Public Relations & Social Marketing Insight

Twitter, which has struggled to grow its user base to the size of some of its social networking rivals, is reporting earnings this week not long after news that companies including Disney would not be moving to acquire the service.

This year, eMarketer estimates, more than 52 million people in the US will use Twitter on a monthly basis, and just shy of half will use the service on both PCs and mobile devices. Mobile-only Twitter use is becoming more common in the US as desktop- based usage shrinks, and will account for a majority of US users in 2018 for the first time.

Currently, just 19.5% of internet users and 16.1% of the population of the US uses Twitter, compared with 51.5% of the population using Facebook. On a worldwide basis, Twitter penetration is even lower: Only 3.9% of people around the world use Twitter this year, and by 2020 the figure is only expected to rise to 4.8%....

The number of shares an article receives has become ubiquitous in online content; widgets that show shares, tweets, pins, and +1s appear front and center on nearly every post you read (or, in this case, just to the left of this paragraph).

Just how many times does content get shared? Where do people prefer to share it? And are some publishers more effective than others at generating highly shared content? These questions are crucial to content marketers looking to understand the key components of a viral marketing success, and our recent research collaboration with BuzzSumo is here to give you some answers....