A recent study by Pear Analytics sought to determine the content of what is being posted to Twitter. They took 2,000 tweets in English from the public timeline over a time span of two weeks, with 200 tweets captured each half-hour from 11am – 5pm CST daily. They then categorized tweets into six different types: news, spam, self-promotion, pointless babble, conversation, and pass-along value. Pointless babble won with 40.55% of the sample.

The Pew Internet and American Life Project has released a survey that indicates that the share of online adults who watch videos on video-sharing sites has nearly doubled since 2006. In addition television and movie watching are now an online experience for a third of internet users.

A recent Nielsen Company study has confirmed that the percentage of Twitter users 25 and younger is significanty lower than the percentage of the same group on the web as a whole. This indicates that Twitter’s recent growth is fueled completely by adult users which runs counter to most people’s intuitive sense that young people are mavens with all things social media.

A study by the market research firm PhoCusWright indicates that travelers who select and purchase their travel options online spend over twice the amount of those who execute the entire process offline. This does not necessarily mean that online travelers spend twice as much per trip but they spend twice as much annually. So, in fairness, it could mean that the online traveler is a more frequent traveler than their offline counterpart. However stats like these place continued emphasis on the online channel for destination marketers.

I read an interesting article on HotelNewsNow.com about whether and how hotel owners and operators should respond to reviews of their facility on sites like TripAdvisor.  The article was interesting for two reasons:

It provides clear direction on what is usually a vexing question for the hotel
The information came from a discussion amongst the members of [...]

Facebook’s Social Ads Platform publishes statistics on the demographics of its audience for the sake of people looking to use their ad platform. I’ve embedded the full spreadsheet of data below but the surprising thing that jumps out is that the young users are declining at a rate of almost 20%. Some theories as to why this is so include:

Sometimes I have to post things just because I want to remember them. This is a great article by Hollis Thomases listing the variety of services that allow for self-service online ad buying. Ok we all know that the search engines allow us to do this but there are scores of other services as well. We have not tested all of these and there are certainly many pitfalls out there but for research’s sake this list is a good place to start.

A recent report by the Pew Research Center’s Internet & American Life Project has indicated the mobile internet usage is higher than many may have thought with an interesting demographic leading the way- African Americans.

Forrester Research released their “Five-Year Interactive Marketing Forecast Report” that projects a 17% compound annual growth rate (CAGR) for interactive advertising. Read the full article to get highlight stats and a chart from the report.

Ok I think we are all aware that MySpace, once the king of the social media landscape is falling back into something pretty close to irrelevance. But that does not apply to entertainment traffic right? It’s still a big driver there isn’t it? Not.

Check out these stats from HitWise that show that MySpace has been steadily declining in the amount of entertainment-related traffic that it drives: