We’ve analysed traffic, tweets, Facebook Likes and a whole lot more from 10th May (when the video was released) to the 15th May, to see what happens to a YouTube video during those crucial first few days. We combined public data as well as private data from our own site and social channels. Here’s what we found:

In the infographic above, ‘article views’ ‘article tweets’ and ‘article comments’ refer to interactions on the original article on our site, while 270+ articles refers to other sites that featured the video.

The lifetime of a video

The first few days can undoubtedly make or break a video and how the video views grow in this period is crucial to determining its success over its potential lifetime. But looking at these first few days in detail we saw that, instant though the internet is, in this case the 2nd day saw the peak in traffic to our site and also video views. You can then see a pretty stark drop in traffic for the 6th day. (We weren’t able to generate YouTube video views for this day due to a time lag in their analytics)

Mobile Traffic

We were a little surprised to see that just 15% of the video views came through mobile. Though given that the majority of traffic to the video came from other sites & tech blogs rather than growing through word of mouth sharing in Facebook (possibly given the ‘industry’ angle to this video) this figure might make more sense:

Social Reach

As well as understanding the success of a video in terms of views or embeds, there is a huge story to be told when it comes to social reach overall. We looked at the top six sites that ran a feature on our video, analysing their social reach through Facebook & Twitter, as well as how the article itself performed on their site. The table below shows the social followings for six of the largest sites that picked up our video, as well as how many tweets/FB Likes the individual article gained:

Our own traffic

As well as looking at what video views mean across social media, we also wanted to see the impact on our own traffic. We saw a huge rise in new traffic vs returning visits:

Compared to previous 6 day periods, this is an increase of around 15% on the usual new traffic percentage, showing that what happens on social media really can impact on your site as well.

Views by Location

Perhaps unsurprisingly, the majority of video views were concentrated in the U.S. and mainland Europe:

External assets

As well as the original blog post featuring the embeddable YouTube video, we also created a Slideshare presentation to house all of the individual designs. This told a pretty impressive story in itself, generating nearly 300,000 views and over 250 individual embeds. This was boosted by higlights including featuring on the SlideShare homepage in the first couple of days after the release, being the top featured presentation in Slidehsare’s email newsletter and also receiving a tweet from their official account to over 89,000 followers:

This demonstrates the importance of thinking about the other formats you’re making your materials available in, instead of focusing exclusively on video.

With Marissa Mayer announcing it on the Yodel blog, this screenshot shows how a tweet from ABC News could appear in the Yahoo! newsfeed, allowing you to instantly follow an account.

The feature will be launching in the U.S. across desktop and mobile ‘soon’, no dates are confirmed for either the U.S. or wider markets.

It’s not surprising to see this kind of partnership coming from Yahoo!. Not only has it been innovating a lot lately, thanks to a steady flow of app launches and product updates, but its intentions in news delivery were made pretty clear when it acquired Summly. It looks like this will also improve Yahoo!’s ability to offer customised content as the tweets delivered will be personalised, depending on your previous browsing behaviour and interests.

This isn’t the first time we’ve seen the two collaborate and bring the two platforms closer together. Back in 2010, a number of features were added to Yahoo! to integrate Twitter into the service, including the ability to update Twitter from Yahoo! messenger.

It’s the second huge news story to circulate on Twitter in just a week, where we saw news of Alex Ferguson’s retirement reach 1.4 million mentions in the first hour. Also, an hour and a half into the announcement of the world tour, they’re occupying five of the top ten trending topics worldwide.

According to Twitter Music, they occupied seven of the top ten trends at the story’s height.

The timeline covers expected growth in key markets including spend on digital and mobile, as well as big data so we can start to see exactly where this emerging industry will head. Data for the timeline has been gathered from a wide range of sources, in specialist areas to give as wide a view as possible of what’s coming up.

Particular highlights include the prediction that by 2045, human beings will become ‘functionally immortal’, allowing us to essentially live on through computers by downloading our digital DNA. And if you’re feeling lonely, you will be able to buy yourself a digital companion in 2049 as robots are predicted to be commonplace in the home, providing care and companionship for those who need it.

Sources:
RIM devices shipped
2013 social media ad spend
2014 Facebook users
Social network ad revenue
2015 online ad spend
iPhone market share
Social commerce market
Mobile spending
Hybrid apps
Wearable computing market
Facebook Shares
UK social commerce market
Social advertising spend
1.5 million Android devices
Big data market
Wearable computing shipments
Computer processing powerHolographic Avatars
Entire world will be online
Credit cards obsolete
Household internet connected devices
Virtual Reality
130 million books
World covered by CCTV
Self-driving cars mainstream
Computers to have same power as the human brain
Computers thinking like humans
Social Networks
Exoskeletons
Supersonic jets and flights
Log on directly from your brain
Driverless cars will be mainstream
Machines have greater than human intelligence
Humans become functionally immortal
Robots are common in the home
Robots playing football
Nanobots perform medical procedures
Traditional news organisations no longer exist
Nonfabricators become mainstream
Brain chips help us absorb data

DataKind (previously known as Data Without Borders) is an organisation based in the U.S., where it connects experts in data with those that need data insight, but can’t afford the talent or tools. The organisation focuses on helping out charities and NGOs primarily through data driven ‘hackathons’, where charities bring along a data set and they get to work for the weekend with data experts working voluntarily for DataKind.

This collaboration is key to DataKind’s success and it’s where we need to see the industry moving overall. There’s such an appetite for the work it’s doing that last week, it officially launched the UK branch of the office. I interviewed Duncan Ross, who works for DataKind in his spare time, bringing his skills from his day job at Teradata. The UK office is currently made up of five directors, who all work in their spare time while they get the project off the ground.

Diving Deep into Data

Hackathons are well known in the technology industry, but DataKind is bringing this concept to the data industry through its Data Dive weekends. Attended by a few selected charities, voluntary developers and data experts select who they want to work with for the weekend to pull the data apart and answer a key business question like ‘how can we prove our fundraising activities are achieving our core aims?’

At last year’s Data Dive, Place to Be, Oxfam and Key Fund attended along with 90 developers. The key to the success of these Data Dives doesn’t just rest on the weekend. DataKind will work with charities to ensure they’ve got access to the right data, which could include placing a volunteer in the charity for up to two months before the event. In the first Data Dive, one of the charities wanted to find out the metrics to a successful email marketing campaign based on its previous activity and another wanted to find out if there were common trends to successful projects it funded.

Ross explained that the aim of these Data Dives is to understand the questions you can ask of your data. A charity might come along with one issue in mind that it wants its data to answer, but you have to understand that “data can shift the needle on your goals.”

In addition to the Data Dives, DataKind also runs Data Corps, which is a team of volunteers working with a given charity on a much larger project. Google supports this by ‘donating’ 20% of up to three developers/scientists time to work on the charity initiatives with DataKind. Ross explained that it had no preconcieved conceptions about the ideal charities they want to work with, but that someone relatively senior in the organisation just has to ‘get it’, or else all the work could amount to nothing.

Collaborative Data

From talking to Ross, it seemed there is an industry-wide issue in accessing the data that can be gathered. We know we have the tools to gather data, but organisations with a limited budget can face two obstacles: Actually disseminating the data that they own, and being able to access data that they need from other organisations. While the UK government allows some data to be openly available, in reality this can be completely skewed or just inaccessible. Conflicts between local authorities or something as simple as boundaries between one local authority and the next could mean you end up with an unreliable set of data.

DataKind aims to facilitate access to data so they can combine different sets of data from complementary organisations. So it might approach financial institutions for a project on alleviating poverty, or request data from supermarkets to examine nutrition more closely. The issue, Ross explains, is knowing where to look for the data. It is essentially (in his words) about asking ‘really dumb questions’, but the smaller businesses, charities and NGOs just don’t have the resource they need to know what questions to ask or where they can look for the answers. This is a real threat, as he continued that “corporations that don’t embrace data don’t always survive”. This is likely to be more true as the data industry grows.

Get Involved

If you want to work on a Data Dive or are interested in the project, it’s on the lookout for volunteers in the data space, including data analysts, visualisation experts and pretty much anyone interested in data! Just visit their Get Involved page. The next Data Dive in the UK will be held in late July.

(Image via Data Kind)

But really, this is just completing the set which started with Twitter’s acquisition of social TV analytics company BlueFin Labs in February this year. It’s this combination which forms the ultimate trump card for Twitter.

While Facebook has been successfully and heavily trading off its user data almost since it started, Twitter has largely kept its huge data set to itself, bar leasing out its firehose to selected partners. We haven’t seen much done with it, but all that is about to change, and it’s going big. Lucky Sort is the one tool that Twitter needs to get its data from the platform and out to the public, or potential buyers. Lucky Sort specialises in data visualisation so it turns huge datasets into formats that people can actually use.

Essentially, they’ll be able to do something with Twitter’s data. The problem for monetising Twitter has always been the simplicity of the platform. A single stream of updates doesn’t lend itself to much in terms of revenue, other than inserting ads every few tweets. It has tried this and it hasn’t really worked so now it’s making a data play and it looks set to pay off.

Data Everywhere

What the acquisition of Lucky Sort allows Twitter to do is to bring its data into every facet of our lives, both online and off. The meteoric rise of hashtags has largely been Twitter’s best asset to date. You hardly think twice about seeing a hashtag in a TV ad or a billboard and yet this is actually a tiny ad for Twitter, encouraging you to tweet using a certain keyword.

This has always been great for Twitter, but other than generating additional traffic, it hasn’t really meant anything else to the consumer, or to Twitter. However, with the potential of Lucky Sort’s data visualisation and analytics, it effectively allows Twitter to mine data across a large network and present it back to partners in deals that could prove far more lucrative than selling ad space.

And we know we’re talking about big numbers here. Just look at Obama’s record of 273,000 tweets sent per minute during his election victory in November 2012. Now Twitter is able to do something with this data and it’s going to be a lot more powerful than what Facebook can do with ad inventory.

Twitter has also been careful to diversify through startups. Their recent acquisition of We Are Hunted, a music service which predicates itself on mining data from blogs and present the data back to users in a digestible format (i.e. an instant playlist of the hottest songs around right now). Twitter’s social dominance over TV has been proven by now, but the music industry is up for grabs.

The Real Data Play

Twitter’s acquisition of Lucky Sort is exciting and instantly adds huge value to the company, but combine this with its acquisition of social TV analytics company BlueFin Labs and you suddenly start to see the real vision. One that’s buried deep in real-time and social data. Acquisitions like this enable it to strike more partnerships such as its deal with Nielsen to produce the world’s first social TV metrics, and this will be up for sale to buyers in Autumn this year.

So you can forget about ad inventory, Twitter is upscaling in data analytics and visualisation to go after the big players and provide world-leading data products that simply no one else is in a position to offer. We can already see this starting with Twitter expected to announce a deal today with ESPN which will see it showing sport clips through the site shortly after they’ve been aired on TV. Though not a data play exactly, it shows the strong position Twitter is in, going for the long-term play with broadcasters who already find the service invaluable. Add a social analytics package into the mix and we start to have something very special.

This wouldn’t be the first time Casey and Yahoo! CEO Marissa Mayer would have worked together as both worked at Google. A tweet from Casey in April this year shows he’s already complimentary of the company.
This would be a significant hire for Yahoo! and would show it recognises the need to upskill in mobile. A slew of new mobile apps this year and the high-profile acquisition of ‘snippet’ company ‘Summly’ show’s Yahoo!’s intends to own this space. Considering that Yahoo! announced the acquisition of mobile gaming company Loki Studios last week, it’s an intensely concentrated strategy from Mayer that’s coming to the fore.

[Update} And here’s Casey’s new Twitter bio, which confirms his move to Yahoo

This is a major initiative for ABC to launch and may well set the trend for other broadcasters, showing how to switch customers from TV to the desktop or mobile, while still utilising a traditional subscription model.

This is the second announcement we’ve seen over the past week that shows such a significant shift away from TV. In the UK, we have all been wondering just how BT Sport is going to use the rights it purchased for the Barclays Premier League. Since BT doesn’t have a TV network like the previous rights holders Sky Sports, it was unclear just how it was going to broadcast the games it had exclusive rights to.

Well, at least without Sky charging them astronomical fees to broadcast the games. Well its plans were unveiled this week, when it announced that the games would be available to watch for free online, as long as you’re a BT broadband customer.

With the UK broadband market being so evenly split among the top four: BT with 29.3% of the market, Virgin Media 20.2% , Talk Talk 18.5% and Sky at 17.9%, it was a pretty smart play to make. With a significant market to play for, BT Sport has just given customers a priceless incentive to switch provider.

A One-Screen Future

As the relationship between TV and social media grew closer and closer, the concept of social TV began being discussed with innovations in connected TVs that aimed to revolutionise the viewing experience creeping in. Except they didn’t really amount to much and we seem pretty happy to watch TV with a tablet on our laps or a mobile in our hands to ensure we’re still connected to the online world. But what these two initiatives show is that the one-screen experience we thought we were moving to will instead probably happen on our digital screens instead of our TV screens.

While the two models here differ slights – ABC is a huge TV network whose live streaming is still dependent on cable subscriptions, while BT’s offering is 100% digital, they both show a significant move away from TV. The success of ABC’s campaign can be seen this week when it launches from Tuesday and while it’s a limited test, it will be an important indicator of our appetite for TV as we know it.

Uncharted Territory

So far, there are 54 paid channels on offer to U.S. viewers. Just by glossing over the channels available, you’ll see that the topics and genres are rather diverse. Drama, kids shows, documentaries, fitness, lifestyle and sports all feature here and subscription prices start from $0.99 per month.

So far, the pilot program has enough original content there to give people an idea of what to expect, but this is very much uncharted territory for YouTube. Regardless of the number of visits and views it gets, it’s a site that’s very much associated with free, user-generated content.

The obvious comparison to make would be sites like Netflix and Hulu, which offer premium TV shows for users. Since they feature TV shows and films that we’re familiar with, people are more willing to subscribe to them because they know that the quality is there. YouTube doesn’t quite have that yet.

While there are some impressive videos and series on the site, we still associate the medium with user-produced videos since that makes up the bulk of content on it. Production companies and big name studios haven’t been shown the potential that would make them want to invest the same money as they would with a service like Netflix, which created House of Cards and Arrested Development.

YouTube will need to do something similar to highlight the major difference between free and premium users, while catering for both audiences. So far, people may be willing to subscribe to a batch of channels for a fee since that’s the business model we’re familiar with. However, asking people to subscribe to a channel for $0.99 and only get a couple of shows could be a hard sell unless the content is original and updated regularly like UFC’s channel. Shows that rely on exports like Acorn TV, which features British and Irish shows, might face a bit of trouble since you can’t imagine that the updates will be as frequent.

The Issue Of Content Creation

The other problem is how much do content creators benefit from this service? The pilot channels feature some high quality shows, but when the more established YouTube channels start featuring their own content under subscriptions, how much are they going to benefit from it? It wouldn’t be any surprise if Google wanted a cut of the subscriptions like it does with advertising, and you’ll have to assume that the number of people who will subscribe will be low when it reaches the next phase.

Also, since paying for content brings the association that you’ll be getting a higher quality production, will those channels with a more modest budget be able to match these expectations? The answer will really depend on who gets involved, and how rigorously YouTube will vet applicants. That’s where the bulk of premium content is going to come from and insuring that they match this standard will be another challenge for the site.

Ultimately, YouTube can afford to experiment with this since it’s successful enough to experiment. And even if it fails, you can bet that it will learn from it and prepare the next type of subscription service until it gets it right. The challenge starts now!

Things Fitting Perfectly Into Things

Yep, an entire blog dedicated to random objects that fit perfectly into other random objects. If you’re not convinced, look at this blog for about five seconds, and you’ll wonder how you doubted the idea.

Things fitting perfectly into other things

Facebook

Screenshots of some of the funniest and inane updates, likes and more.
Facebook’s Worst

Pictures of Hipsters Taking Pictures Of Food

We all do it, but little did you know there’s a whole blog dedicated to pictures of people while they’re taking pictures of their food.
Pictures of Hipsters Taking Pictures of Food

Most Awkward Poses

A collection of some of the most awkward poses found in photography around the world, many coming from fashion photography.
Awkward Poses

Inside Candy

Cutting candy in half to look inside it, of course.
Scandybars/

Animals Talking In All Caps

Pictures of animals with their thoughts brought to life in all caps. Amazing!
Animals talking in all caps

Dads on Holiday

Dads forgetting they’re dads and getting up to all sorts of fun on holiday, like all dads do.
Dads on Vacation

Text from Dog

Probably one of the best Tumblrs of all time, texts between a dog and his master. Text from Dog

I’m Remembering

A great nostalgic Tumblr of all the best things from your childhood and years gone by.
I’m Remembering

F@%kYeah Dessert

A Tumblr dedicated to that most beautiful of all the food groups: Dessert
Fuck Yeah Dessert

These are never breaking news stories, but rather some of the deepest thinkers and smartest minds from the world of technology and social media, offering their thoughts and views regarding the biggest stories of the week.

You won’t make it through them all in one sitting, but it’ll bring you up to speed with this week’s happenings. So just sit back, grab a coffee and enjoy.

- How the Syrian Electronic Army hacked The Onion (via Onion Inc.’s Tech Blog)
- Dear Apple, let’s talk about photos (via Peter Nixey)
- LinkedIn: The creepiest social network (via interactually)
- China’s changing Internet landscape (via DealBook)
- Will Indie distributors hit it big with paid YouTube channels (via Deadline)

- How Facebook could save Nokia (via Quartz)
- The man behind the Google Brain: Andrew Ng and the quest for the new AI (via Wired)
- Is Google’s love affair with content marketing usurping SEO? (via The Guardian)
- Twitter Vines get shared 4x times more than online video (via AdWeek)
- How the iPhone conquered Japan (via CNN Money)

- Why online video just took one more big step to legitimacy (via Both Sides Of The Table)
- The unverified on Twitter (via The Awl)
- Will Waze be Facebook’s next Instagram (via All Things D)
- Why the Nexus 7 succeeded where others failed (via C|Net)
- Where brands struggle in social (via Digiday)

- LinkedIn is 10 years old today: Here’s the story of how it changed the way we work (via The Next Web)
- Marissa Mayer’s moonshot: Yahoo on every device (via C|NET)
- Spotify is part of the solution, not the problem (via TechRadar)
- Where Google Search is going (via Time Tech)
- Why E-Mail newsletters won’t die (via Wired)

- YouTube is happy to take your money, but what it really wants are ad dollars (via All Things D)
- The money shot (via Vanity Fair)
- ‘Open interviews’ with startups are a nice idea, but who would benefit from them? (via The Next Web)
- Five retail technology trends you should know about (via The Guardian)
- AOL is still the weirdest successful tech company in America (via The Atlantic)

Bonus Content

- iOS 7 concept designs: Welcome to the future of the iPhone.
- Alex Ferguson, 1.5M likes and the social stats in full.
- Why Soundwave is going to shake up the social music scene.
- Why Second Captains’ Arrival Is a huge coup for the Irish Times’ digital-first strategy.
- 13 ways to boost your Facebook Edgerank status

A story has been circulating about how you can retrieve deleted Snapchat photos from your phone – and for a service that sells itself on allowing users to send photos that are deleted as soon as they’re viewed, this might not seem like great news. It’s technically true. It is possible to retrieve deleted Snapchat files from a mobile, but there’s a little more to this story than what’s being reported.

The company behind the discovery – Decipher Forensics (and that name alone should lead you to be a little suspicious of the story already) claims that while photo files may be deleted from your phone, they only have a .NOMEDIA  extension file added to them, meaning that they can ultimately be retrieved if you know what you’re doing.

Indeed Decipher Forensics has even supplied us with a step-by-step blog post of how they did it, using a Samsung Galaxy Note 2.

First of all, it’s worth noting that this hack was only possible on Android, and wasn’t tested on iOS – either because it’s not possible or its rigorous testing didn’t extend that far.

But here’s the real killer. Hidden in the middle of that blog post is this line.

Which leads to two conclusions. First of all, what Decipher Forensics had to do in order to retrieve the files isn’t exactly simple. Indeed, its blog post covers such instructions as: “The mTimestamp field is stored in epoch format”. In other words, you need to really know your way around a mobile in order to retrieve these deleted files.

Having to go to such extreme lengths, it’s hardly surprising the deleted data is retrievable. Snapchat hasn’t really broken its promise to the user here. Something that’s captured on a phone is ultimately going to still be there in some form. Generally that’s a good thing, it’s why we have forensics teams. Would I really be bothered or surprised, as a Snapchat user, with this discovery? Not really, I’m not stupid.

But the second conclusion is that this is clearly just a sales tool from Decipher Forensic, as  this was made possible using a piece of software that you can handily purchase from its site, and according to TechCrunch, this can normally cost upwards of $9,000. Though Decipher Forensics handily have it on trial for cheaper.

Snapchat’s Response

Snapchat has written a blog post in response to the story, clarifying how users’ photos are actually stored and deleted within Snapchat’s servers. It stays true to its claim that as soon as someone views a file and the timer on the photo runs out, it sends a notification to its servers and the file is deleted. The same is true if a photo is sent that remains unopened for 30 days. Snapchat delete it from its servers, which is what we should really be concerned about here.

Okay, so Decipher Forensics may not have technically done anything wrong here. It hasn’t lied as the findings of the experiment conclude that you can retrieve deleted photos in this way. But a story like this is hugely damaging to a company like Snapchat, who techncially haven’t done anything wrong either. The fact that this is all part of a sales drive only leaves a bad taste in your mouth.

After acquiring social news reader Pulse for $90 million and introducing original content from successful entrepreneurs and thought leaders, it came out with the next phase of this strategy, which was relaunching the LinkedIn Today page.

The first thing you will notice is the obvious design change, making the section more visual. Also, the spacing between articles and text is nicer showing you exactly who’s responsible for the content that appears. It looks and acts more like a magazine, which was also apparent with its app redesign.

But the changes aren’t just stylistic. The real change comes in the form of ‘channels’, which is another way of saying categories, but allows the inclusion of individuals. What LinkedIn Today is doing isn’t anything revolutionary – it’s very similar to many other content aggregation sites and apps – but it’s making an effort to properly group these categories and do it in a way that makes it easier to find new content.

Variety Is The Spice Of Life

Its categories have seen a change too with more abstract ideas to accompany the traditional industries. Placing such channels on top of the existing categories adds an extra layer of content and expands upon a rather successful format.

Things like ‘Your Career’, ‘Big Ideas’ and ‘Innovation’ are designed to appeal to those who are looking for more considered and open-ended sections. Not everyone wants to read about industries, but throw in a channel called ‘creativity’ and it increases the scope for more diverse content.

That’s the one thing LinkedIn Today has lacked. For the most part, industry topics can be quite limiting. Sure there’s a lot to write about under these categories, but content is driven by curiosity and if you throw in unpredictable categories like the ones mentioned earlier, you’re going to appeal to readers more. There will always be room for guides and analysis, but readers also want to be entertained, amazed and inspired as well. This isn’t always possible to do, but the leeway these new channels lend will allow such content to become more prevalent.

Perhaps what’s most interesting about this is allowing you to follow journalists and entrepreneurs on the site. Effectively a following service designed for the site, this probably works better for LinkedIn considering it’s more suited to news and reports. The idea could be extended to normal users which would work in a similar way to Facebook’s subscription service, connect with those people you already know and those you’re not familiar with can follow you.

Also, LinkedIn is the rare exception to social media creating their own curated content. Facebook had mixed success with its own social reader and YouTube hasn’t quite gotten to grips with having its own channels. LinkedIn succeeded since that’s what its community is looking for: Trends and analysis that ensures that they’re ahead of the curve. The introduction of influencers was a step in this direction, and channels only shows that won’t be changing course any time soon.

With 1.5 million likes coming from all of the club’s Facebook updates that day and the #thankyousiralex hashtag being used over 400,000 times yesterday, it was a highly significant moment for many sports fans. We’ve gathered stats to analyse what happened in a day across Facebook & Twitter, tracking social activity from the time the story broke to midnight on Wednesday.

The First Hour

With a story like this, the first hour is absolutely crucial and we soon saw some astonishing stats flying in on Twitter. According to Twitter Sports, there were over 1.4 million mentions of the story within the first hour, and over 25,000 retweets from the official tweet from @ManUtd_PO (Man Utd Press Office).

Sir Alex Ferguson retires. #thankyousiralex

— ManUtd_PressOffice (@ManUtd_PO) May 8, 2013

The story also dominated Twitter trends in the UK, taking eight out of ten of the top trends in the hour following the story breaking. (We’ve given the hourly breakdown for this below).

The Day’s Activity

We tracked the story from the time it broke up until midnight on May 8th to see how it grew and gather reactions from the rest of the world. Here’s what happened.

Facebook Interaction

To track the story throughout the day, we logged the number of shares, likes and comments the original post from the Manchester United Facebook Page got from fans. As you can see from the graphs below, the post saw a huge amount of interaction with likes surpassing the 200,000 mark and the post being shared almost 46,000 times.Further posts capitalised upon this news, but what was particularly interesting – and rather savvy of the Manchester United marketing team – was the inclusion of an app allowing fans to personally thank Sir Ferguson for his work. Not only is it a smart way to connect with fans abroad, but it also gives the team a significant amount of data to work with when planning future campaigns.

Since the link went up yesterday morning, it has been clicked on a total of 161,155 times that day according to data from bit.ly. Of these clicks, 92,632 came from Facebook while 65,039 came from direct referrals (email, IM, apps, etc.). Twitter only accounted for 2,479 of these clicks showing that Facebook is the best platform to use when promoting a cause.

Geographically, it was pretty evenly spread out with the UK accounting for 15% of all clicks. After that it was a gradual drop to 6% for the United States and 5% for Indonesia and Thailand.

Twitter Followers & Facebook Fans

We wanted to see if all the buzz around the story would have an impact on Man Utd’s Twitter account. Though the club itself doesn’t have a Twitter account, the @ManUtd_PO‘s follower count grew steadily throughout the day. Having 147,020 at noon, this number grew to 166,028 by the end of the day, an increase of 19,008 in one day

Similarly, we wanted to track the impact the story had on Man Utd’s official Facebook page likes. Already boasting over 32 million fans before the story even broke, their work wasn’t exactly cut out for them, but it did increase from 33,303,685 to 33,324,500, an increase of 20,815.

Retweets & Global Trends

Retweets on the offical post continued to climb upwards as the day progressed. After an initial 25,000 retweets, we tracked new retweets on the original tweet from 2pm.Considering that Manchester United is very much a global name, it was no surprise that the news trended in different regions around the world. While there were numerous hashtags honouring the man, the main one was Man Utd’s own #thankyousiralex. While a significant proportion of that traffic came from the UK and Ireland, the hashtag trended in some far-reaching places across the globe, highlighting the reputations of both the man and the club.

According to data from Trendsmap, while Europe’s reaction was rather lukewarm in comparison, parts of the U.S, and Canada had a more positive response. The top cities trending with the hashtag were located on the east side with New York and Toronto as well as Miami, the latter because the club’s owner Malcom Glazer already has an American Football team, the Tampa Bay Buccaneers, based in Tampa, Florida.

Moving further down towards South America, the news was trending massively in Mexico City – this was more than likely because one of their players Javier Hernández (or Chicharito as he’s known) is part of the club, famed for his late goals as a substitute. Further down, the topic was trending heavily in Botogá in Colombia.

In other territories, the topic trended significantly in the Middle East as well as the southern part of Africa – mainly Nairobi in Keyna and South Africa in general. In Asia, India saw the most interaction as well as Indonesia and the surrounding countries.

General Retweets

To track the impact on news providers on Twitter, we’ve provided a breakdown of the number of retweets on some of the top news accounts for their original tweet. This is a total figure taken at midnight on Wednesday.

Twitter Trends

From 1pm, we tracked how many of the trending topics in the UK the story held on Twitter, including associated keywords such as Moyes and Mourinho. For the first five hours of the news breaking, #thankyousiralex was the top trending topic across the globe, probably due in part that it was morning in Europe and both North and South America were still fast asleep. Once it got to 3pm UK time, the trend dropped to 5th place before disappearing entirely an hour later. The next hour still had ‘Sir Alex Ferguson’ trending, but that was gone by 5pm.

Over in the UK however, the trend practically dominated the trends, at one point holding all but one of the top spots. The trend disappeared between 9pm and 10pm since the Chelsea vs Tottenham game was on during this period. However, the topic then took four places after rumours of Wayne Rooney wanting to leave the club turned out to be true.

Overall, #thankyousiralex was used over 400,000 times during the course of Wednesday, an impressive figure whatever way you look at it.

The Stock Price

While we’ve looked at the online impact of this news, it’s important to remember that it had an impact in the ‘real’ world too. Man Utd is currently listed on the NYSE and when the markets reopened yesterday, the share price dropped from $18.77 to $17.79, a drop of 4.8%. Soon after this fall, however, the stock mostly recovered and climbed back up to $18.46, marking an overall drop of 1.76%. It wasn’t a cataclysmic drop by any means, but it was enough to show the confidence and ability Alex Ferguson had in ensuring the club was both stable and successful.

Research released by new student social networking site unii.com reveals that 56% of British Dads and 54% of British Mums admit to checking on their kids’ Facebook profiles at least once a month. Unfortunately for the parents though, they usually find something they don’t like and wish they hadn’t looked in the first place. 50% of those respondents claimed they regretted it after they started snooping. The most common worrying finds include swearing in a status update, or discovering a picture of their kid drunk.

On the surface, it would seem that Facebook is the ideal tool for spying, as you can do so without them ever finding out and if they haven’t updated their privacy settings, you can take your pick of status updates and photos to find exactly what your kids up to. But maybe, however, this stuff is better left undiscovered. The aim of Unii, of course, is to provide a space for students where they can’t be spied on by their parents. Harking back to the early days of Facebook, you need a University email address in order to register.

This is unlikely to be welcome news to many parents, while they claim to be worried about what they find and regret checking up on them,  over half of parents signed up to Facebook to do just that. Does that mean there’s room for a ‘parent free’ social network? Time will tell on that one, but for now, offspring can continue to happily block or defriend their parents to keep Facebook an adult-free zone.