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In June, Facebook tallied 870 million unique visitors and one trillion page views, meaning the social network is reaching 46.5 percent of Internet users.

Pandora now accounts for 3.6 percent of all U.S. radio listening, a number based on the 1.8 billion hours users spent listening to the service during the second quarter of 2011.

After Steve Job’s resignation announcement on Wednesday evening, Apple’s stocks fell almost 7 percent in after-hours trading but by mid-day Thursday had stabilized at 1 percent below average.

Last month, Android owners spent an average of 56 minutes a day using their phone to interact with apps and the mobile web. Apps, however, seem to be more popular with Android users – 67 percent of the 56 minutes spent on their phones was using mobile apps and only 33 percent of that time was spent browsing the web. Continue Reading…

This week has certainly been a crazy one here at the DC office. On Tuesday, central Virginia was hit by a 5.9 earthquake and several aftershocks.  After evacuating (from our building’s top floor, no less) the RepEquity team gathered outside and turned to our phones for more information. Despite the crush of people trying to make phone calls, text and access the Internet in the District, several of us were able to visit Twitter from our phones, which gave us the most up-to-date, if not comprehensive, news on the quake.

Thanks to Twitter, we quickly discovered that people as far south as North Carolina had felt the tremors and found out that one New Yorker learned of the quake before he felt it. User @JesseCFriedman tweeted Tuesday: “I saw the tweets from DC about earthquake, then 15 seconds later felt it in NYC. Social media is faster than seismic waves!”

That really blew our minds! More investigation revealed that seismic waves can travel between 5 to 8 kilometers per second. Information traveling via fiber signals travels at 200,000 kilometers per second. If you consider the 482 kilometers from the quake’s epicenter to New York City, it would have taken the quake up to a minute and a half to reach the Big Apple, definitely giving some speedy tweeps in Virginia or DC time to tweet about the quake before it reached NYC!

On Tuesday afternoon, the official Twitter account shared that within one minute of the quake, there were more than 40,000 earthquake-related tweets and the tweets-per-second spiked to 5,500.

All is back to normal in the RepEquity office, after some minor picture-frame readjusting, just in time to prepare for this weekend’s hurricane. See you in the Twittersphere!

Tripp Donnelly, CEO of RepEquity, and Huard Smith, President of RepEquity are candidates for a panel at next year’s SXSW Interactive Conference, which is being held March 9-18 in Austin, Texas. Voting is now open for the panel – we would appreciate your vote. You can read the full description below, thanks!

The Indestructible Brand: How to Bulletproof Your Brand Online

A brand, whether personal or corporate, is only as good as the reputation behind it. We’ve all seen the headlines: United Breaks Guitars. Netflix’s price increase. Sony’s PlayStation hacking scandal. A Congressman’s unsolicited yet salacious Tweets. Each of these brands suffered major damage in a very short time because of the amazing power of digital channels and social networks.

And yet while we all know about the immediacy with which the online world can damage a brand and reputation, we don’t recognize the power of using these same digital platforms to build and protect our brands before, during and after such inevitable events. Even if such events never happen, these digital platforms have become the best way to define and nurture a brand image and reputation.

This panel, with examples from client experiences, makes the case that a digitally well-built brand, properly harnessing search, social media and mobile-Web digital experiences, is the key to withstanding any reputational damage that may come its way. The speakers will show how to construct a corporate or personal brand that not only weathers any challenge, but actively engages audiences and customers with content you want them to see, wherever they may roam online.

This presentation will distill the challenges faced by brands in a world that is increasingly being defined by Google, Apple, and Facebook, identify the three major areas in which brands need to work to “bullet-proof” themselves (search, social media, and mobile-Web digital experiences), and provide practical takeaways in each area based on real-world results that the panel audience can use with their own personal or corporate brands.

There is no silver bullet to be found. No shortcuts. No one-time fix that will forever protect your brand and reputation online. The steps to take, while straightforward, are time-consuming and continuously required. Nothing worthwhile is easy! But doing them will not only strengthen your brand and reputation online, they will even shift your and your entire organization’s perspective on digital media, how to practically use it, and how it is helping people and companies succeed while others stumble.

Click Here to vote for this SXSW panel!

According to a new study, 55 percent of parents use Facebook to keep an eye on their children and 11 percent of those parents joined Facebook for the sole purpose of seeing what their kids were doing on the social networking site. In addition, a whopping 76 percent of parents reported that they monitor their children’s Internet history.

For advertisers wishing to target audiences in specific zip codes, they now can, using Facebook’s zip-code targeting tools in the site’s Power Editor and Ads Manager.

Fifty-two percent of Americans over the age of twelve have a profile on at least one social networking site and 70 percent of active users log in to their social profiles at least once a day, according to this Mashable infographic. Continue Reading…

Earlier this year, All Facebook and a handful of other tech blogs posted statistics showing that the average Facebook user doesn’t know 20 percent of the people listed as friends on the site. In one study, conducted by GoodMobilePhones, 54 percent of people said they stayed friends with strangers out of politeness and 34 percent reported that they remained friends with strangers to appear more popular on the social networking site. According to Facebook, the average user has 130 friends, meaning that they’ve never personally met 26 of their online “friends.”

Personally, I don’t agree with these statistics. I haven’t actually scrolled through my list of friends to see who I do and do not actually know, but I would say that it’s much lower. I would guess that less than 5 percent of my Facebook friends are complete strangers. If the survey reported that the average user has only met 20 percent of their Facebook friends once, I can certainly agree with that. How many times have you attended a networking happy hour or football tailgate and found friend requests waiting the next time you logged on? These are people you’ve personally spoken to and spent some time with. Over the years, though, I’ve made a habit of only accepting friend requests from people I know personally. Sure, some people may have sneaked through, but that’s my general rule for approving friends.

Continue Reading…