10m UK consumers made mobile transactions in 2010

"A total of 10 million UK consumers made a mobile transaction in 2010 (equal to 23% of UK online consumers), but 83 percent of these experienced problems, according to a survey by Harris Interactive for online customer experience management (CEM) software provider Tealeaf.
The research shows that as smartphone adoption groups, UK consumers expect a faultless experience across all online channels, with 75 percent of online adults agreeing there is no reason why a mobile transaction cannot be completed on the first try.
Two thirds (66%) of online adults said they would be less likely to buy from the same brand via other purchase channels if they experienced problems conducting a mobile transaction.
Shopping is the most popular m-commerce activity (63%), followed by financial transactions (37%), travel bookings (34%) and insurance payments/purchases (23%)."
Source:  The Wireless Federation, April 2011
Note - presumably this includes app store purchases, purchases by SMS and so on, in addition to more high-profile spending with Debenhams, Ebay, Dominos etc.

80% of British mobile internet users under 25 use their mobiles to communicate with friends while watching TV

"How young people watch television is rapidly changing according to a new study of UK mobile internet users below the age of 25.
80% of those surveyed use a mobile device to communicate with friends while watching TV with 72% using Twitter, Facebook or mobile applications to actively comment on shows as they are watching them.
These are the findings of a study conducted by Digital Clarity (www.digital-clarity.com), a specialist digital marketing agency which polled over 1300 people under 25 from a cross section of the UK.
The trend known as ‘Social TV’ is popular with young people as it allows them to instantly comment on their favourite shows to friends in different locations via the web or mobile phone.
In the US, a joint Nielsen and Yahoo study late last year found that the trend is already well established with over 86% of mobile internet users choosing to communicate with each other in real-time during broadcasts. Now ‘second screening’ as it is referred to in the States has become common place in the UK too.
Rather than social networks and television competing for attention it seems that young people are happy to embrace both and use one to enhance their enjoyment of the other.
The UK study found that 34% described the trend as ‘fun’, 32% said it made television ‘more interesting’ with 42% mentioning the ‘community’ aspect of ‘Social TV’."
Source:  Research by Digital Clarity, revealed in a press release, 8th March 2011

Actual & predicted smartphone operating system sales & shares 2010-2014

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"Worldwide smartphone sales will reach 468 million units in 2011, a 57.7 percent increase from 2010, according to Gartner Inc. By the end of 2011, Android will move to become the most popular operating system (OS) worldwide and will build on its strength to account for 49 percent of the smartphone market by 2012 (see Table 1).
Sales of open OS* devices will account for 26 percent of all mobile handset device sales in 2011, and are expected to surpass the 1 billion mark by 2015, when they will account for 47 percent of the total mobile device market."

Source:  Gartner press release, 7th April 2011

Note - I normally steer well clear of predictions, but I've included this one because it's a good source and also it's a nice clear table

Yelp has 17m reviews and 50m monthly visitors

"Today the company has surpassed 50 million monthly unique users (as reported by their internal Google Analytics), up from 46 million the month before. And they have a total of 17 million reviews for venues around the world. CEO Jeremy Stoppelman says that the service is seeing a faster rate of growth for both contributions (reviews) and users than it has historically— in Q1, users wrote 2 million reviews, while most quarters average 1 million. In other words, even if some of these other services are gaining traction, it isn’t hurting Yelp."

Source:  Techcrunch, 4th April 2011

China's top 15 social networks

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Source:  TechRice, 8th March 2011
Note - lots more information on the TechRice site.
Caution - as it says on the chart, there's a bit of guesswork behind some of the numbers.  It's a good list of sites though.

2/3 of Spotify's free users are under 29

"Is Spotify’s free service drawing people away from piracy? Will Page from PRS for Music outlined a stat that starts to answer that question, during a speech to the IPsoc law society late last week. “Two thirds of Spotify Free users are under the age of 29,” he says. “Strong evidence that a significant part of ‘Generation Napster’ now prefer legal free.” Spotify has confirmed the figure with Music Ally."
Source:  MusicAlly, 5th April 2011

A list of social networks that get at least 1m visitors a day

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Source:  Google Trends for Websites data, reported by Pingdom, 25th March 2011
Note - Google is pretty secretive about how they collate their Trends for Websites data (e.g. do they use Doubleclick stats?  Google Analytics stats?) so perhaps treat the figures with a bit of caution.  It's a handy list of social networks though!

Factors that influence engagement with Facebook wall posts

"We looked at three primary success metrics in relation to Wall Posts:
Comment Rate: number of comments as a percentage of fan base
'Like' Rate: number of 'likes' as a percentage of fan base
Engagement Rate: a combination of the above factoring in fan base size
Key takeaways from the research include:
Post Timing (Hour): Brands that posted outside of normal business hours had 20% higher engagement rates on their posts.
"Promotional" Keywords: Which keywords are most engaging when running a contest, sweepstakes or other offer?
Post Length: Posts between one and 80 characters had, on average, a 27% higher engagement rate than posts with over 80 characters, yet accounted for only 19% of all posts.
URL Shorteners: Engagement rates are three times higher for posts that used a full-length URL, as opposed to a URL shortener."
Source:  Research by Buddy Media, reported in their blog, 6th April 2011

Social network Badoo has 120m members

"It's a 120-million-member social network that's adding over 300,000 users a day, with more than 4.3 million daily photo and video uploads, and seven billion monthly page views. It has Facebook's fastest-growing app, with 570,000 new daily users, making it the third-biggest app of all after FarmVille and CityVille. Hugely profitable, it's forecast to generate hundreds of millions of dollars this year, and is being aggressively courted by venture-capital firms valuing it in the billions. And it's run from London by a secretive Russian serial entrepreneur who has steadfastly refused to be interviewed or photographed. Until now.
[...]
Still barely registering in Britain or the US, the free-to-use network -- on the web and via smartphones -- is a mass phenomenon in Brazil (14.1 million members), Mexico (nine million), France (8.2 million), Spain (6.5 million) and Italy (six million). Relying on word-of-mouth rather than any marketing spend, it has cracked the internet's eternal conundrum: how to persuade users to pay hard cash in a world drowning in free digital services and content, by charging members each time they want to boost their visibility to others searching for a date."

Source:  Wired, 6th April 2011

Lionel Messi acquired over 6m 'Likes' in his first 3 hours on Facebook - Updated

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Note:  We think that what's happened is that the old 'Messi' Facebook page was transitioned across to a new URL (Facebook.com/LeoMessi) and fans from his old board transitioned too.  There are also lots of other Facebook Messi pages like this one and this one.

Update 28th April - As of today he has 10,257,816 fans - so he has been adding approximately 1m fans a week, and these figures are real.

"I’m happy to get a few new likes a day on my Facebook profile, but not Leo Messi. He joined Facebook just a few short hours ago and now has over 6 and a half million fans and he’s not done yet. Just in the process of writing this article he’s already jumped up another 10 thousand.
Messi’s Facebook page was flooded with fans after he joined the site this morning, getting over 12,000 likes on his first wall post alone. It’s unclear at this point why Messi fans are flocking to his page in such numbers but at this point he actually has more fans than his sponsor Adidas who only has 1.8 million fans! Currently his page has over 6.6 million Likes in the just over 3 hours that his page has been active."

Source:  The Next Web, 6th April 2011

Advertising group Interpublic owns approximately 0.4% of Facebook

"Advertising group Interpublic Group owns a stake in Facebook that could be valued at roughly $200 million to $300 million, The Financial Times reported.
The exact size of the stake has not been disclosed, but people close to Interpublic say it owns slightly less than a half percent of Facebook, the newspaper said in its electronic edition. Interpublic paid less than $5 million for the stake in 2006, the newspaper said.
Interpublic's stake of 0.4 percent would be worth $200 million, based on a Facebook valuation of about $50 billion, the newspaper said."
Source:  Reuters, 4th April 2011

Note - Interpublic includes Initiative, McCann, Lowe, Draftfcb etc - full list here

119m twitter accounts follow at least one other person, but only 1.5m follow more than 512 people

"Fortunately, we know someone with full access to Twitter's API. Even more fortunate, this person took it upon himself to have an engineer write up some code and actually count the real number of users on Twitter.
Well, that's sort of what he did. What he actually did was look at follower/following statistics, to see how many users are following or are followed by a certain number of people.
Using data that is now just one month old, he found out that…
There were 119 million Twitter accounts following one or more other accounts.
There were 85 million accounts with one or more followers.
With these figures, and Twitter's claim of 175 million accounts, a little subtraction shows us that there are 56 million Twitter accounts following zero other accounts, and 90 million Twitter accounts with zero followers.
Those are some interesting figures, because they show us Twitter is much smaller than the "175 million!" number might lead us to believe.
But they still don't answer our question: How many active users does Twitter have?
To get close to answering that question with this data, we have to take a guess at how many accounts an "active" Twitter user follows.
At Facebook, a company source tells us, they believe that a user is not going to end up sticking around unless they make friends with 10 people.
So let's say an "active" Twitter user is someone who follows at least 10 other accounts.
How many such "active" Twitter users are there? Our source's API data shows that there are 56 million accounts on Twitter following 8 or more accounts. There are only 38 million following 16, and just 12 million following 64.
Your author, by the way, follows 700 people. There are only 1.5 million accounts on Twitter following 512 or more accounts."
Source:  Data unofficially collected from the Twitter 'firehose', reported by Business Insider, 31st March 2011