The other day the always informative journalism blogger Malcolm Coles showed how UK newspapers were doing a bit of SEO by stuffing their web-pages full of Patrick Swayze results and tags. This follows Malcom's earlier analysis that the Daily Mail had become the UK's most popular online newspaper....thanks to its coverage of Michael Jackson's death (on another note, check out how the Mail is copying right wing blogs in the US with its Obama coverage).
This was demonstrated by Comscore earlier in the year when it showed that most UK newspapers get 50%+ of their visitors abroad and now Robin Goad of metrics firm Hitwise has weighed in on the same theme.
Robin's stats show that a number of UK sites rank highly in the top 200 list of media sites in the US. This includes BBC News (no 21), The Daily Mail (no 47), The Daily Telegraph (no 74) The FT (115), The Times (131) and The Guardian (134) - I'm surprised the latter isn't higher given its attempts to lure like minded latte drinking liberals in the US.
There's been a more modest growth in Australian visitors to UK sites, but then organisations like the BBC already started with a high base being the 13th most popular news site in Australia.
It's the demographics that should spark the most interest with US brands. Wealthy Americans (household income $150k+) were the most likely to visit UK news sites, and those visitors are most likely to be based in California and New York
Perhaps more curiously, the least wealthy Americans (under $30k) were the second most likely to visit and Robin wonders whether this is due to immigrants and students.
Similarly, Experian's stats show that "aspiring contemporaries" and "affluent suburbia" over-index in terms of US visitors to UK news sites.
Useful stuff for US marketers looking to target wealthier consumers. Though for those of us working over here...now we do all tell our clients that a large chunk of those X million visitors who saw our campaigns are not from these shores...don't we?
Image, Robin Goad Hitwise
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Or so says the result of a Penn State study in the States.
Researchers led by Jim Jansen, associate professor of information science and technology, and Twitter chief scientist Abdur Chowdhury looked at half a million tweets. 20% of them were apparently people 'asking and providing' product information. Assuming three million tweets a day, that would translate into 600k posts daily of direct relevance to brands.
I initially found that % on the high side, though 'providing product information' is a definition that's wide enough to include any tweets about a product or service - I went to this restaurant today, I bought this mobile phone and so on. I guess it is true that as a personal broadcasting system we do use Twitter to talk about stuff we buy or like / dislike a great deal.
Case in point I've - almost unconsciously - made some kind of comment about four different companies since the weekend.
According to the study authors, the large amount of brand data on Twitter can pretty much provide you with a sentiment map if you monitor and analyse tweets over time: What do your customers and non customers think about your product, what features are going down well / not so well, and how are your competitors faring.
One to add to our list for internal clients of 'what is Twitter good for?'
Image - marc.benton
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Dirk Singer
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