Compete.com published a list of the top 25 social networks by traffic for February 2008. A couple of interesting things stuck me after looking at the data.
The top 25 social media networks delivered over 155 million unique visitors in Feb. 2008 with 70% coming from MySpace, Facebook and Classmates.com. Add in YouTube and Flickr and you get another 60 million visitors, meaning that an estimated 215 million people visited social media sites in February.
Four additional points from the article:
- Myspace was down slightly from February 2007 in terms of total US visits. However, the networking giant still holds a commanding traffic lead over all other Social sites.
On a snowy day in New England, here are some of the social media articles that caught my attention this week.
Traffic at EyeBuyDirect.com has increased between 10% and 15% according to Internet Retailer since the online discount eyeglass retailer added a social networking hub to its web site about five months ago.
About 20,000 consumers have added pictures of themselves sporting nearly 500 different styles of eyewear to EyeBuyDirect.com’s “Wall of Frame” social network. Here, friends, family and strangers can offer feedback on photos. The social networking hub now drives more traffic to the EyeBuyDirect.com site than search and any other marketing efforts.
This is a preview of
Social Networking Helps EyeBuyDirect.com Increase Traffic
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Read the full post (182 words, 1 image, estimated 44 secs reading time)
When I ask a company how they monitor their reputation online the most frequent answer I hear is that we use Google Alerts. Google Alerts are ok, but they don’t give the complete picture about what people are saying about you or your company, and because they are email based, the information is difficult for multiple users within a department or company to use simultaneously.
Aaron Wall blogged recently about how you can use iGoogle or Google Apps to create a web site that allows multiple members of your team to easily track brand mentions on blogs and other active parts of the web.
There is a common perception that marketing campaigns on sites like Facebook and MySpace do not produce the ROI that other online marketing efforts do. Social media marketing is still very new and one reason for the lack of success is that a lot of marketers are just not experienced in marketing to these types of communities. Last year I wrote abut A Successful Facebook Marketing Campaign from Target.
Adage recently had an article about how successful Disney has been on MySpace continually revitalizing the MySpace profile it created for its 2006 dance-themed movie “Step Up”.
From the article:
Internet Retailer reports that shoppers with Facebook pages will no longer be restricted to only evangelizing about the latest products and talking trends with friends. Now they will be able to sell directly from their Facebook page.
BSocial Networks Inc. has launched a Facebook application called Market Lodge that allows Facebook users to create miniature e-commerce stores on their Facebook pages. Market Lodge allows Facebook users to select from 1,100 products from 50 retailers items to sell in their own shops.
There has been a lot written about how companies are using social networks sites like Facebook and MySpace to screen prospective candidates even before the interview process begins. There has been a lot less written about how companies can use social media to recruit new employees. Enter Affinity Circles.
Affinity Circles is:
the leading provider of exclusive social networks for established, professional organizations seeking to promote career advancement opportunities among their members. Today, more than 140 top tier organizations like Stanford, Dartmouth, Michigan, Golden Key Honor Society, etc. utilize the inCircle community platform to connect over 15 million verified alumni with preferred employers like Google, Merrill Lynch, Oracle, etc. in a trusted, exclusive environment.
I came across a press release from RiverWired last week. RiverWired is the first website to provide both informative content and a social networking platform for the growing market of consumers and advertisers interested in green, eco-and environmentally-friendly lifestyle topics. They were able to raise $1.5 million in seed funding to create original Web video series and associated blogs around environmental lifestyle content.
Last month I pulled back the curtain a little and gave a look inside a social media campaign that we are currently undertaking for soccer tickets online. The story generated quite a few comments and emails and I wanted to provide an update on how the campaign is going.
To summarize our initial efforts we created five targeted social media events focused around creating awareness for the web site. Two of the events went popular on Digg and two made the buzz page at StumbleUpon. As a result these two web sites sent over 5,000 visitors to the web site.
B2B Online put together an interesting list of five web/tech trends worth watching right now and what they mean for b-to-b marketing. The five trends they identified are:
Widgets
Definition: Widgets are small programs that can be embedded on desktops, Web pages and mobile phones.
Background: Widgets aren’t new—buy social networks have helped them explode. These mini-applications are most often downloaded and installed on social network (Facebook, MySpace, Bebo, LinkedIn) pages and blog sidebars..
