Some really interesting data from a survey by Ipsos OTX for Askmen.com. The survey found that overall Facebook is second amongst all men as their preferred way to keep in touch with their friends.

And it is not just young men that prefer Facebook as the chart below shows. Men over 29 prefer Facebook.

Facebook usage was high among respondents, nearly 70% of whom said they logged on to the site regularly.

While The Media Audit found in July that some 55% of the US Facebook audience was female, that still leaves a large share of men to target on the site—and 70% of male internet users is no small audience.

And with men more comfortable than women with location-based services, Facebook’s new Places feature may catch on more quickly among males, giving marketers an even greater opportunity in this department.

The travel industry was one of the first industries to be heavily impacted by the Internet, and it is no surprise that they are one of the leaders in social media marketing.

According to a white paper from HSMAI and online marketing services company VIZERGY, travel puts more marketing budget toward digital than any other industry.

Nearly 70% of US hoteliers responding to the April 2010 study reported online was the marketing channel with the greatest return on investment, and the majority are using a variety of online channels to reach potential customers, including 60% who have implemented a social media marketing strategy.

For many hotels, guest reviews are an important part of that social media strategy. Half said they proactively encouraged guests to post reviews of their hotel, and even those that did not encourage reviews saw the importance of monitoring them. Nearly seven in 10 did so at least weekly.

According to a survey by recruiting platform Jobvite nearly three-quarters of companies surveyed are using social networks for recruiting, and 58.1% said they had successfully hired a candidate found through a social network.

LinkedIn was the top social network looked to for hiring, used by nearly 80% of companies recruiting through social media. It also provided the most success, with about 90% of companies who had hired through a social network reporting they found the candidate on LinkedIn. While Facebook and Twitter were used for recruiting by about 55% and 45% of companies, respectively, they led to far fewer hires: 27.5% for Facebook and 14.2% for Twitter.

Success in this area is leading almost half of employers to increase recruiting program spending on social media. At the same time, more than a third of companies were lowering spending on job boards and search firms.

“While the economy begins to recover, companies looking to make new hires are seeking the most cost-effective, efficient ways to find new talent. As our third annual survey shows, social network recruiting has become a mainstream channel for employers who need access to talent,“ said Dan Finnigan, President and Chief Executive Officer of Jobvite. “Job boards launched a revolution in recruiting more than 15 years ago. And now, social networks are doing the same – but in a targeted way. Through social recruiting, companies are learning they can find the best talent efficiently, without making a major investment.“

There is no doubt that Facebook is the dominant social networking site, but as parents and grandparents join Facebook, data suggests that the site might be losing its coolness amongst teens.

According to a study from OTX nearly one in five teens with a Facebook profile had decreased or discontinued their use of the site as of April 2010.

What’s more, the decreases seemed to speed up in recent months, with two-thirds of the lapsed users having turned away from the site in the past six months.

Initially I thought that one of the reason that teens are leaving Facebook or abandoning their profiles are their concerns about privacy on Facebook. But that does not appear to be the case.  Instead, the reason is  much worse from Facebook’s standpoint. Teens are leaving the site because they simply find the site boring.

We have been running a campaign on Twitter for the last couple of months for a client of ours. While I cannot go into specifics about the campaign, I can share some of our learning’s:

Build Credibility
There is nothing worse than a Twitter account that only tweets sales offers. Unless your name is Dell you cannot build a following that way.

What we have found is that the Twitter account has to tweet useful information. To do this we set up accounts on a program called EasyTweets. EasyTweets allows us to add some RSS feeds to our Twitter account. These RSS feeds pull in news from the niches that we are targeting. So anyone who follows our account, will get news that they are interested in.

What does that look like?

Well if I was a restaurant in Nashua NH, I would add RSS feeds of Nashua news to my feed as may target audience is people who live in, and around, Nashua.

What we found was that if we added local and industry news to our Twitter feeds, we were able to increase the number of followers that we had. And since the feeds we added were of interest to our target audience, we were able to add followers who were interested in what we were selling.

Don’t Oversell
We have found that if for our client that the optimal number of “sales tweets” was one to two a day. And since the Twitter accounts were sending out 10-15 tweets a day from the RSS feeds, our “sales tweets” blended into the overall stream and did not look like all we were doing is selling on Twitter.

Test Content
Just like testing Ad copy for PPC, test and retest your sales tweet content. It is amazing what a difference changing one word can do for your CTR. Also, test the time of day of your offers. Do they convert better in the morning or afternoon?

Use Hashtags
Hashtags (#mets for example) is an massively underused Twitter feature. There are a lot of portal type web sites now that run continuous twitter steams. For example Metsblog.com is aimed at New York Mets fans and averages 2.5 million page views every month in traffic, and is read by roughly 35,000 unique people every day. Metsblog.com has a twitter feed page on its site that pulls in Tweets that use the tag #mets.

So if your target audience is Mets fans, and you use the #mets tag in your tweets, then suddenly your tweet is getting exposed to 35,000 mets fans. Multiple that by the hundreds of Mets web sites that are online and suddenly your reach is much greater than the 1,000 followers that you have. Your tweets are now being seen and read by tens of thousands of people.

Google Adwords has dominated the online advertising space for the last three or four years but Facebook I believe is positioned to really challenge Google for some of those advertising dollars.

We recently ran a series of campaigns for local events on Facebook and I was really impressed with the ROI that we got. It was much higher than anything that we have gotten using Adwords. So how did we do it?

Demographic Targeting
Unlike Adwords, Facebook users are not actively searching for your product or service. But by using Facebook’s demographics and location data we were able to really focus on our target audience.

Since our campaign was specific to a location we were able to target just the people who liked the brand we were promoting and who lived within 50 miles of the event.

This ended up being a really small group, but that was ok because the conversion event and CPC was really good.

Use Pictures
We tested ads with pictures and ads without. The ads with pictures all performed substantially better than those without.

Test Multiple Ads
When we run a paid campaign we always use multiple ad text, but it really is useful on Facebook. We tested new ad content every day until we were sure we had the most optimized copy. Then we let that as run until the end of the campaign.

I wrote last week on Brands and Social Media that 33% of Facebook users have become fans of brands.

That sort of number begs a follow-up question to be asked. What is the value of a Facebook fan? Well according to two companies called Syncapse and Hotspex, the average value of a Facebook fan for the twenty largest corporate brands on Facebook is $136.38. (see PDF of report).

Now the Syncapse/Hotspex calculation is very different from that of Vitrue, a social media company. Last year I wrote about a new study by Vitrue on How Much Is A Facebook Fan Worth? Vitrue’s calculation was that the average Facebook fan is worth $3.60 in earned media. Vitrue calculated the value of a Facebook fan based on impressions generated in the Facebook news feed. It then applied display banner advertising pricing to the number of Facebook fans you have and viola, an instant metric.

The Syncapse/Hotspex formula took a very different approach. Rather than compare a Fan to display advertising, they looked at a series of attributes of a Facebook fan: Product Spending, Brand Loyalty, Propensity to Recommend, Brand Affinity and Earned Media Value

• Product spending — Facebook fans spend, on average, $71.84 more than non-fans over a two-year period.
• Loyalty (meaning ability to influence and promote brand loyalty within a target audience) — Facebook fans are 28% more likely to continue using a brand than consumers who are not fans on Facebook.
• Propensity to recommend — 68% of fans are “very likely” to recommend a product to family and friends (as opposed to 28% of non-fans).
• Brand affinity — 81% of fans feel a connection to the brand (versus only 39% of non-fans).

Put together these attributes in a formula and you come up with a value of $136 per fan.

So who is right: Syncapse/Hotspex or Vitrue?

Not sure. I think the value lies somewhere between $3.60 and $136.38. The Vitrue calculation I believe is too simplistic. It treats all fans the same and treats them like a regular marketing campaign. I don’t think that is true. The Syncapse/Hotspex calculation had the earned-media component of a fan’s value at $6.79, nearly double that of Vitrue.

The Syncapse/Hotspex formula sounds nice, but other studies have shown that Facebook friends, for a very large degree, are already familiar with, and have a positive opinion of, the brand they are friends of. What is the value of that consumer off Facebook? It is higher or lower than $136.38.

Social media marketing has proven to be very successful for B2C marketing, but how is it for B2B marketing?

Not that good according to a study by lead generation provider LeadForce1. LeadForce1 looked at where visitors to B2B Websites from social media sites like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and Wikipedia went.

There conclusion was that traffic from the top social media sites were generally uninterested in product or contact pages, suggesting they were not in the market for the company’s products or services.

Visitors from Facebook were most likely to check out a company’s “about” page or blog posts.

Twitter-directed visitors had similar behavior, with blogs coming out on top.

In addition, their research showed that most site visitors referred from Facebook or Twitter visited only one page before leaving. What this suggests to me is that if you are targeting social media users, that the landing pages that you are sending them too should be specifically created for them. If you are sending traffic to a generic home page, then your campaign will never be successful.

The LeadForce1 research so that LinkedIn users tended to be interested in “careers” pages (no surprise there) and that Wikipedia visitors were most likely to be carrying out product research (probably because the Wikipedia page links to a product page.

Following up on my post from earlier this week on Brands and Social Media and how social network users interact with brands.

At the end of that post I mentioned that my Twitter stream is full of people asking for brand recommendations and it seems that this is not that unusual. According to an April 2010 study by ROI Research, 33% of active Twitter users, at least once a week, share opinions about companies or products, while 32% make recommendations and 30% ask for them.

“Social networking has greatly contributed to the shift from strict consumerism to more lively, two-way participation between brands and everyday customers,” said Daina Middleton, CEO of Performicst. “It’s a groundswell of technology-enabled word-of-mouth, and many of the brands involved in these active discussions are effectively satisfying their fans.”

Social media has become such an important marketing channel for brands that it is not surprising to read that a February 2010 survey by Chadwick Martin Bailey showed that 33% of Facebook users have become fans of brands.

Read that again. A third of Facebook users have became fans of a brand. That is pretty amazing to me. And leads me to ask the obvious follow-up question: Why?

Well coupons are by far and away the most popular driver of brand interactions in social networks. After that, people say that learning about sales and new products is also a strong motivator for them to fan brands.

Those two actions (coupons and learning) are usually taken by people who are already aware of your company/brand. But if you are not aware of a company/brand, how do social network users research?

Interestingly, they do not tap into their existing social network of friends for advice or recommendations. According to a study by PowerReviews and the e-tailing group, only 3% of online buyers said they sought recommendations from social network friends first, compared with 57% who started with search engines.

“While people trust their friends for advice and use social networks as part of their research process, social networks are long way from replacing search, if they ever will, as a source of information leading to a purchase” Said Debra Aho Williamson, eMarketer senior analyst.

I find this data most interesting as my Twitter stream is full of people asking for product recommendations. Am I that much of a minority here? Do you ask your social network friends for brand recommendations?