Blognomics – Written by David Lee (Nuffnang Australia)

Universal McCann’s Global Social Media Wave 4 report

Universal McCann has been running an annual global social media tracker report for the last four years.  The Wave reports started in 2006 (Wave 1) and now in it’s fourth year, the Wave 4 report has shown some key insights on Bloggers and Social Networkers.

• Internet global audience has grown with over 625million active internet users.
• Blogging has nearly reached saturation in terms of total numbers, with 71% reading blogs (read blogs), a small increase from 70% last time out.
• However, number of people that have started a blog has increased to approx. 40%… up from approx. 32% in 2008.
• Blog participation has increased strongly with number of people leaving a comment on a blog site increasing to over 50% in 2009.

Social Media Wave 4 - Reach Over Time

• Social media platforms are becoming more multi-media.  The number of bloggers and social network users who have uploaded photos, videos, music and widgets has continued to rise.
• Thirty-two per cent of bloggers have uploaded video, an increase of 8%.

On the question for Blog writers only: ‘‘When writing your blog what topics do you normally post?’’  There was an interesting observation between Wave 3 (2008) and Wave 4 (2009) on the shift of blog posting behaviour in the type of content.

Social Media Wave 4 - Blog Post Content

“It had to happen.  The days of posting written commentary on a blog, going to a separate site to upload images or video and then managing your network of friends via a third location were always limited.

The days when a consumer would either restrict him or herself to just one of these activities or go to three different sites to upload content are disappearing. The decline or stasis in the use of separate blogging or photo-sharing sites suggests that social media is being rationalised. The addition of new functionality to platforms originally designed to serve each of these areas also highlights their convergence.

Bloggers, for example, are no longer restricting themselves to text: they are adding images and video as well as music and widgets to their prose in ever greater numbers.”

If you’re interested in more, you can find the PDF report here.