Interesting Statistics on Social Media Marketing

The world of Social Media is evolving everyday and the need to catch up has become all the more important. Erik Qualman has collected interesting statics that will help you be more informed about Social Media. You can find the link to his blog at the end of this post. Here’s a list of 42 interesting statistics on Social Media Marketing:

1. Over 50% of the world’s population is under 30-years-old
2. 96% of them have joined a social network
3. Facebook tops Google for weekly traffic in the U.S.
4. Social Media has overtaken porn as the #1 activity on the Web
5. 1 out of 8 couples married in the U.S. last year met via social media
6. Years to Reach 50 millions Users:  Radio (38 Years), TV (13 Years), Internet (4 Years), iPod (3 Years)…
7. Facebook added over 200 million users in less than a year
8. iPhone applications hit 1 billion in 9 months.
9. We don’t have a choice on whether we DO social media, the question is how well we DO it.”
10. If Facebook were a country it would be the world’s 3rd largest ahead of the United States and only behind China and India
11. Yet, QQ and Renren dominate China
12. 2009 US Department of Education study revealed that on average, online students out performed those receiving face-to-face instruction
13. 80% of companies use social media for recruitment; % of these using LinkedIn 95%
14. The fastest growing segment on Facebook is 55-65 year-old females
15. Ashton Kutcher and Ellen Degeneres (combined) have more Twitter followers than the  populations of Ireland, Norway, or Panama.  Note I have adjusted the language here after someone pointed out the way it is phrased in the video was difficult to determine if it was combined.
16. 50% of the mobile Internet traffic in the UK is for Facebook…people update anywhere, anytime…imagine what that means for bad customer experiences?
17. Generation Y and Z consider e-mail passé – some universities have stopped distributing e-mail accounts
18. Instead they are distributing: eReaders + iPads + Tablets
19. What happens in Vegas stays on YouTube, Flickr, Twitter, Facebook…
20. The #2 largest search engine in the world is YouTube
21. While you watch this 100+ hours of video will be uploaded to YouTube
22. Wikipedia has over 15 million articles…studies show it’s more accurate than Encyclopedia Britannica…78% of these articles are non-English
23. There are over 200,000,000 Blogs
24. Because of the speed in which social media enables communication, word of mouth now becomes world of mouth
25. If you were paid a $1 for every time an article was posted on Wikipedia you would earn $1,712.32 per hour
26. 25% of search results for the World’s Top 20 largest brands are links to user-generated content
27. 34% of bloggers post opinions about products & brands
28. Do you like what they are saying about your brand? You better.
29. People care more about how their social graph ranks products and services  than how Google ranks them
30. 78% of consumers trust peer recommendations
31. Only 14% trust advertisements
32. Only 18% of traditional TV campaigns generate a positive ROI
33. 90% of people that can TiVo ads do
34. Kindle eBooks Outsold Paper Books on Christmas
35. 24 of the 25 largest newspapers are experiencing record declines in circulation
36. 60 millions status updates happen on Facebook daily
37. We no longer search for the news, the news finds us.
38. We will non longer search for products and services, they will find us via social media
39. Social Media isn’t a fad, it’s a fundamental shift in the way we communicate
40. Successful companies in social media act more like Dale Carnegie and less like Mad Men Listening first, selling second
41. The ROI of social media is that your business will still exist in 5 years
42. Bonus: comScore indicates that Russia has the most engage social media audience with visitors spending 6.6 hours and viewing 1,307 pages per visitor per month – Vkontakte.ru is the #1 social network

Find Erik Qualman’s blog here

Softweb Solutions provides Search Engine Optimization (SEO), Search Engine Marketing (SEM), and Social Media Marketing (SMM) services in addition to web development, application development and other services. If you have requirement, you can reach us @ Softweb Solutions.

Promoted Tweets Unveiled

Tweets are buried within seconds after their promotion as they are easy to write and publish quickly. The promotional part of the tweet becomes less effective as the time to see the tweet reduces substantially. So, Twitter recently introduced promotional tweets, which fills this void. Promoted Tweets also provide Twitter the opportunity to monetize on their vast reach. The new concept combines organic search with paid promotions.

Promoted Tweets are unlike normal ads thrust upon the users whether they like them or not. The control switches over to the hands of users as only those promoted tweets float that engage users the most. It pushes marketers to be creative and engaging to lure users to retweet, reply or add the tweets to their favorites. Twitter names this phenomenon of keeping the tweets afloat as ‘resonance’.

The main features of Promoted Tweets are:
• A single Promoted Tweet appears on the top of search results for a particular keyword. Currently, the payment goes for 1,000 views but it is susceptible to changes as resonance algorithm evolves.

• Twitter allows the online advertiser to reserve a keyword, set a budget and select a tweet to promote. Promoted Tweets have sub-text written as ’Promoted by Company Name’ and the number of retweets are mentioned at the bottom right.

• Only the promoted tweets that have a high ‘resonance’ factor stay up in the twitter stream and are seen in the search results. If people ignore it, the advertiser loses the privilege of posting promoted tweets and the rest of the budget is returned to them.

• For now, Twitter has only given right to select companies including Sony Pictures, Virgin America, Starbucks and Best Buy for posting promoted Tweets. Twitter plans to gauge the success of promoted tweets to extend the concept to other advertisers keen on twitter promotions.

• Online advertisers are using their creativity to find out new ways of engaging the audience by posting exciting offers, short narratives, appeal for causes, etc.

Do you have any new ideas on interacting with your audience via Promoted Tweets? Please post your opinions in the comments section below.

3 Reasons Why Facebook Launched Community Pages

A new page creation option recently made its way on Facebook – the community page. There can be various internal as well as user centric objectives that Facebook would be looking to target by adding Community pages. Here’s what the social networking site has to say about its recent addition:

Generate support for your favorite cause or topic by creating a Community Page. If it becomes very popular (attracting thousands of fans), it will be adopted and maintained by the Facebook community.

While this may be one of the key reasons why Facebook started Community pages, it may not provide

Developing sort of a Wiki
Community pages are like Facebook Groups except that they are more publicized. Groups have limitations when it comes to privacy settings and user analytics. Due to these limitations, even though there is enough content, it isn’t public. Community pages, on the other hand, give contributors an opportunity to support favorite cause or topic. In our opinion, future sees a lot of information being added to these community pages on various topics and contributors will be easier to connect with.

Distinguishing ‘Official’ fan pages from the ‘Unofficial’ ones
Invariably, Facebook wishes businesses, organizations, and public figures to have their own official pages without leaving the slightest possibility for duplication. Previously, Facebook launched pages where non representative of the entities also created pages of their own. Facebook either removed these completely or transferred them to their rightful owners. Facebook wants ‘official’ page owners to actually own them and interact with users, spend on advertising and make them more business oriented. (Who knows, an announcement may follow making business pages paid!)

Community pages will serve the ‘non official’ purpose of sharing thoughts, social causes, and forming subject specific groups. The real purpose of creating community pages lies in having brands do serious business while others go into community pages.

Getting more content in search engines
Community pages will allow Facebook to get content rich and accurate resulting in better ranking in the search engines. They may be looking to improve indexable fan pages and their internal link structure. Community pages when linked with official pages will have tremendous clustering possibilities.

Appearance wise, community pages look exactly similar to business pages. The only difference between both of them is that when a community receives ample number of users, no single party will retain control over the page and the rights will be transferred to the particular Facebook community.

What are the other likely reasons for Facebook to add Community pages? What could be the likely impact? Please post your views in the content section below.

Facebook overhauls Google’s number of visitors- What could it mean for businesses?

Hitwise, a research firm, recently released stats unveiling an important insight – Facebook overhauled Google and became the most visited site in the US. Like all other numbers, Hitwise’s research results ought to be taken with a pinch of salt. Firstly, they haven’t compared all Google’s web functions such as Maps and Gmail with Facebook, which indicates skewed data. Second, they might have included the number of return visits catapulting Facebook to a higher position as compared to Google.

However, for a website that has spent far less no. of years on the playground, this is certainly a huge achievement. Social media strategies of different businesses may undergo transformation as a result. What was once a pastime for college students may transform into a magnet, attracting serious website traffic. To understand what this could mean for your business, we must first understand the user’s perspective.

Users have different expectations from both the channels. While Google may be more of an instrument of search, Facebook achieves the purpose of connecting with people and developing relationships. Businesses likewise should have different expectations from both channels and similarly different means of approach. If businesses understand how users take their online presence, they will able to meet user expectations more quickly and easily.

What Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is to Google, Social Media Marketing (SMM) is to Facebook. Therefore, which channel or combination of channels work for a business, will depend on the purpose and the target audience. For example, a SMM strategy would work well for an NGO having a social cause rather than a real estate broker as it would be easier to spread the message and draw participation. On the other hand, for a real estate broker direct marketing through ads or increasing the number of visitors through SEO may be more effective. While an NGO may measure success on the basis of awareness it creates among people, a Real Estate broker will typically count the leads generated through the efforts.

Comparing both channels is like comparing apples to oranges. In order to benefit from either channels, you will have to define the strategy that works best for you. That will mostly depend on the success metrics that you decide for your business.

Buzz – a threat to Facebook?

We haven’t forgotten Buzz, or have we? The inception of Buzz attracted media headlines with an immediate user reach of millions of customers. Ideally, if all the Facebook users covert into Google we could see a single dominant platform for all marketers. However, this situation seems almost next to impossible considering Facebook fan base and the widespread love for the social networking website. By introducing Buzz, Google has leaped head on in the social networking pool but will it emerge as a winner?

Has Facebook’s overtaking Google in the number of visitors encouraged you to tweak your social media strategy? Please post your views in the comments section below.

Future of Social Media Marketing

The Future Of Social Media Monitoring Marshallsponder

View more presentations from Marshall Sponder.

Social Networking Sites Are For All Age Group People

Social Networking sites are becoming craze among the people of all age group in UK. More and more people are spending time on any of the famous social networking sites, whether for getting information or for promoting their business.

The data given by ComScore states that everyone is spending time on internet by surfing social networking sites like Facebook or MySpace or twitter or anything else. It shows clear interest of everybody in social networking sites.

uk_social_networking