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The UK Social Media Landscape

Running a social media campaign is a great way to get lots of visitors to a website but its very hard to target the campaign to a particular country. If your goal is to generate links, buzz or blog subscribers then worldwide traffic is fine but what happens if you are primarily interested in local visitors?

In the past most people have used Digg, Reddit and StumbleUpon as the main networks to seed a viral article or blog post and this week I loaded up Google Trends to see which of these was biggest in the UK. As you can see below the daily traffic figures are nothing to get excited about and traffic to all of them seems to have dropped a lot in the UK during 2009.

Social media sites

However what is exciting is the chart below which includes Twitter data. Judging by these figures Twitter is the best place for doing a viral campaign to target UK users.

Social media sites

Of course Facebook is still by far the biggest site but it’s not really a link sharing site in the same way as Twitter & the other social media sites are.

London leads the way

According to The Telegraph London leads the way with social media and Digg is quoted as saying:

Nearly 10 per cent of traffic to news recommendation site Digg comes from London alone, making it the top city worldwide. A Digg spokesman said: “Nearly 10 per cent of traffic to Digg is from London and the UK is our second largest country next to the US.”

Apparently London is the largest city on Twitter too:

Last month, Evan Williams, Twitter’s chief executive and co founder, said that London is the service’s “top Twitter-using city”. Talking to BBC’s Newsnight, he said: “We have definitely noticed the UK has exploded for us recently… London is our top Twitter-using city.”

Whether this is testament to the way we use social media or the way all BT IP addresses seem to resolve to London remains to be seen.

BY Patrick Altoft AT 9:08pm ON Tuesday, 29 September 2009

Patrick Altoft is Director of Search at Branded3 and has worked in the SEO industry for over 10 years. With experience across some of the worlds largest brands as well as startup businesses Patrick is well known in the industry and speaks regularly at the major SEO conferences and events. Follow Patrick on Twitter or Google+

Comments

  • http://www.justinparks.com justinparks

    Interesting points to see graphically Patrick. Twitter is definitely gaining momentum in the UK and its obvious from the above that the sites such as digg, stumbleupon and reddit are declining in the traffic, but I would guess that it depends on the reason behind the message your are sending out that will have the final and ultimate effect on it.

    While Twitters traffic is dwarfing the other networks it works and reacts in a very different way to the social bookmarking sites and they all have their failings and merits.

    I guess its not time to quit on them, or indeed give up on them, the traffic is still pretty substantial, though a close eye needs to be kept on them, most definitely.

  • http://www.blogstorm.co.uk Patrick Altoft

    I think the interesting thing with sites like digg is the potential to get your content in front of new people while twitter is very much about putting your content in front of groups of friends who have some kind of link to you and your friends. Both great methods but totally different.

  • http://www.crearedesign.co.uk Nicola

    It’s interesting to view the trends in this way Patrick. Like you and justinparks say however, each tool serves a slightly different purpose. I guess at the end of the day though it’s the traffic that matters if you are after a large audience > you use the tool which will get you the most exposure. For this reason it makes sense that the relatively ‘new kid on the block’ Twitter is where all the hype is right now, anything fresh and new which is adopted by the media in general (as has been the case with Twitter and Facebook in the UK) is bound to climb in popularity.

    I think a lot of users of social media are choosing to concentrate on just one or two different networks (posting quality content) rather than trying to keep up with ten different networks all at the same time (with less available time to spend on each the emphasis is on quantity, thus building a less meaningful ‘identity’ on each)… thoughts?

    Where will we all be flocking to this time next year? Will Facebook and Twitter continue to flourish or will we all get bored and move on? I suspect there will be something new and shiny.

  • http://www.linkedin.com/in/robertjnicholson Robert Nicholson

    I found the recent Twestival in London very enlightening as to the potential audience of Twitter in London- in that I’ve been to the first two, and whilst they’ve gotten bigger and bigger, the audience there has become more and more diverse.

    Case point – several people at the most recent one had only just joined Twitter to attend the party (as they recognised the old fashioned value of networking & open bar!)
    Others joined & didnt really “know” the internet, but knew that they had to be seen/heard at such events & be able to say they were on twitter.
    And ironically I only met 1 (out of 1,500) other SEO there… most were PR’s, Journo’s, TV/Offline people & Startups.

  • http://www.tag44.com tag44

    Thanks for sharing the social media link with the comparison of the social media graphs.

  • http://www.adamus.nl Barry

    London, eh? Right. I live in Belfast, Northern Ireland. When I use my AOL broadband at home (yeah I know – blame my girlfriend) I register as a visitor from London. I’m pretty sure there are vast numbers of internet users who register as coming from London merely because of how their ISP has set things up. So you might want to take that geographical data with a couple of tonnes of salt.

  • : Joe

    I found the recent Twestival in London very enlightening as to the
    potential audience of Twitter in London- in that I’ve been to the first
    two, and whilst they’ve gotten bigger and bigger, the audience there has
    become more and more diverse.

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