Earlier this week I looked at the demographics of blog readers which showed that the younger the user, the more likely he or she was to read or keep a blog on a weekly basis.
I focus so much on demographic data because it is important to understand who is using social networking sites before you start advertising on them. Recently I looked at some new social network user demographics which indicated that the Facebook demographic skews female and under 25, compared to other major social networks. That is important information to know if you are building a Facebook application.
Jeremiah Owyang had an interesting blog piece recently about the many challenges of corporate blogging. Jeremiah points out that the following seven challenges that launching a corporate blog faces, especially from a resources, preparation and expectations standpoint. They are:
Most don’t receive a lot of traffic: Truth is, from one day to the next, there aren’t massive increases in eyeballs to the web, also, there are only so many hours in the day. The same applies to blogs, while there are millions out there, only a few rise to the top of their marketplace and really stand out.
Compete.com has some new video market share data and it seems that YouTube has gotten even stronger. YouTube’s market share has grown by 12.3% in the last year and is now at 50.4%, . For the first time ever half of the videos watched online are viewed on YouTube.
With over 10 billion videos viewed a month online, YouTube must be close to being the second most popular search engine in the world (after its parent Google).
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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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.”
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.
I recently upgraded by phone to an iPhone. I have been a long-time Verizon user, but I wanted a phone with a real browser and Verizon doesn’t have anything that browses as good as the iPhone.
It seems that I am not the only one who wanted the iPhone for web surfing. According to Internet Retailer:
A survey by Viewpoints.com, a rating and review site, found 48% of iPhone users frequently use their iPhones to look up specific information online, compared with 5% of other cell phone users. And 45% of iPhone owners frequently use their phones to browse online, compared with only 6% of users of other brands of cell phones.
