Our two posts on the Top 10 Social Bookmarking Sites and Top 10 Video Sites generated a lot of interest and questions. I wanted to take a moment and answer some of the questions here, instead of via the comments section.
There were some questions around the sites that made the top ten social bookmarking list. I used Qunatcast for all traffic numbers, so that I was at least using the same traffic source across all sites. One thing that struck me when I was complying the data was how small the audience size of these social bookmarking sites is, especially when compared to the video sites. Blinklist.com for example has 353K U.S. monthly uniques while Blinklist.com reaches about 205K U.S. monthly uniques. These are not huge numbers. Somebody asked me why Sphinn.com was not on the list and Quantcast shows only 13k U.S. monthly uniques.
If you are in the B2B vertical and are thinking about adding social media marketing to your marketing mix, here are 3 questions you should ask yourself before launching your social media campaign.
1. Who is the target audience?
Who are you trying to reach via social networks and does your target audience participate in social networks? Understand the demographics of the social networking sites that you are looking to target before you begin your campaign and make sure that you can reach the right people online.
The dot com boom of the late 90’s peaked with the acquisition of Time Warner by AOL. Will the social networking peak be AOL’s purchase of Bebo?
AOL paid $850 million for Bebo, which makes News Corp’s purchase of MySpace for only $580 million one of the all-time great deals. For their $850 million AOL gets a site whose total revenues last year were $20 million! To top ot off Bebo led all social networks with 12 hours and 28 minutes of down time since the beginning of 2008 according to ValleyWag.
Hitwise has the following stats about Bebo:
The video numbers are quite staggering. comScore Video Metrix’s reports that over 10 billion videos were watched in December 2007, with about 75% of all American’s online in December watching at least one video.
Online users are actively searching for videos. Google trends shows that more people are looking for videos than are interested in shopping or news.
You know that YouTube is the 10,000 pound gorilla in the video space, but who are the other websites that you should be looking at, and who visits them? Using Quantcast we have put together a list of the top 10(actually its top 11) video sites that social marketers might be interested in, and who visits these sites.
The number of social bookmarking sites has exploded in the last year, leaving someone new the space probably a bit overwhelmed at where to start. If you are new to social networking understand that each social networking site is different, it attracts a different audience with different interests. Thus what interests someone on Reddit might not appeal to anyone on Digg.
So who are the main players in the social bookmaking space? And what is the profile of the typical user of these social bookmarking sites? The answers below might surprise you!
Emarketer had an interesting report that looked at social network advertising. While Facebook is the face of social networking to most of the press, eMarketer projects that Facebook will only capture 20% of the ad spend on social networks in 2008., compared to 54% for MySpace.
Facebook stumbled last year with its roll-out of their Beacon Platform, while MySpace has quietly launched its HyperTargeting system. HyperTargeting allows marketers on MySpace to target ads based on 1,000 different issues and hobbies that members describe in their profiles. The eMarketer study would seem to indicate that MySpace is much more advertiser friendly than Facebook.
In the winter edition of Search Marketing Standard on the plane this week, they had an interesting survey that Prospero released last year about how companies measure ROI from their social marketing efforts.
The one thing that stands out from the survey is that most businesses as this point in time do not know how to measure the effectiveness of their social media efforts. Asked about social media return on investment (ROI), 35% reported positive ROI and 41% said that ROI was “unknown.”
From the Survey:
