NZ Facebook stats: December 2011

NZ Facebook stats

If there’s one thing that’s marked about New Zealand’s online activity, is the sheer dominance of Facebook over other platforms.

Facebook’s estimated New Zealand reach today was “2,100,220 people who live in New Zealand”, according to Facebook. The data also reveals over 54% of users returned daily – that’s at least 1,134,118 daily users of Facebook.

That’s a lot of people.

And they’re not just logging on – they’re participating. The data shows there are 15 million Kiwi wall posts made per month, 85 million comments a month left around the site, and 192,000 check-ins a month.

Here’s the data, courtesy of Facebook:

New Zealand Facebook data

Tips to viral content

Problogger has released an infographic based on research from Noah Brier, Blueglass and Future Buzz that talks about how to viral content.

It’s a good graphic, but he’s obviously trying to viral a gfx which could better service the audience by just writing it out! Don’t get me wrong – his tactic is working – the graphic has just been featured on Mashable.

It reminds me of the chatroulette love song. For those of you who missed that out, video is below. In a nutshell, a Danish Masters student named Rune Iversen was researching what would make a video viral. He had a theory that you needed someone cute to front a video that evoked a strong emotion from the watcher. The video (below) he made to test his theory has had over 5.7 million views to date.

“Make something that gives people a story that they feel. Make people happy, make sure your content is good,” Rune says, adding that it must be genuine.

“Every bit of it is real,” he told reporters. “We were on Chatroulette and she came up randomly, after having filmed for about 10 minutes, and we had choreographed it meticulously and we just played the song for her.”

The chatroulette love song:

YouTube’s trends manager Kevin Alocca also has some great insights about why video virals. Speaking at a TED event, he said that the most popular clips often had unexpected or suprising content, were pushed by alpha influencers, and were easy for members of the public to contribute to and own.

Tips for helping content to go viral:

  • The content is worthy of being shared; It is funny, incredible, unbelievable, deeply emotional, makes us think. It evokes a strong reaction from us.
  • The content is easy to find; it’s on platforms we already use, or is shared with us by trusted sources
  • The content is easy to share; sharing buttons are attached, it is embeddable
  • The content works – the links aren’t broken, the video loads properly, it’s readable, images render nicely, pageload isn’t through the roof
  • Here’s Problogger’s infographic:

    Sharing trends

    Mashable recently posted a block infographic released by Clearspring based on AddThis data, but I found it hard to read as it was so big and oddly spaced. I’ve recut the graphic slightly, but the data is all there. No infringement inteded!

    Here’s some sharing trends from the last five years of data collected by AddThis: