g. Oreo “dunking in the dark”). Users leveraged Twitter, too – engagement  increased 34% during the power outage.

power_outage_sm

The Game
Buzz during the game was dominated early by the Ravens as they jumped out to a lead. The 49ers stormed back after the power outage but fell short of the comeback. Social mentions of the two teams during the game reflect that momentum swing.

teams_sm

The Ads
Coke and Gildan were the big winners in their respective categories for immediate social buzz after their ads aired, but it was Budweiser and Calvin Klein that sustained the highest brand lift from the game. Calvin Klein has also maintained the highest brand lift since the game. Mentions dropped only 35% since Sunday where mentions of Gildan have dropped 87%.

top_food_sm

top_retail_sm

Summary
Based on social mentions, our interests were piqued by content related the following terms during Super Bowll XLVII.

sb_tc

Getting Excited for Super Sunday?

 |  written by  |  Data Trends
1

It is that time again for America’s favorite sporting event, the Super Bowl. The ads, the halftime show, and of course the game all come together for a 4+ hour event that is celebrated with friends, family and food.

As we did last year we took a look at our data to see which brands are getting the most pre-game buzz and to see if the same data can help determine who is going to win the game.

Many brands have already released teasers to their Super Bowl ads and we took a look at two particular brand verticals to see if one brand is outperforming the others.

cars_pre_superbowl

Mercedes Benz ad which stars Kate Upton has helped Mercedes jump out to an early lead among many contenders.

food_drink_pre_superbowl

Budweiser which had a very popular pregame ad last year is again leading the pack with their ‘Lucky Chair’ teaser

Unlike last year’s game where the majority of Americans wanted to see the Giants win, this year the country is more divided at least geographically.

super_bowl_2013

We are split right down the middle, but the geography only tells a small part of the story. The 49ers are generating 20% more buzz than the Ravens in the US, which if last year was any indicator, predicts a San Francisco victory.

As for the food we are going to consume on game day, it looks we are looking for low cal recipes by Guy Fieri on Pinterest and shopping for food at Costco.

super_bowl_tc

I hope everyone enjoys the game and festivities. Come back on Monday to check out the advertising winners and losers and other in game social reactions.

Introducing Individual Share Counts

 |  written by  |  Features & Tips, What's New
2

Today, we’re happy to offer new buttons for Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, Reddit, Delicious, VK, Linkedin, and Odnoklassniki, with individual share counts.

These new surfaces demonstrate the popularity of your content on the top social networks.  We retrieve share counts directly from each service’s API; data is cached and loaded asynchronously for optimal page load performance.

We’ll be integrating additional service counts in future releases (and we’d love to know which services you think we should add next).

Toolbox Support and Icon Sizes
Both horizontal and vertical toolboxes are supported, with 16×16, 20×20, and 32×32 pixel icons.

Horizontal Toolbox Examples:

If you already use AddThis, you can start using the individual share counters horizontal toolbox with this HTML snippet:

<!-- Horizontal toolbox -->
<div class="addthis_toolbox addthis_default_style addthis_32x32_style">
  <a class="addthis_counter_facebook"></a>
  <a class="addthis_counter_twitter"></a>
  <a class="addthis_counter_pinterest_share"></a>
  <a class="addthis_counter_reddit"></a>
  <a class="addthis_counter_linkedin"></a>
</div>

Vertical Toolbox Examples:

If you already use AddThis, you can start using the individual share counters vertical toolbox with this HTML snippet:

<!-- Vertical toolbox -->
<div class="addthis_toolbox addthis_floating_style addthis_32x32_style">
  <a class="addthis_counter_facebook"></a>
  <a class="addthis_counter_twitter"></a>
  <a class="addthis_counter_pinterest_share"></a>
  <a class="addthis_counter_reddit"></a>
  <a class="addthis_counter_linkedin"></a>
</div>

In both cases, if you’re not using AddThis already, you’ll also need to include our JavaScript file:

<!-- AddThis code -->
<script type="text/javascript" src="http://s7.addthis.com/js/300/addthis_widget.js”></script>

You can get these counters without registering, but if you’re not already an AddThis user and you’d like to receive analytics about how your content is being shared, you’ll need to create an account. It just takes a minute to set up!

Read our full documentation for more information.

Got questions or comments? Know which services you would like us to add next? We’d love to know what you think!

AMD + AddThis: A Case Study in Platform Pairing

 |  written by  |  Features & Tips
2

We have been building infrastructure around real-time analysis of big data sets since 2006. Back when “big data” wasn’t a thing. Now, we process up to 300 terabytes of data per month. This is an unprecedented amount of incoming data that we process in real-time so it can be made useful and actionable for all of you.

Processing all of that data in real-time daily and optimizing for the fastest possible delivery of content and service puts extreme pressure on the hardware that supports it. Check out this case study put together with AMD about how we work together to ensure massive processing capabilities even in the face of record setting social sharing events like the 2012 Olympics – which passed last year’s Super Bowl as the most social sporting event by 106% with 4.95 million shares!

AMD Case Study Pic

 

 

Site of the Week: Narrative.ly

 |  written by  |  Features & Tips
4

This week’s Site of the Week highlights a brand new site –  Narrative.ly - launched in September of this year. As they describe in their About Us section, they are a “platform devoted to original, true and in-depth stories.” Each week has a theme and every day, a new article is posted relating to that theme. Currently, Narrative.ly is only in New York but plans to expand to other cities soon.

In our modern 24-hour media world, with constant streams and up-to-the-minute (and not always accurate) breaking news, it has become hard to drown out the noise. Good stories about everyday people and appreciating the little things are fewer and far between. That is why we wanted to share Narrative.ly with you, because we believe these are the stories worth sharing.

Narrative.ly uses an AddThis scrolling vertical bar with our large 32×32 icons. It fits nicely with their clean, simple design while also adding a bit of fun and encouraging the reader to share.

We hope you check out their stories and share them too! We also hope you have a wonderful holiday season.

Solutions for our WordPress Publishers

 |  written by  |  Features & Tips
6

WordPress continues to be one of the most popular platforms with a diverse landscape of many great blogs and other publishers. This is why we’ve put so much focus in making our AddThis social tools easily accessible for the WordPress community.

Recently, we launched a page on the AddThis site highlighting and summarizing the current solutions we support for WordPress. This includes our web-leading share buttons as well as some additional engagement and traffic driving plugins.

If you ever have any questions about any of our WordPress plugins, please do not hesitate to reach out.

Does Social Behavior Vary By Vertical? An Analysis

 |  written by  |  CEO's Corner, Data Trends
2

Given how social continues to evolve quickly, I thought it would be interesting to look at several representative publishers leveraging our social platform and assess what’s happening in the social space overall.  To keep things simple, I’ve selected a large publisher (based on uniques) in three verticals.  Internally, our deeper analyses have shown each to be representative of the aggregate of the vertical with respect to social behaviors of their users.

Through our AddThis social platform, we empower publishers to provide and track all kinds of social activity on a site – from copy and paste of the URLs and text in page to posting to social services to printing/emailing.  We have provided these social services for five years and are now installed by publishers on 14+ million active domains touching 1.3B unique users monthly.  We are 10x our closest social tools competitor and, as a result, have an exceptional view into web-wide behaviors.

In this analysis, we assessed:

Shares – a user sending content to their friends / social graph (via sharing button, email or IM)
Clicks – a user shares, then another user that sees that share clicks on the link (or, if you prefer, a clickback)
Profile of Action – a breakdown of service or share type of the social behavior.

Here are some topline insights from the analysis…

-News sites see the highest virality (as measured by clicks over shares), then e-commerce and food.  News sites tend to have short shelf life, highly viral content, such as articles around Frankenstorm, crimes or Olympic victories.

-The e-commerce site exhibited lower virality than the news site, but greater proportion of emailing and printing.  We didn’t reflect it in the analysis but the shelf life of the content was longer. This is likely because this site had more expensive, considered purchases.  The food site exhibited greater pinning but the lowest virality overall.  The content shared were recipes and exhibited the longest shelf life.

What is interesting is not only how much users are sharing but how they share, and how the preferred mechanism for sharing changes by vertical.  Alexis Madrigal of The Atlantic touched on this in his piece called Dark Social: We Have the Whole History of the Web Wrong.  While his title implies something ominous, it’s a scientific reference to dark matter being all around us.  In our analysis, users are clearly aware of how public/private they are, why they share and what social brands or tools satisfies their need(s) based on their current task.  Facebook is the mental anchor for social, but user behavior varies, and is both locked-in and evolving.

Learned behavior – The simple act of copying and pasting an URL drives significant traffic across all categories.  It also remains one of the most impactful sharing mechanisms (as measured by virality, e.g., URLs shared by copy/paste exhibit the highest clickback). This behavior is different by medium (mobile vs PC) but is ingrained into consumer behavior.  The profile of copy/pasters varies greatly (it’s exhibited, for example, by casual up thru heavy users) and has become a habitual behavior that isn’t changing over time.

Evolving – Pinterest’s growth has been extraordinary.  As Pinterest adoption grows across categories of publishers, we are seeing specific verticals adapt faster to quickly changing user behavior.   Pinterest has been working to enable easy pinning, and AddThis rolled a pinning tool back in July.  We continue to see social behavior evolving, and Pinterest won’t be the last.  Sites and technologies that solve a pain point or make actions easier will be adopted.  Innovative companies like Sulia recognize that social is maturing and are attempting to build mass niche social communities.

There are interesting implications of this changing consumer behavior.  On the one hand, consumer habits are hard to change.  On the other, social activity is maturing and fragmenting rapidly.  If you look at AddThis global stats, Facebook represents ~50 percent of social activity to 3rd-party social services.  However, when you include social activity such as copy/paste of the URL, the percentage decreases significantly.

Stay tuned, we’ll touch more on questions this raises next . . .

An Introduction to AddThis Analytics Profiles

 |  written by  |  Engineering, Features & Tips
2

One of the most powerful features of AddThis analytics is our profiles. These allow you to separate analytics collected under your account however you want. In this post, I’ll explain how to create new profiles in your account, and then give a couple examples of how you can use them.

Creating a new profile

Creating profiles is really easy. Just go to http://www.addthis.com/settings/publisher and click the “Add Profile” button.

Profile Manager Screenshot

Then, enter the name for your new profile and click “Add”

Profile Creator Screen

This will create a profile with that name and create a random profile ID that’s associated with that profile. A couple things to note:

  • Profiles can have the same names
  • Profile IDs can’t be changed

Now that you’ve got a profile you can click on the name of the profile to edit its settings.

Profile settings page

Here’s a quick explanation of these settings:

  • Email Reports: When checked AddThis will send you weekly analytics reports for this profile
  • Alerts: This allows you to set email alerts for when shares, or clicks change for the entire profile, a specific domain that this profile tracks, or for a specific URL tracked by this profile, as well as adjust the frequency.
  • Sharing: You can share the profile with anyone who has an email address and give them either full control over it or just allow them to view the analytics.
  • Blocked Websites: If your profile ID is somehow used on a domain that you don’t want reports for you can manage that domain here.
  • Email Templates: This section lets you create specific email templates that are used when someone shares using our email system. More information on email templates is available here.
  • Content Feeds: These allow you to create RSS or JSON feeds for shares, clicks, and trending content for this profile.
  • Applications: This allows you to manage which iOS or Android apps can use this profile.
  • Labels: These allow you to group profiles together and see a roll-up of the analytics collected with these profiles. More on these later.
  • Bit.ly Shortener Settings: This allows you to set a specific Bit.ly login and API key on our servers. Then you’ll just have to configure your page to shorten using Bit.ly
  • Delete Profile: Just what it says – you can delete the profile if you don’t need it anymore.

Some ways you can use profiles

As a consultant

Profiles provide consultants with a way to both monitor the effectiveness of their clients’ sites and give their clients a way to keep an eye on things.

First, create profiles for each of your clients. Then, share those profiles with the relevant stakeholders for each client. If you want, you can group these clients by using labels based on their industry, the type of client, or the level of support they’ve purchased. Then you can generate reports for each one of these labels.

As an editor

If you run a site with multiple contributors, profiles can give you a way to get detailed information about how well each contributor’s content is performing, as well as seeing an overall view of what links are generating the most social traffic.

Just create profiles for each one of your editors. Then adjust your content management system to put that editor’s profile ID on their stories. You could also share these profiles with the editors so they can make use of the analytics to increase social sharing.

As an online store owner

If you run an ecommerce site selling multiple types of product you can get more granular information about sharing by using profiles. Create profiles for each product or group of products and use your theming system to set the profile ID.

One Caveat

Unfortunately our application plugins don’t currently support assigning different profiles for different criteria. To set a different profile you’ll have to add this to the page:

<script type="text/javascript">
var addthis_config = addthis_config||{};
addthis_config.pubid = 'THE PROFILE ID';
</script>

Just replace THE PROFILE ID with the relevant profile ID.

If you’ve used multiple profiles on your site, let us know how! If you have any other questions about profiles, don’t hesitate to reach out.