Sydney wifi map enters the fray: the power of social media
The Wifi-in-Australia project has had its first major external development. Earlier in the week, I was contacted by Josh Liebmann, who has been generous enough to donate some of his time to start up a Sydney wireless hotspot map for WiFi in Australia.
Josh is a twitter user, and found out about the project by the wifi-in-australia twitter page.
I’ve been pretty amazed by how this project has really taken off using twitter and I think really shows how powerful twitter currently is as a social media marketing tool. I’ve been actively maintaining both a Facebook Group for the project, and a twitter page. I started pushing the facebook group about 3 weeks ago, and pushing the Twitter page about 2 weeks ago.
The facebook group has a little less then 100 members, whilst the WiFi in Australia now has around 150 followers on Twitter (and this number is very literally growing DAILY, averaging an extra 10 followers a DAY). Interestingly though, 30% of the traffic comes from facebook, compared to around 20% of the traffic coming from twitter. Despite this, most of the community activity on Wifi in Australia has originated from the Twitter followers.
There are a few possible reasons for this. The most likely (to me at least) is that I believe the twitter followers of WiFi in Australia represent a slice of the online community that have a greater interest in Wireless internet (and computing culture in general) then their facebook cousins. This is in no small part due to many of the Twitter followers coming from the follower list of freeAusWireless.
Any other ideas of why this might be the case? Throw your theories at me!
Chris is a shining example of how, in a world where abortion is not as easily obtained as a leg of fried chicken, an ounce of prevention can be worth more than its weight in gold. He is currently completing a PhD in Bioinformatics which he hopes may one day help him get out of a speeding ticket.