I came across a fascinating report on the demographics of social network users. Rapleaf ooked at user profiles and demographcs for the major social networking sites (MySpace, LinkedIn, Friendster, Plaxo, and Hi5 ) as well as for Facebook. The data is fascinating.
Summary Numbers
- The greatest overlap between OpenSocial container sites exists between MySpace and Hi5, in which 43% of Hi5 users also use MySpace.
- Facebook users are 63% female and 36% male whereas the sites integrated with the OpenSocial platform are 61% female and 38% male
Next Monday (June 2nd) I will be talking at the Boston Internet Marketing SEO Networking Meetup about how we have used social media sites like stumbleupon, digg.com etc to create targeted links and traffic. My presentation will be followed by a round table discussion on social media.
If you are in the Boston area and are coming to the event I hope that you will stop by and introduce yourself
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Interesting report from Hitwise UK last week about rural towns in the UK have higher broadband penetration than urban areas and as a result, more rural area users are visiting social networks than urban viewers.
The map above from Hitwise illustrates the representation of visitors to sites in Hitwise’s Social Networking and Forums category relative to the online population. Interestingly London is the most under-represented region, while Northern Ireland, Wales and Scotland are all over-represented. The data indicates that Facebook, MySpace, Bebo et al are certainly not just a metropolitan media obsession, but do attract visitors from all over the country. This is an important point as it shows that broadband access is the “Tipping Point” for social network participation and as broadband access continues to grow (Wi-Fi, Mobile, Cable, DSL) that usage of social networks will continue to grow also.
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A new survey from Cogent Research found that US investors are highly engaged in social media, and their investment decisions are being influenced accordingly. The study found that 25% of US online adults are engaged in social media specifically related to personal finance and investing.
Furthermore, almost two-thirds of high-net-worth investors—defined as those with $100,000 or more in investable assets— claimed online peer-generated content about personal investing and finance has an influence on their financial purchasing behaviors and decisions.
I was flabbergasted to read that Gartner projects that 70% of organizations will develop a private internal virtual world by 2012.
Search engine optimization is a stretch for many companies, never mind Web 2.0 like Twitter and MySpace. I just cannot see how such a large number of organizations are suddenly going to embrace virtual words. Especially when Gartner’s own research shows that nine out of 10 corporate attempts to use virtual worlds fail within the first 18 months.
One of the things that has struck me as we have been handling more social media marketing campaigns for clients is that social media marketing is an ongoing process, it is not a one time event.
I blogged about this last year after interviewing Dan and Jennifer. The question and answer that prompted that blog post was:
Tell me about your most successful social media campaign?
Thankfully we’ve had many successful social media campaigns, so it’s hard to isolate just one. We believe very strongly in developing and fine tuning a REPEATABLE process, regardless of what you’re doing.
This is a preview of
Social media marketing should be an ongoing process
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Internet users in the US watched 11.5 billion online videos in March 2008, up 13% over February 2008 and 64% over March 2007, according to comScore Video Metrix. On average we watched 83 videos each during March.
Online video viewing has became a mainstream activity for the majority of us as nearly three-quarters of the U.S. online population watched an online video in March.
The big two video destination sites are YouTube and MySpace. Nearly 85 million viewers watched 4.3 billion videos on YouTube (50.4 videos per viewer), while over 47 million viewers watched 400 million videos on MySpace (8.4 videos per viewer). Including YouTube, Google sites served an average of 50.9 videos per viewer.
Interesting note from eMarketer that they are downward revising their US social network ad spending projections for 2008. They reduced their estimate of ad spend from $1.6 billion to $1.4 billion.
They also reduced their projections going forward. Their crystal ball projects that 2012 social networks ad spending to be $2.6 billion down from $2.7 billion.
The reason for the downgrade is the state of the economy. Or as eMarketer puts it:“Today’s economy, combined with the fact that social networks are still trying to come up with successful ad models, has led to lowered ad spending projections for the next few years.”
After four days I am finally back online! Lasy Thursday I was trying to upgrade to a newer version of WordPress and something went wrong. Luckily I had backed up my database before I started the install, but when I uploaded the database, Wordpress could not see it.
After many hours on the phone with BlueHost (who were great) I was finally able to configure Wordpress so that the site was back. But to make matters worse I could not log in!
Recently I wrote about my new iPhone and how that Yelp was well positioned to take advantage of the mobile component of social networks. eMarketer forecasts that mobile social networking will grow from 82 million users in 2007 to over 800 million worldwide by 2012.
Some of the early mobile social numbers are pretty impressive. MySpace recorded over 7 million unique visitors to MySpace Mobile in the US in the six months since launch. “It wasn’t until we rolled out m.myspace.com that we got a sense of how powerful demand was for MySpace on cell phones,” Brandon Lucas, senior director of mobile business development for MySpace, told eMarketer.
