THE GUARDIAN — Twitter's growth seems to have lost its momentum, according to a new study. Growth in the micro-blogging service's number of users peaked at nearly 20% last April, but had dropped down to 0.15% in December 2009, says a study by Barracuda Networks. Recent web analytics had already suggested that Twitter had reached its peak, as Twitter.com recorded a traffic high in July 2009 and has never reached that level since. According to Compete, Twitter reached 23.5 million users in August 2009 and stayed put. However, as Twitter client applications have grown and have become a bigger percentage of Twitter's user base, the numbers didn't necessarily reflect the actual situation of the micro-blogging service. By using the growth in Twitter users, instead of the site's traffic, the Barracuda study now puts things into perspective...

EMARKETER — US marketing executives were much more optimistic about the economic outlook in February 2010 than they were the year before, when the recession was in full swing, and many were planning to increase budgets, according to the “Marketing Trends Report 2010” from Anderson Analytics and the Marketing Executives Networking Group (MENG). But they have become even more focused on getting a good return on their marketing investments. Anderson and MENG found that “marketing ROI” had jumped to become the most important trend to marketing executives. Social media cracked the top 10 this year, when 72% of respondents were planning a social strategy...

NEXT GEN MARKET RESEARCH — For those of you who missed the expert social media panel on marketing to women on Tuesday, I have updated yesterdays post with a link to the recording. Also today wanted to share a link to some gender specific factoids/statistics from one of Anderson Analytics recent social media studies as well as the 10 tips below which came out of the group discussion...

MARKETING PILGRIM — Lots of cool Twitter statistics coming out of Barracuda Networks new study (pdf). Where do I start? 21% of Twitter users are actually using the service–meaning that have at least 10 followers, follow at least 10 people, and have tweeted at least 10 times. 74% of Twitter users have less than 10 followers! However, that number is improving with a 30% increase in the number of users with 10+ followers (since June 2009)...

MARKETINGSHERPA — Summary: We wanted to find out the effectiveness of social media in terms of achieving various target business objectives, such as increasing brand or product awareness and increasing sales revenue. See the responses we received from more than 2,000 marketers in this week’s chart...

Rating the Effectiveness of Social Media in Terms of Objectives Achieved