There was a really interesting study last year by BabyCenter, an online community for expectant and new moms. The study called “21st Century Mom” found that new mothers gravitate to social media sites after having a child.

How moms are using the Internet and social media today:

• Social Mom: Social Media is Mass Media for Moms. The number of moms who use social media regularly has significantly increased from 11% to 63% since 2006. Forty-four percent use social media for word-of-mouth recommendations on brands and products and 73% feel they find trustworthy information about products and services through online communities focused on their specific interests such as parenting.
• Gadget Mom: The 21st Century Mom™ is not intimidated by technology. Moms are using PDA technology to manage the hectic family schedule, digital cameras to share family life and gaming consoles to connect with their children. The vast majority of moms (91%) never leave the house without their cell phones and compared to just three years ago, are 348% more likely to use her cell phone to go online. They are considered the Chief Memory Officer in the family and over half (55%) have replaced the traditional family photo album with an online version.
• Mealtime Mom: Family dinner time is a priority for today’s moms. Ninety percent of moms say they eat dinner as a family several times a week. The Internet has become moms #1 source (77%) for recipes, higher even than cookbooks (36%).
• Dr. Mom: The 21st Century Mom™ is AAD (Almost a Doctor). Today’s mom has become the key decision maker in the health and well-being of her family. She comes to appointments armed with information and actively seeks second opinions online. She consistently taps into both expert and mom-to-mom wisdom using the Internet and social media. In online communities, children’s health issues are the leading topic of interest in online communities (91%) followed by childhood development tips (79%) and product reviews (72%).

A couple of the stats jumped out at me. I am amazed that 55% of mom’s surveyed have replaced the  traditional family photo album with an online version.  I am not too surprised that more than twice as many mom’s use the Internet to search for recipes instead if using cookbooks. That mom’s use online communities for information on their children’s health is not a surprise. That 91% of them use them, is a much higher percentage than I expected.

I have to say I was not surprised to read that according to a survey by Mzinga and Babson Executive Education, that less than one in five marketers measured their ROI from their social media marketing efforts in 2009.

“Marketers believe that measuring true ROI for social media is difficult,” said Geoff Ramsey, eMarketer CEO. “There are so many metrics available that it is difficult to choose which ones are the most important. In addition, marketers do not start with clear objectives for using social media.”

So how do companies measure the success of their social media marketing campaigns? One obvious was is to simply measure traffic to your site from the different social networks and this is the measurement that between 60% and 76% of companies use.

How do you measure the success of your social media efforts?

I received some interesting data today from Dessert Gallery (DG), a Houston-based cafe chain about their recent Facebook fan page campaign.

Utpal Dholakia, associate professor of management at Rice University’s Jones Graduate School of Business, and Emily Durham, a Jones School alumna and founder of Restaurant Connections, a Houston?based restaurant consultancy surveyed customers of Dessert Gallery (DG).

The study, based on surveys of more than 1,700 respondents over a three-month period, found that compared with typical Dessert Gallery customers, the company’s Facebook fans:

• Made 36 percent more visits to DG’s stores each month.
• Spent 45 percent more of their eating-out dollars at DG.
• Spent 33 percent more at DG’s stores.
• Had 14 percent higher emotional attachment to the DG brand.
• Had 41 percent greater psychological loyalty toward DG.

This is one of the few Facebook fan page studies that I have seen for small businesses. It would seem to indicate that Facebook fan pages can increase sales, word-of-mouth marketing and customer loyalty significantly among a subset of their customers.

The study will be featured in the March issue of the Harvard Business Review.

I came across this interesting chart from Michael Brito this morning that shows the demographic breakdown of Twitter users by age.

Interestingly the fastest growing segment on Twitter (other than bots) is among people 24 and younger accelerated faster than older folks in 2009, according to comScore.

Unlike most social networks, Twitter started out being more popular with adults, before it caught on with younger users. Last year that changed as celebrity tweets caught on, and mainstream media started talking about the service more.

At the end of 2009, more than 30% of Twitter’s visitors were under 25, this chart suggests, up from about 20% of its visitors at the end of 2008.

As you can see from the chart above, more than 30% of Twitter’s visitors were under 25 up from about 20% of its visitors at the end of 2008; thank you in part to celebrity adoption and the mainstream media mentioning Twitter over

Earlier this week I published the findings of the ForeSee Results 2010 Social Media Report. Kevin Ertell who is Vice President of Retail Strategy for ForeSee Results and author of the report kindly agreed to answer my question about the report.

I found the results of the report really interesting Kevin. What one or two things from the Social Media Report jumped out to you

I was surprised to see how many people wanted to hear about new products and promotions from retailers they friended on Facebook. I find it encouraging that retailers’ best customer are eager to hear marketing messages in a forum that has been widely believed to be personal “no marketing zone” space.

That 25% of the Top 100 online retailers does not have a Facebook fan page is astounding. What it holding online retailers (who by definition “get” the Internet) back from marketing on social media sites?

The 25% was an informal look–we basically went to Facebook and searched for all of the Top 100 retailers and couldn’t find pages for 25% of them. What’s interesting is that if you Google a retailer’s name and facebook, it seems that some of the ones I thought didn’t have a page do have one. But if you can’t find it by searching on Facebook, it’s a lot less powerful.

I think the bigger obstacle might be lack of clear strategy or execution of less effective strategies leading to poor results. If customer want to know about new products and promotions and the retailer is giving them polls and silly status updates it wouldn’t be surprising to find the retailer getting poor results and deciding to assign resources elsewhere.

It strikes me that people are following or friending brands that they already have an existing relationship with. How can brands use social media to reach out to potential customers, who maybe are not that familiar with them?

I think it’s impressive that these loyal customers are friending brands in such a public forum. Social networks are incredibly powerful, so brands should look for ways to engage their best customers and give them the tools to spread the word via their own networks.

What companies/brands that you think are doing the best job marketing via social media?

I think Victoria’s Secret and Best Buy are doing the best job. VS has really focused in giving customer what they want on Facebook, and their fan count seems to indicate they are successful.

Interesting data in the ForeSee Results 2010 Social Media Report. Some of the key findings in the study, which looked at nearly 10,000 visitors to the biggest e-retail websites in the United States, include:

• 56% of shoppers to top e-retail websites who interact with social media websites have elected to “friend” or “follow” or “subscribe” to a retailer on social networking sites like Facebook, Twitter and YouTube. This is an amazing testament to customer loyalty and interest in social engagement. Shoppers are actually choosing to engage in relationships with retailers on social sites.
• Facebook is, by far, the best place to reach shoppers. More than half of everyone who shops online uses Facebook, and of those online shoppers who engage in social media, more than 80% use Facebook. However, an unofficial look at the Facebook pages of the Top 100 online retailers reveals that one-quarter do not have any formal Facebook presence. In other words, half of the top online retailers have a minimal to nonexistent Facebook presence.
• Customers mainly interact with retailers on social media sites in order to learn about products and promotions—only 5% use social media primarily for customer support—a marketer’s dream come true. Consumers want companies’ information, sales and specials; retailers just have to learn how to give it to them effectively.

Facebook Impact

In terms of pure usage, more than half of all online shoppers frequent Facebook. Facebook’s dominance is even more apparent when you look just at shoppers who visit social sites regularly. Among online shoppers who engage in social media, more than 80% are using Facebook.

Give the People What They Want

49% of respondents who “friend” or “follow” companies through social media do so to learn about special deals and options. Close behind, 45% of users do it to learn about products. Only 5% use social media primarily for customer support. This should be exactly what marketers want to hear: they want our information, sales, and specials.

Actionable Items

If you are an online retailer and you don’t have a Facebook page then get one! Make sure you have someone to monitor it and post good, timely information. Promote it to your most loyal customers through your regular communications venues (emails, ads, stores, coupons, etc.). Use your Facebook page to post promotions and product information.

I have been really busy launching an online sports network so my posts have been a little sparse recently. But something happened last month that I thought was worth sharing.

All the talk about social marketing these days revolves around Twitter and Facebook. By being so myopic on these two social networks, marketers are forgetting about the universe of other communities that are online.

I had written a post about the 25 Most Valuable College Football Programs just after Christmas. We did some work making sure the post was visible on the sports social networks, we tweeted it etc. Social media marketing basics.

By a week or two after the post was published I saw a big spike in referral traffic from a fan forum for the Missouri Tigers. Missouri did not make the top 25 list, but the members of that forum are huge college football fans and they were interested in the topic.

It then struck me that if Missouri fans are so interested in the topic, and they were not even listed, think how interested the fans of the schools who are listed would be. I had made the mistake of focusing just on the big social marketing sites, instead of getting down into the trenches and connecting with our target audience there.

Not everyone hangs out on Facebook or Twitter, but there are millions of forums, groups and message boards that are full of people who are interested in what you are selling. What are you doing to reach this audience?

Companies “brag” all the time about the number of followers or friends that they have on Facebook or Twitter. But what motivates someone to friend or follow a company?

A December 2009 survey from MarketingSherpa of 500 social network users showed that the top motivation of those who friended or followed a brand online was to learn about specials and sales, followed closely by learning about new products, features or services.

This data would seem to indicate that Facebook and Twitter is good for reaching people who already have an existing relationship with you, but not as good at attracting new customers.

The MarketingSherpa survey confirmed a study by Razorfish last fall which found that exclusive deals and offers was the #1 reason that users followed brands on Twitter.

Last week I looked at some of the marketing strategies that are working on Facebook according to the September 2009 MarketingProfs survey of business-to-business (B2B) and business-to-consumer (B2C) marketers.

Today it is time to turn that attention onto what is working on Twitter.

Most marketers are using Twitter to simply drive more traffic to their web site. The most common tactics are direct linking to web pages or promotional pages.

As with the Facebook results, what works in the B2B market does not necessarily work for B2C marketers and vice-versa.

In the B2B space, companies are successfully using Twitter as a brand monitoring tool (41%). What I found really interesting was that 36.7% of B2B marketers are contacting Twitter users who tweeting negatively about their brand.

Now since you need to monitor your brand (40.7%) before you can contact users who are trashing your brand (36.7%) that would mean that nearly everyone who is monitoring their brand via twitter is also engaging in the conversation.

The numbers are similar in the B2C space with 46.9% of marketers actively monitoring their brand on Twitter with 44% contacting the Twitter users who made the comments. Who knew that reputation management was such an integral part of the marketers toolkit in 2009?

I find it interesting that almost over 37% of marketers surveyed say that they are successful using Twitter invites for in-person events. I have seen this tactic used for meetups, but I am surprised that so many respondents are successfully this tactic in the B2B world.

Though some firms, such as Dell and Naked Pizza, have reported success in the area, the study found that driving sales was the least effective marketing tactic attempted by companies using Twitter.

I have been going over the September 2009 MarketingProfs survey of business-to-business (B2B) and business-to-consumer (B2C) marketers to see what are some of the more successful tactics that they are seeing work on Facebook.

One thing is quite apparent is that tactics that work for the B2B market will not necessarily work for those marketers who are targeting the B2C market.

For those in the B2B space, the most successful marketing tactics used on Facebook are creating a survey of “fans” and friending customers.

Creating a survey of “fans” was the one marketing tactic that appears to work in both the B2B and B2C markets.

On the consumer side the most successful tactic that marketers are seeing is creating a Facebook application around a brand.

The most surprisingly result to me was that marketers surveyed found that buying ads, even highly targeted ones, was the least effective type of social media marketing on Facebook.

This is very surprising to me in that I have seen data from a lot of marketing campaigns on Facebook and the results have been really good, especially for locally targeted campaigns. The results I have seen have been much better than other online efforts including Google Adwords.

What marketing tactics are you seeing work on Facebook?