Social Media Marketing by the Numbers

Social media marketing now represents about $1.7 billion in expenditures. Facebook gets 53 percent of that. Twitter gets only about three percent. But I'd watch Twitter.

Social Media Marketing by the Numbers L2: A Think Tank for Digital Innovation

63% of Millennials Use Social Media to Engage with Brands

About 63 percent of Millennials use social media to engage with brands, a new study by McKinsey & Company has found.

A Majority of the the Emerging Affluent Uses Social Media to Engage with Brands

Email, Social Media to Get More Spending by Enterprises

According to a November 2010 survey of business executives around the globe by StrongMail, nearly two-thirds of companies will increase spending on email marketing, and 57% will put more dollars toward social media marketing. Search took a distant third place with 41% of respondents indicating they would spend more.

Email and social will continue to get closer as more marketers integrate the two channels with each other. More than a quarter of respondents said they had already formulated and implemented a strategy for making email and social work together, and another 43% plan to make efforts toward integration in 2011, though some are more prepared than others.

Email, Social Media to See More Marketing Dollars in 2011 - eMarketer

3 Metrics to Prove Social Media Marketing is Working

Ultimately, all marketing channels must prove their worth. Right now, social media are in their infancy, and so are being widely nurtured despite clear evidence of return, simply because some investments initially are strategic, and only later are tactically justifiable.

At some point, though, social media will have to demonstrate return on investment in the somewhat imprecise way all other channels must: on lead generation and customer acquisition, even though those metrics are hard to attribute to any specific channel when multiple channels are used.

In the near term, people can use proxy measures, such as traffic growth, but that ultimately is a just a proxy for the other measurable outcomes any business has to rely on. 

read more here

Social Adoption by Enterprises

What social technologies and tools do enterprises view as most important, and what kind of investments do organizations plan to make in Web 2.0 in the future? This McKinsey presentation tries to answer the questions.  The survey examines business use of 12 technologies and tools: blogs, mash-ups (a Web application that combines multiple sources of data into a single tool), microblogging, peer to peer, podcasts, prediction markets, rating, RSS (Really Simple Syndication), social networking, tagging, video sharing, and wikis.


http://www.mckinseyquarterly.com/Business_and_Web_20_An_interactive_feature_2431?pagenum=1#interactive

Brands Don't Necessarily Benefit From "Lots" of Followers or Fans

The sheer number of "followers" or "fans" a brand has does not seem to impress most users as much as the quality of the interactions, a study finds.

Brands Don't Necessarily Benefit From "Lots" of Followers or Fans

Invoke Live Social Commerce Report

View more presentations from Invoke Solutions.

Social Media and Branding

Social media increasingly is seen as an imperative channel for larger brands and companies. Social media also relies heavily on mobile access and devices, so there may well be opportunities for mobile network service providers, not just app providers. 

Social Will Grow 10 to 25x In The Next Five Years

Kleiner Perkins venture capitalists think social applications could grow 10 times to 25 times over the next five years.

Bing Gordon: Social Will Grow 10 to 25x In The Next Five Years

Established and Emerging Marketing Channels

A recent survey of 113 marketing executives confirms the current pattern of marketing channels. Display advertising, email marketing, search engine optimization, social media and online listings, plus paid search, are typical marketing venues.

Mobile advertising and applications, paid social media and game marketing are the emerging categories, Forrester Research finds.

Perhaps the most surprising finding is the 45 percent use of social media such as blogs, podcasts, widgets and discussion forums. Not so long ago, those were "emerging" and "experimental" channels.

These days, it is mobile apps and advertising and paid social media which seem poised to make the move from "experimental and emerging" status to "mainstream" levels of use.

Social Media Clutter Grows

Social media is more popular than ever (81 percent of U.S. online users engage with social tools at least once per month), but that popularity also increases "clutter" in the space, making it harder for marketers to stand out in a busy environment, says Nate Elliott, Forrester Research analyst.

(Click on image for a larger view)

The average U.S. Facebook user has 135 friend connections on the site, and MySpace and Twitter users aren’t far behind, with MySpace users having an average 107 connections and Twitter users an average 77 connections.

In addition, nearly 75 percent of online users consume other social content outside of social networks, like blogs posts and YouTube videos. Younger users are even more active than the averages suggest.

Also, most users don’t check their social feeds that often, Elliott says.  Despite the lingering stereotype of Facebook and Twitter users being tethered to their computers, the average social network user logs in only every few days, with Facebook users checking in less frequently than users of other popular networks.

From a marketing standpoint relatively few online users become "fans" of brands’ social networking pages. With more than 500 million people around the world using Facebook, and with nearly every business having started its own Facebook page, you probably could’ve guessed that social networks are by far the most common social technology through which consumers engage directly with brands.

But even this type of engagement remains disappointingly rare. Just 18 percent of U.S. online users have become “friends” with or “liked” a brand on a social network in the past three months.

Users are even less likely to engage with brands on less-popular social platforms. For instance, only eight percent have been to a brand-sponsored social network recently, while just six percent have read a brand’s blog. Only five percent of online users have followed a brand on Twitter in the past three months.

If such low levels of engagement continue, it will become difficult for marketers to justify dedicating budget to social channels. In fact, this challenge is already becoming evident: The majority of the large interactive marketers we survey say they’ve chosen not to increase their social media marketing budgets from 2009 to 2010.

With clutter growing, and with social networking users much more interested in engaging with each other than with brands,  interactive marketers have two options for reaching their audiences through social media: cut through the clutter, or  avoid it altogether.

And though many marketers try to fight through social clutter, this strategy is fraught with danger because most marketers simply aren’t interesting enough. Unless a marketer is blessed with genuinely unique content or a breakthrough creative idea, it remains tough to cut through the clutter.

It also costs money to get users’ attention on popular social networks. Although many marketers still think of social media as a “free” strategy, we rarely see successful social programs that didn’t involve some form of paid promotion, says Elliott.

Nothing is ever too easy in the online and mobile marketing business, it seems.

Social CEOs?

In a new study, global public relations firm Weber Shandwick found that the majority of CEOs from the world’s largest companies—64 percent—are not using social media to engage online with external stakeholders.

“Strong evidence exists that CEOs are not silent in these turbulent times. They are extensively quoted in the business press, frequently deliver keynote speeches at conferences and participate in business school forums. But when it comes to digital engagement externally, CEOs are not yet fully socialized, often with good reason,” said Leslie Gaines-Ross, Weber Shandwick’s chief reputation strategist and online reputation expert.

That probably makes sense. If you are the CEO of one of the world's largest 50 companies, you have lots of people who can handle those sorts of duties, while at the same time avoiding the risk of infringing some regulatory rule or another, or going "off message."

64 Percent of the World’s Largest Company CEOs are Not Social Online

Digital Natives are Different

In an intensive, three-month study of the media and social habits of 100 consumers between the ages of 18 and 24, French marketing firm BVA found that “Digital Natives,” don’t trust authority, doesn’t want anyone telling them what to think and don’t like to pay full retail prices.

Digital Natives don’t trust politicians, social institutions, the media or corporations. Rather, they rely largely on themselves and their peers to decide what to think, what to do and what to buy.

Is it any wonder social media and social networking have gotten traction?

Digital Natives view life as a game of outsmarting authority to beat a system they disdain. Whether catching up on the news or shopping for a car, Digital Natives enjoy the challenge of acquiring and manipulating information as much as the outcome to which it leads.

“The Digital Native enjoys using all tools available in his arsenal to outsmart the merchant system and to find the best deal,” research director Edouard Le Marechal says. “He doesn’t trust the brand. Like in a game, the brand is the enemy to defeat.”

Those are challenging ideas for most sellers of products and services, advertising, marketing and media, and would suggest marketing and media will be different in the future, more socially constructed, at the very least.

http://newsosaur.blogspot.com/2010/10/digital-natives-more-different-than-you.html

Twitter Really is a "Real Time" Media

Sysomos recently found that 29 percent of all tweets produced a reaction, in the form of a reply or a retweet. Of this group of tweets, 19.3 percent were retweets and the rest replies. This means that of the 1.2 billion tweets Sysomos examined, six percent, (or 72 million) were re-tweets.

Sysomos also discovered that 92.4 percent of all retweets happen within the first hour of the original tweet being published, while an additional 1.63 percent of retweets happen in the second hour, and 0.94 percent take place in the third hour.

The obvious take-aways are that Twitter really is a "real time" medium and that most people read, but don't write.

Replies and Retweets on Twitter

Is Social Media a Fad?

Hardly anybody thinks so, but it is worth asking the question, I suppose.

The Value of a "Liker"

Newspapers and other content organizations can use social mechanisms, such as the Facebook "Like" mechanism, to drive traffic, engagement and clickthrough rates, Facebook argues. Do get those results, content publishers should use social plugins, beginning with the Like button.

When a person clicks "Like," it publishes  a story to their friends with a link back to a site, adds the article to the reader’s profile, and makes the article discoverable through search on Facebook.

Publishers also should optimize their "Like" buttons, perhaps  showing friends’ faces and placing the button near engaging content, but avoiding visual clutter with plenty of white space. That can increase clickthrough rates by three to five times.

Publishing engaging stories or status updates (things that are emotional, provocative, related to sporting events or even simple questions) increase on-page engagement by 1.3 to three times, Facebook says.

Highlighting the most-popular content on a site leads people to view more articles. Those who click on the "Activity Feed" plugin in particular generate four times as many page views as the average media site viewer. Place it above the fold on a home page and at the bottom of each article for maximum engagement.

Publishers should use the "Live Stream" to engage users during live events, as well. The live stream box can serve as a way to reach an  audience, facilitate sharing of content, and get them involved in what is streaming, be it an interview, conference, or other type of event.
People who click the Facebook "Like" button are more engaged, active and connected than the average Facebook user, Facebook says. The average “liker” has 2.4 times the amount of friends than that of a typical Facebook user. They are also more interested in exploring content they discover on Facebook. They click on 5.3 times more links to external sites than the typical Facebook user.

Many publishers are reporting increases in traffic since adding social plugins, including ABC News (+190 percent), Gawker (+200 percent),  TypePad (+200 percent), Sporting News (+500 percent), and  NBA.com (number-two referral source). Publishers have also told Facebook that people on their sites are more engaged and stay longer when their real identity and real friends are driving the experience through social plugins. For example, on NHL.com, visitors are reading 92 percent more articles, spending 85 percent more time on-site, viewing 86 percent more videos, and generating 36 percent more visits.

link

Millennials are Social, Period

Fully 78 percent of Millennial internet users engage with social media, including blogs, microblogs, social networks, and photo- and video-sharing sites, according to a Harris Poll.

But social media usage has grown in virtually every age demographic.

Millennials Online: Marketing to a Moving Target

The Blogosphere: Colliding with Social and Mainstream Media

Social networks and microblogs have in recent years nudged blogging off the social media pedestal.

For some consumers, Facebook and Twitter have supplanted blogging as life-streaming outlets.

But blogs remain an important part of the landscape. This year, 51 percent of U.S. Internet users, or 113 million people, will read blogs on a monthly basis.

By 2014, the blog audience is expected to rise to 60 percent of internet users, or 150 million people.

The number of bloggers will also grow, though somewhat more modestly. In 2010, 11.9 percent of US internet users keep blogs. By 2014, there will be 33.4 million bloggers in the United States, representing 13.3 percent of internet users.

The Blogosphere: Colliding with Social and Mainstream Media

Lots of Enterprise Experimentation With Social Media

While 95 percent of companies surveyed by Econsultancy have added social media to their marketing mix, 45 percent have either only “experimented” or not done anything in social media. 

Global Social Media Trends: Surprise or Not?

If you have been following user behavior in the social media space, you intuitively know that some people are more active than others.

Some people post, blog or comment quite a lot, while others mostly read.

Forrester Research breaks users into a number of categories based on their behaviors. You might, or might not, be surprised that the number of active content creators has not grown as much as the ranks of "readers."

The latest Forrester Research surveys indicate that the number of active content creators has basically stabilitzed, while the number of readers grows.

Whether that is a surprise or not might depend on what you originally thought might happen.

At a rough level, the difference might be something like the difference between newspaper readers and writers. If you were expecting that most people would suddenly start "writing" as social media became established, you'd take one view of the new data.

If you assumed that would not actually happen, and that lots of people derive value mostly from reading, rather than writing, you'd have another view.

The latest Forrester Research data tends to indicate that not everybody actually wants to "write."

The Latest Global Social Media Trends