Whilst I appreciate that people share content in a variety of different ways, I have focused my efforts solely on Twitter. I thought the site would give a good indication of how much content people are sharing without requiring the immense amount of time that would be needed to analyse several social networks and bookmarking sites.

The results of my three month study are interesting. On average, each of the IT trades are tweeted about 2,868 times a month. The Register is the most tweeted about IT Trade, racking up 21,719 tweets by its readers per month – more than 7.5 times as much as the average. And almost 37 times as much as the least tweeted publication.

By comparing the average number of tweets with the number of unique users that Google’s DoubleClick Ad Planner says each each publication receives, I found that just 4.18 per cent of each publication’s readership is tweeting links to articles. Computer Weekly has the highest percentage, with a possible 9.06 per cent of users tweeting about articles on the site. However it’s likely that both figures are much lower in reality, as people may tweet more than one link each per month.

Interestingly, IT PRO has the most followers on Twitter, with 12,901 people following its account. The average IT trade has 3,748 followers. This suggests that the number of people following a publication’s Twitter account isn’t the only factor that impacts how much content people share on the social networking site.

A whole host of things can encourage people to share content – frequency of tweets, relevancy and newsworthiness of content on the site, whether or not social sharing buttons are available on the site, which buttons are on offer, where the buttons are positioned, the size and type of readership that each publications has, and of course, which social networks they use most.

What are your thoughts on this? What do you think makes people want to share content? And how can publications encourage more visitors to share links with their network.

For the past few months we have used Twitterfeed to herald new blog posts by Speed staff using the @speedcomms Twitter feed, but recently we have experienced problems with Twitterfeed’s service going down quite regularly. So we are now experimenting with Google’s service.

The ‘socialize’ feature uses Google’s new URL shortening service named goo.gl to push blog posts out on Twitter almost instantly. If also offers a couple of interesting options that are above and beyond what Twitterfeed currently offers. It allows users to turn the keywords that they have tagged their blog post with into hashtags, which can help more people to discover your tweets and blog posts by using Twitter Search. The service can also reduce the size of your tweet, making it small enough for other users to retweet and share with their followers.

But there do seem to be a few teething problems at the moment. As not all blog posts are tagged with keywords, some blogging platforms such as WordPress tag them with ‘uncategorized’. Currently Google classes this as a proper keyword and has been tagging tweets with the #uncategorized hashtag.

Will scores of users now migrate from Twitterfeed to Google? Only time will tell, but I suspect that many users will give the new service a try the next time that Twitterfeed goes down.

(Cross posted on the Speed Tech Blog)

To support the day, I have developed a Google Maps mashup for Speed that uses Twitter to allow home workers to display their location. To take part you have to send a tweet containing #NWFHD and the first half of your postcode ie: “#NWFHD WC2H”. The site will then automatically update every 30 seconds throughout the day, displaying the location of Twitter users working from home.

Being quirky is a great way to stand out, but it’s not sustainable. TV commercials and moving billboards were once new, exciting and different ways to advertise, and so captured the public’s imagination. But now they’re just background noise, unless the actual advert is interesting.

The same is true in PR. There are plenty of ways to spice up press releases, but if the content is as dull as dishwater than there’s no point. Rather than focus all our attention on jazzing up the delivery with pretty designs and social media add-ons, we should ensure the we give the actual press release the same amount of attention. After all it’s the really creative adverts that we remember.

Check out this video of mobile adverts in Berlin by Mrneglect:

What I need is some extra time, an excellent spell checker and the ability to type several hundred words a minute.

What I don’t need is someone getting a little too trigger happy with a bulldozer and cutting through the network cable, bringing the entire university network down along with all the e-mails that I desperately need from people I’ve contacted. And it’s raining!