Social Media Week

Greetings once again ladies and gentleman! Sheldon from Sysomos here with another look at one of Social Media Week’s  host cities. With Social Media Week quickly approaching you can expect these post to become more frequent so that each of our host cities has a chance to be in the spotlight before the big week kicks off. That said, today I’m going to be taking a dive into the social media community of Berlin, the capital city of Germany.

Using Sysomos MAP, I’ve been able to pull up some high level stats about what is happening in Berlin in the past six months in regards to social media. To start, I looked for all the social media posts I could identify as coming from Berlin and found a very involved community there. In the past six months I was able to find 518,917 blog posts, 17,625 online news articles, 1.1 million forum postings and 3.9 million tweets that have originated from Berlin.

If I trend those numbers out over time into a graph, we can see that Berlin seems to have a very active social media community. In most of the other cities I’ve already looked at I found that Twitter activity usually tends to out shadow most other social media activity, but in Berlin blogging and forum posting seems to be so widely used that we can see the two mediums showing very clearly on the popularity graph bellow.

Next I pulled up an all encompassing wordcloud. This wordcloud spans all the different mediums that Sysomos covers to show us the most used words in social media coming from Berlin. Because there was no actual search query that I was looking up the wordcloud, these words tell no story and just show us some of the most common words being used. Still, they can help us get a good idea about what people in Berlin are talking about using social media.

From here, I took a deeper look into the demographics of just who is creating all this social media activity in Berlin. I first decided to look at the 3.9 million tweets. While Twitter doesn’t ask a user for much demographic information aside from a location (and we already now that we’re looking at tweets from Berlin), Sysomos has developed a industry exclusive way to determine the gender of Twitter users. Looking at Berlin, I found that 59% of the tweets coming from the city were from males and the remaining 41% were posted by females.

While there were a lot of tweets coming from Germany’s capital, there is also a substantial amount of blogging being done in the city. Blogging, like Twitter, seems to be a gender neutral thing in Berlin. Using user provided information I was able to determine that 55% of blogs coming from Berlin were being written by males, while the other 45% are being posted by females. As well, there also seems to be a large amount of bloggers spanning age differences in Berlin. 42,5% of the blogs coming from Berlin have been written by people aged 21-35. Not too far behind are the bloggers aged 36-50 who account for 38.2%. There is even a large community of people aged 51 and up blogging as they make up 17% of all blogs from Berlin.

There also appears to be a wide variety of topics being covered in blogs from Berlin. A look at the industries being blogged about is quite diverse. The two most popular categories being blogged about are arts and communications and marketing which each respectively account for 18.4% of all blogs. Education blogs were the next largest category coming in at 13.1%, followed by blogs about publishing (10.5%) and then a tie between sports and non-profit blogs (7.8% each).

The next thing I did was delve into Berlin’s social media scene to see what people were actually talking about in regards to social media. In a query for people talking about social media in Berlin I found 2,553 blog posts, 64 online news stories, 64 forum posts and 9,044 tweets.

From there, I pulled up a buzzgraph around the social media talk. A buzzgraph shows us the words most commonly being used in conjunction with our search terms and how those words are connected. While no word appears directly in the center of this buzzgraph we can see words like “netzwerke” and “netzwerken”, which mean network in German, having very srong connections to the rest of the conversation. We can see a strong connection to the words “kommunikation” (communication), “kunden” (customer), “informationen” (information) and “bereich” (area), so it’s safe to assume that a lot of the talk about social media in Berlin seems to be about how it can be used for business.

Finally, I’ve put together a list of the 10 most common words associated with my search for social media talk so as to hopefully inspire some ideas for what people will be interested in talking about during Social Media Week in Berlin:

• Facebook
• Twitter
• Kommunikation (communication)
• Netzwerk (network or networks)
• Bereich (area or areas)
• Elgene (own – as in who owns social media)
• Kunden (customer)
• Informationen (information)
• Beispiel (examples)
• Agentur (agency)