Small businesses save more money using Twitter

Written on 25th March 2009                                                                                                              6 COMMENTS
David Petherick, Contributing Editor, United Kingdom

The Financial Times reports that small businesses are making better use of Twitter than larger corporations, with just 19 of the UK’s top 100 technology companies using Twitter. By comparison, in the US all the top technology companies use the service for marketing or recruitment purposes.

The data comes from reports commissioned by ntl:Telewest, a division of Virign Media and by O2, a division of Telefonica. The O2 survey shows that 16 per cent of the 500 businesses surveyed said they had saved more than £5,000 on marketing and recruitment costs, while almost a third had saved more than £1,000 since joining Twitter.

Hitwise, a division of Experian which tracks web audiences, said Twitter entered the UK’s top 100 websites in March, and is now ranking at 44, competing well with popular newspaper sites.

More details at FT.com

business, survey, twitter

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Flirtomatic surprised by its “increasingly savvy” users

Written on 5th November 2008                                                                                                              0 COMMENTS
Ernst-Jan Pfauth, editor in chief

Here’s a mobile start-up that has been underestimating its target audience for a while. Flirtomatic, the UK’s leading mobile and online flirting service, has sent out a press release filled with words of surprise. It basically says: “hey, these customers actually are pretty smart”.

Flirtomatic has conducted a survey to gain some insight on the mobile usage of its users. 5,800 responded, 87% of them completed the ten questions. Here are some of the results that get CEO Mark Curtis excited, copy/pasted from the press release:

• 56% of respondents said that they use bookmarking in order to return to Flirtomatic, a figure much higher than initially expected.
• When asked ‘which best describes your internet connection at home?’ a whopping 84% of users stated they usually use their phone to connect to the Web.
• 38% of users have already invited their friends to join Flirtomatic and a further 57% are considering it

Flirtomatic passed the one million users mark in September. Now that we know a lot of those folks are pretty smart, the future for the London start-up looks brighter than ever.

flirtomatic, Mark Curtis, mobile, mobile phone, Mobile Web, survey, united kingdom

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Who will be The Next Web Oracle?

Written on 30th December 2007                                                                                                              0 COMMENTS
Patrick de Laive, Internet entrepreneur and co-founder of The Next Web Conference. Twitter: @patrick

It’s the end of the year. Time for flashbacks and predictions. As we like to talk about the future at The Next Web we’ll keep it to the predictions.

We’ve come up with some questions about the near future. Can you foresee what is going to happen with the Google stock quote? Which company will be acquired? Will it be the iPhone or the Google Phone? Well… Why don’t you tell us. We will publish the results in the second week of January and of course at the end of 2008 we’ll see who is most paranormal gifted.

All ‘visionaries’ will get first access to and a discount for the third edition of The Next Web Conference (April 3&4, Amsterdam).

Grab your tarot cards and fill in the questionnaire

2008, predictions, survey

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