Last week, the number one event for the Scandinavian fitness market, the “Swedish Fitness Festival 2012” (Fitnessfestivalen), took place in the Swedish city of Gothenburg. About 20.000 people gathered at the 3 day event, among them club owners, personal trainers and active people from all over the Scandinavian countries. Twingly was there, too!
As in most sectors, even the Fitness market is affected by the changes caused by the Internet and social media. For all businesses in the fitness sector, from studios to retailers for equipment and food, new ways of interacting and communicating with their target group create lots of potential to grow, to improve and to understand the customers’ needs.
Twingly CEO Peter Bláha, himself a big and active fan of sports and fitness, and Twingly CMO Anton Johansson, introduced the audience during a presentation to what social media can do for their fitness-related business. They explained the differences between Facebook fans – which often already are customers – and Twitter followers as well as blog readers who might act as great multiplicators, give feedback, discuss issues and could become potential customers in the future. And of course they highlighted how Twingly’s eTrade and Blogwatch solution are a great tools to connect fitness-related businesses and websites to the blogosphere.
And since we released our Twingly Report Fitness right in time for the festival, Peter and Anton had proof enough to show how big the fitness blogosphere in Sweden actually is, and how much impact it can have on brands and companies. The two brought about 50 printed reports to their presentation, which didn’t last long since apparently everybody in the audience wanted to get hold of a copy.
Speaking about the report: It got some great response from many fitness bloggers. Here is a list of posts from the past days referring to it:
http://erdoderdo.com/2012/12/07/mest-lankade-fitnessbloggarna-enligt-twingly-report-och-jag-ar-med
http://blogg.loppi.se/linda/2012/12/07/pa-24-e-plats
http://emliscious.blogspot.se/2012/12/en-av-sveriges-25-maktigaste.html
http://sparkibaken.se/tag/twingly
http://trendotraning.se/2012/12/07/1777846
http://www.finest.se/userBlog/entry.php?uid=31205&beid=2300384
http://blogg.piggelina.se/2012/12/sveriges-mktigaste-trningsbloggar
http://uppochhoppa.se/2012/12/07/sveriges-maktigaste-traningsbloggar
http://blogg.veckorevyn.com/ptfia/2012/12/07/stolthet
http://fitnessochhalsa.blogspot.se/2012/12/lankkarlek.html
It’s great to see so many bloggers and fitness-oriented people engaging with our report, both online and at the Fitness Festival in Gothenburg.
In case you haven’t seen the report yet, you can get it here as bilingual PDF. And if you wonder anything about how Twingly can help your business to become more engaged with bloggers from around the web, drop us a line. We love to hear from you: info@twingly.com.
A few weeks ago we published an overview about all the things Twingly can do for your business. As you can read there, our main focus is and has always been to help websites such as online shops or media outlets to open up to the blogosphere and to connect with blogs in order to increase their reach and to offer additional context and information to their visitors. But in the past years, a second field of activity has been gaining importance for us: Providing media monitoring companies and other organisations with data from the blogosphere.
We figured that if we index the blogosphere for our blog search engine and our widget solutions connecting websites and blogs, we could use this data in order to enhance and improve companies’ knowledge about what’s hot and trending in blogs. So we launched our API offerings. Last year we explained in detail our offerings to media monitoring companies which comprises of three different APIs.
Our goal is to have the best blog data in Europe in terms of coverage, quality and immediacy.
So what are the aspects we are working on to provide our API clients with even more compelling and complete insights into the world of the blogosphere?
For one, in terms of overall coverage, we are since a couple of months back building new providers for local blog hosts in Europe with focus on the Nordic countries. In the graph below you can for example see that we deployed a provider for a Norwegian blog host in the beginning of October. We have also deployed one for Finland last week and you can spot that the Finnish data is about to increase.
Both in the above graph, for the Nordic countries, and in the graph below for Total, Swedish and English data you can see a big bump in the beginning of September. This is due to deployment of other different providers. They usually find, for us, unknown blogs and index them back in time and therefore the temporary increase of data. Apart from providers we have also built other indexing robots, which together with the providers widen our coverage over all. In the graph below for Total, Swedish and English data you can see that the average total amount of blog posts per day has increased from just above 500.000 per day to over 600.000 per day.
Another improvement has to do with immediacy. A lot of our customers desire to get new posts as soon as possible after being published. Therefore we have built a new indexing algorithm that looks at how often a blog publishes, categorizing it in different indexing cycles ranging from being indexed every 10 minutes to once every month. In this way we can index new blog posts much more efficiently. The glitch in the indexing in the beginning of November is due to deployment of this algorithm.
Having a closer look on the aggregated blog data also means that we at Twingly have lots of insights about different industries, areas of interest and trends. In order to show the potential of our data, we recently published two reports, one about the power of bloggers in the book e-commerce market, one about the power of bloggers within broadcasting and one about how blogging engages the fitness world. All were featured in different media outlets and blogs and can be downloaded here: twingly.com/reports
More than ever, data quality is our focus. We’re constantly adding new features, initiatives and providers to ensure that we are the best blog data service in Europe, and the world. Our product development is all based on customer feedback so if you have thoughts, ideas or a problem – please let us know. And if you aren’t being provided with blog data from Twingly yet, we would love to hear from you: info@twingly.com.
Since we know a bit about what’s trending in the blogosphere at any second of the day, we have started to publish occasional reports to give you some insights into the latest trends from the world of blogs. After our report on books and the one on TV/radio, today we proudly present our latest creation: The Twingly Report Fitness (with a focus on Sweden).
Maybe you didn’t know it, but there is a huge number of people out there who blog about their passion to stay fit and healthy. For the report we took a look at the Swedish fitness blogosphere and provide you with some interesting details about who those persons are that blog about fitness, which gym chains they write about, which online stores they visit for equipment, tools and the right nutrition, as well as which fitness brands their favour.
You can find the full bilingual report (Swedish/English) here as a free PDF download twingly.com/reports. If you just want to get a very quick overview, keep on reading.
One of our main findings when analyzing the fitness blogosphere was that girls seem to be much more successful with running popular fitness blogs. On our top list with the blogs that get most incoming links, four out of five bloggers are girls. We noticed that many of the people blogging about fitness do also work in that field, for instance as gym instructors or personal trainers.
The five Swedish fitness blogs with the most incoming links are:
1 www.sparkibaken.se
2 blogg.mama.nu/olgas-blogg
3 www.traningsgladje.se
4 www.fiafit.se
5 blogg.alltforforaldrar.se/lofsa
Furthermore, we analyzed which of the major Swedish gym chains are being linked to most from fitness blogs. The diagram shows the result:
Everybody who takes fitness seriously needs the right equipment and nutrition, thus it’s no surprise that fitness bloggers link a lot to online shops where they buy everything they need to fulfill their goals. Here is the ranking – the first diagram shows stores for dietary supplements, the second shops for sports clothing and other equipment.
In clothes graph you can se that Stadium, that uses Twingly to engage bloggers to write about their products, have over 8 times more links than one of their main rivals and equal in size – Intersport.
Check out the report if you are interested in all the details. As of today, all our previous and future reports will be presented on the dedicated website twingly.com/reports.
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A few days ago, Försvarsmakten, The Swedish Armed Forces, relaunched their blog portal blogg.forsvarsmakten.se where members of the Armes Forces blog about their everyday life at work – both in Sweden an abroad. For the new version, Försvarsmakten decided to use Twingly technology in order to find blogs from around the web that discuss topics related to the Swedish Armes Forces and their assignments.
The new blogg platform looks extremely neat, and the Twingly technology working in the background makes for a great user experience for visitors of blogg.forsvarsmakten.se who want to learn about related issues discussed by bloggers around the web.
You can see that in action when going to blogg.forsvarsmakten.se/omvarldsbevakning. What you see is a pretty cool monitoring section which shows content from Twitter, Facebook, Google+, YouTube, internal blogs and external blogs that is related to the Swedish Armed Forces. If you uncheck all the boxes on top except “Externa Bloggar”, you are being presented with the latest blog posts from the blogosphere relevant to those who have an interest in the Armed Forces.
We are proud that Försvarsmakten trusts Twingly as the provider of complete blog data in order to make the global blogosphere accessible to everyone interested in topics related to the Armed Forces.
We are not only looking for skilled, enthusiastic Account Managers (if that could be you, read on here!), but also for a driven, social and communicative person that wants to join Twingly as Marketing & Relationship Manager.
If you love communication, have experience in the field of PR, Marketing and Sales, prefered from medium-sized or big companies, you might be the perfect candidate for us. Post-secondary education, special language skills and a background in the technology and web industry are a plus. To fit into the role, you should have excellent social competence and be an high-performing indiviudal with a genuine interest in business and marketing strategies. We are looking for a “doer” who doesn’t hesitate to take initiative and who would like to drive Twinglys international expansion forward.
Your Tasks include:
– Working with development of business and partnerships
– Creating marketing and business strategies
– Bringing Twingly into new markets
– Handling public relations together with our PR agency
– Holding presentations at seminars and conferences
– Participating in preparations for and planing of fairs, events and conferences
– Being the visible face of Twingly together with the CEO
– Working with and giving guidance to writers, designers and external service providers
– Being in charge of social media, search engine marketing and Twingly’s bloggers
– Handling Twingly’s client communication, such as the newsletter
If that’s sounds exciting and if you like to work in a young, growing Internet company with great, knowledgeable colleagues and ideal possibilities to grow and to develep, we would love to hear from you. Interviews are being conducted on an ongoing basis.
The role will be based at our headquarter in Linköping and includes some travel and work time spent in Stockholm.
Send your application including your CV to Peter Bláha (jobs@twingly.com). If you have questions, don’t hesitate to call Peter at 0733-707773.