Dan Zarrella is the award-winning social media scientist and author of four books: “The Science of Marketing,” “Zarrella’s Hierarchy of Contagiousness,” “The Social Media Marketing Book” and The Facebook Marketing Book. He has a background in web development and combines his programming capabilities with a passion for social marketing to study social media behavior from […]
Most modern marketers know that Instagram can be a powerful marketing channel if you know how to use it. Unfortunately it’s lacking a bit in the analytics department. So I made PicStats, a free tool that allows you to analyze any Instagram account, yours, your friends’ or even your competitors’ accounts. You can get data […]
If I say the word “meme” around a group of web savvy people, the first thing that will come to most minds is an image macro–a photograph overlayed with funny text. A sort of meta inside joke that gets passed around the internet. Things like Good Guy Greg, Success Baby or Grumpy Cat. And while […]
When I’m speaking at a conference, one of the most common questions I’m asked is what do I think the future of social media is. I’m not great at distant future predicting, but I do believe the story of the present and near-future of social media is visual content. From the impact of images and […]
Using a database of 11.4 million posts published by just over 24,000 of the most liked Facebook pages, dating back to 2010 and earlier, I was able to analyse the performance (in terms of likes) of the four most common post types: Photo, Video, Link, and Status (text only posts) over three and a half […]
Selfies are pretty cool, everybody’s posting them. Merriam-Webster just added the word Selfie to the dictionary. The most retweeted tweet ever posted was a selfie from the Oscars. If you’ve heard the latest novelty dance music hit #SELFIE you’ll recall that the song’s protagonist ponders aloud which filter she should use, X-Pro II or Valencia. […]
More new ReTweet data! In the past few weeks, I’ve looked at quotes and hashtags and images. This time I decided to look at Tweet-length, in characters and it’s relationship to ReTweets. The data set is up to 1.4 million randomly selected Tweets, from 1.2 million different accounts. I found that Tweets between 100 and […]
Continuing my new research into ReTweeting behavior, I also looked at non-alphanumerical characters and their relationship to new-school, native, ReTweets. Using a dataset now more than 1.2 million Tweets strong, I found two particularly impactful characters, which when present in Tweets tend to correlate with those Tweets being more likely to be ReTweeted: quotes and […]
I collected a dataset of more than 400,000 randomly selected Tweets and the number of times each tweet received a “new school” (native) ReTweet. I then compared 4 of the most popular ways to send images to Twitter: Facebook image links (images hosted on Facebook’s CDN, fbcdn-sphotos-h-a.akamaihd.net), Instagram, Twitpic and Twitter’s own, native image uploading […]