Twitter reported 175 million accounts as of Sept, 2010, with monthly visitors to Twitter.com between 20 to 26 million per month in 2010.  These numbers are inflated due to duplicate accounts, international users, “Twitter quitters” and the fact that many visitors to Twitter.com are simply reading public tweets and not truly using the service.

emarketer predicts 20.6 million US adults will access a Twitter account at least monthly in 2011, +26.3% vs. last year. Double digit growth will continue through 2013, when nearly 28 million adults will be Twitter users.  Twitter captures about 10% of US female internet users and 7% of US male internet users Twitter was more popular among younger adults. (Pew)

I’ve been quiet on Twitter for the last six months due to the time to stay on top of both Facebook, Twitter and other news sources.  I’ve chosen to stay active on Facebook due to the strong connections I have with friends on Facebook.  Who finds a way to stay active on both social networks?

2010 is a milestone for online advertising.  For the first time ever, online advertising surpassed newspaper advertising (including both online and print editions).  I remember the days when online advertising was so far behind newspapers…early/mid 2000’s.  Now it seems obvious that online would surpass newspapers.  Here are the charts and article from emarketer.  In the article, you can see yearly growth rate since 2005 for each medium.

One note:  Emarketer is a tool I’ve used since 2004.  Great product Geoff Ramsey!

There’s a free site – compete.com – that let’s you see the trend of monthly traffic to a website. It’s as easy as entering in a few urls and getting the results.  I use this all this time to show clients:

- what’s possible – what kind of traffic does a site like theirs get?  What could they aim for?

- what is the competition’s traffic?

- What sites would be great partners? Think link juice for SEO or shared content.

3 compete

Here’s an example:  One of my clients, Harvard Varsity Club, is a booster organization for Harvard Athletics.  Last year we improved their website (harvardvarsityclub.org) and they grew membership 20+% and the endowment +80%.  Their site has fewer than 5,000 visitors a month.  A great partner for them would be gocrimson.com, the Harvard Athletic site, with over 4X the traffic.  Of course, what about harvard.edu, the main University site that has 2 million visitors a month, or hbs.edu, with 250,000 visitors.   Many potential HVC members visit these sites.  Links between these sites would increase traffic and drive major improvements in search engine results!

A free tool to gain insights on your competition or partners.  Just another idea for your brands!

Julie

Over six weeks in the summer of 2010, I worked with a small team at Lutheran Church of the Good Shepherd to update their positioning, logo and web presence. With the blessing of Pastors Samuelson and Rudi, we had amazing collaboration between groups I’ve trusted for years –  Inizio Creative and May Advertising and Design – to create a major turnaround in the church’s image and communications.  The key transformations were:

- Message: After several key workshops, we determined the most important message to communicate: Together…Seeing a new way….Reaching with hope.

- Logo: working with May Advertising, we kept a past element (the shepherd head outline) while updating the logo to communicate the new message.  The result is a logo that reflects the community’s vibrancy and history!

- Website: We worked at rapid speed to change the www.goodshepherdmpls.org with the objective of to energizing the community to come and participate. We aimed at two targets: those new to the community, making the website an invitation where they would want to clickthrough to learn more. To current community members, we wanted them to see themselves at the church and use the site as a valuable tool.

More to come: We’re close to capture streaming video, we’re adding SEO (search engine optimization) and adding group and calendaring tools.  Lots more to come to make this the invaluable tool the community needs!

The results: In just three weeks, Good Shepherd has had over 1100 visits and nearly 7000 pageviews. Time on site is over four minutes! And the community members have felt the change:

Stay tuned for more breakthroughs to come!