Friday Social Round Up: Google gets Social, MySpace Sale, 200 Million Tweets a day

Google Gets Social

This week Google unveiled it’s latest attempt at Social Media Google+. Google are not afraid to admit that it’s previous attempt at social, Google Buzz, was not very successful.

Dubbed Googles’ answer to Facebook, Google + turns the whole of Google into a Social package due to a mass of social products and the new black navigation bar that allows you to share things from every aspect of Google. The concept behind Google+ is to create a more natural way of interacting online based on how we interact with each other in the real world.

Google+ has some very unique features, such as video chats with up to 10 friends as well as allowing you to group your contacts into different ‘Circles’ and update them accordingly. For example if you have an update or some photos that you only want a certain group of friends to see you can select the group and broadcast only to that circle. It is also possible for your stream to update only with information from one of your circles.

Google Analytics Goes Social Too!

As previously mentioned Google as a whole is becoming more social and this extends to Google Analytics. New tools have been added to Google Analytic and Google Webmaster Tools for tracking the impact that tweets, likes and +1s have on your website’s traffic. Obviously Google Webmaster Tools now include a “+1 Metrics” section, which provides a report displaying the impact of the +1 Button on search. This new tool will also show the affects +1 has on your website’s click through rate. Not only does it track the number of +1s given on a page but it also measures the click through rate with and without +1 annotations.

What is possibly more useful is Google’s new Social Plugin Tracking tool for Google Analytics. The plugin compares the impact of different types of social actions on your website, tracking +1s, tweets and Facebook likes amongst other social actions.

These tools will give website owners a better insight into how social media impacts their website.

Twitter users tweet over 200 million times a day

Twitter has reached a new milestone, it’s users now send 200 million tweets per day.

Less than 18 months ago twitter users were sending 50million tweets per day, a 500% increase from 10million tweets a day six months before that.

Twitter, estimated to be worth $10 billion, is growing at rapid pace but still has a fraction of the users of it’s rival Facebook.

MySpace sells for $35million

It was announced yesterday that Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp has sold MySpace for $35 million to Specific Media.

News Corp purchased MySpace’s parent company eUniverse in 2005 for a reported $580 million, approximately $327million of which was attributed to the value of MySpace.

MySpace dominated the US and global share of social networking users in the mid 2000s until Facebook and Twitter overtook it. Myspace has around 70 million users compared to Facebooks 600 million active users.

US advertising agency, Specific Media, teamed up with singer, Justin Timberlake to buy MySpace. Together they are set to take a stake in the social networking site and help shape the future of MySpace.

The Current State of Social Networks

This weeks infographic offers some informative statistics. It shows which social networking sites are on the rise and which are in decline, as well as the demographics of people using apps, which networks are favoured by each sex and where the wealth rub virtual shoulders.