Higher Education Marketing and Second Life - Part 3 of 6: Stastics that Matter

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As with most things on the web, certain statistics matter more than others. In web marketing, we rarely even mention hits to a web page, because those numbers can be very inaccurate as an indicator of traffic behavior. Instead we tend to focus on unique visitors if that information is available. So in Second Life, you may have a tendency to focus on unique residents. And that tendency would probably be wrong. The problem with the unique resident statistics is that it is not an accurate reflection of actual activity in Second Life. This is for the simple reason that some people create an account and then are never heard from again, or they may create multiple accounts with different personal information and are never detected in the system. In fact, I was one of those first 3,000 residents that existed in early 2004, but I lost the information for that account and have since created a couple different accounts with more preferable avatar names. The more telling statistics are really the recent daily login activity and to a lesser extent the hourly usage. I found statistics all over the web for these, but many are very inconsistent with other statistics I’ve found, so I don’t think they are reliable enough to use. You can get current data at any time though on recent login activity at the Second Life website, which is what is listed above for this particular moment. Hourly usage per month, which are all of the hours logged by all of the Second Life users, was 51,000 in 2003 when they started tracking the statistic and that has grown to 34.8 million per month today. In the last 12 months (August to August), hourly usage grew 44%. Even though they are not 100% correlated, that should help give at least an indicator in the growth of logins over the past year as well. With the statistics we found, you could analyze Second Life usage for weeks, but this should get you started. You are welcome to download our statistics that we gathered yourself (downloadable from this article behind login), but if you do, we encourage you to come back and share with the community what your findings were.

Related Posts:

• Introduction and General Information about Second Life;
• We'll dig into the demographics of Second Life users;
• Discuss what statistics to use when analyzing Second Life as a marketing channel;
• Discuss some of the marketing challenges you'll face in Second Life;
• Discuss brand building for higher education institutions in Second Life;
• And reaching out to Alumni in Second Life.