New report reveals stats behind photo sharing on Twitter
With all the news surrounding Twitter’s announcement to partner with Photobucket to offer photo sharing, we spotted this gem from the guys at Sysomos that shows how people are currently sharing photos on Twitter. The stats are pretty interesting and show how third-party services are currently benefiting from photo sharing on Twitter ; something that will change drastically now that Twitter have brought this under their own umbrella of services. Findings include that on a typical day, 1.25% of tweets sent contained a link to a photo. When you consider that over 170 million tweets are sent per day on average, that’s a lot of photos at 2.125 million. And in reality, a whole lot of potential traffic that will now be taken away from these third party sites. To put this into context, check out the graphics from the report below, that show which photo sharing sites are currently winning out on Twitter
As expected, Twitpic is clearly winning out here, but what’s interesting is just how high a percentage Instagram has. As we covered in our post on the Photobucket announcement yesterday, Instagram could potentially be under threat from Twitter’s own photo sharing service. Twitter are clearly focusing a lot on mobile in their photo sharing functionality, as it will be available both through their mobile apps as well as MMS. And it’s easy to see why, when Instagram have built up such an impressive share in Twitter photo sharing as it stands, beating well-established photo sites such as Flickr, who haven’t made Twitter integration easy.
Flickr responds with mobile service
Interestingly, it seems that Flickr aren’t going to take their decreasing popularity lying down. They’ve faced a huge threat from Facebook and now another huge threat from Twitter, so they need to act fast and innovate here. Yahoo evidently is focusing on mobile, as they’ve announced a partnership with MediaTek, who supply mobile chip packages. The move will see Yahoo’s web services, including Flickr photos, integrated into regular mobile phones, to mimic the smarthpone experience. This is a good move by Yahoo, as it allows them to potentially grab hold of a huge younger market that haven’t quite reached smartphone usage yet. The move could see younger people creating Flickr accounts to share photos with friends, as this becomes the easiest way to share images on non-smartphones. I doubt whether Flickr can compete with the likes of Twitter and Facebook for photo sharing now (though it remains a firm favourite among photography fans) but this move is positive, allowing them to stay relevant in an area of the mobile space that is still very much alive.
