December 24, 2011

Twitter Media Darling of 2011

First published on Technorati by Adi Gaskell.

Yesterday it was revealed that Facebook was visited by over 50% of the global web using population last month.  Such popularity has not translated into media popularity however.

HighBeam Research has released data today revealing the media popularity of various social networks, and Twitter has come out on top in 2011.  The microblogging site received nearly 50% of all press coverage about social media in 2011.

Twitter edged Facebook into 2nd place, earning more coverage every month of the year except February and April.  Twitter also received much more favorable coverage than Facebook throughout the year.

While Facebook mainly hit the news because of privacy concerns, celebrities such as Ashton Kutcher ensured Twitter received a regular stream of positive news stories as the press flocked to the site to find out what the world’s famous faces were saying.

This shift has forced Facebook to respond, rolling out its profile subscribe feature in a bid to encourage celebrities and other famous faces to use the site to interact with their legion of followers.  So far this move has had limited success, although they can count on people such as Britney Spears and Nicole Ritchie as regular users.

Outside of the big two press coverage was limited.  Professional networking site LinkedIn came 3rd with a paltry 3.33% of media attention this year.  Most of this was due to the companies flotation over the summer.  MySpace languished in 4th spot with just 1.3% of coverage, with the majority of this focusing on how poorly the former social media champion was now doing.  Foursquare went largely unnoticed by the press, garnering just 0.71% of press coverage on social media.  Google+ was not included in the data for this year, but seems certain to make a bigger splash in 2012.

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