Some interesting data from a new report from Ad-ology called the “Small Business Marketing Forecast 2010”). According to the report, lead generation is the biggest benefit of social networking for US small businesses (50% of respondents), keeping up with the industry (45%), and monitoring online conversations (44%).
The No 1. Roadblock to using social media is the perception that “our customers do not use social networks,” claimed by 31% of small businesses. Nearly as many (29%) say they do not have the time or staff available to do a good job with social network marketing.
A new report from Marketing Sherpa called the “2010 Social Media Marketing Benchmark Report” shows the importance of social media marketing now from a strategic perspective.
As social media marketing has moved from the trial phase to the strategic phase, the ability to measure success becomes more important.
“Defining specific objectives for a social marketing initiative is only half the battle. The other half is aligning those objectives with corresponding metrics,” according to the report. “This alignment is important because it enables an organization to measure its progress in achieving the objectives and proving ROI.”
It appears the hockey growth phrase of Twitter is over.
Twitter’s international traffic has flattened. Twitter saw 60.3 million unique visitors in November compared to 58.3 million unique visitors in October. That translates into an increase of only 3.5%,
Here in the U.S. the news is even worse. Twitter’s November U.S. traffic rose by a little over 100,000 visitors, to 19.37 million unique visitors after seeing a 8 percent decline in traffic in October.
The flattening of Twitter’s growth rate can be seen in this chart from TechCrunch
Last week I had the opportunity to beta test a cool new product from Flowtown. By entering in someone’s email address into the Flowtown system you can find out who a person is: their name, age, gender, occupation, and location.
The cool feature is that Flowtown also lets you know the social media profiles that are attached to that email addres. So you canfind out whether a prospect/customer is on Facebook, Linkedin, MySpace, etc and so can tailor a campaign specific to them.
Last week I spoke with Ethan Bloch, co-founder of Flowtown to learn more about their company and product and this is part of that conversation Read more...(519 words, 1 image, estimated 2:05 mins reading time)
Evan Carmichael just came out with his Top 50 SEO Posts of the Year and our post on Don’t Forget Search made his list. Certainly an honour considering some of the other great posts that Evan has on the list.
For those of you not familiar with this site here are some details:
EvanCarmichael.com is the Internet’s #1 resource for small business motivation and strategies. With over 450,000 monthly visitors, 4,650 contributing authors, and 78,000 pages of content no website shares more profiles of famous entrepreneurs and inspires more small business owners than EvanCarmichael.com.
If your target demographic is college students, there is no better way to reach this group that through Facebook.
According to the “American College Students Survey” Facebook is not only the overwhelming favorite social networking site (SNS) among college students; it may rapidly become the only SNS that matters, according to research by Anderson Analytics.
Among seven leading social networking sites ranked by college students in the Anderson Analytics 2009-2010 GenX2Z American College Student Survey conducted this fall, Facebook was viewed as “cool” by a whopping 82% of males and 90% of females. All other SNS’ were deemed “lame” by significant percentages of both male and female collegiate users. In particular, MySpace–the granddaddy of SNS’–was considered “lame” by the largest portion of college students (31%). Read more...(339 words, 2 images, estimated 1:21 mins reading time)
Social media has transformed itself in the last 2 years from blogs and forums to Facebook and Twitter. But I see another transformation unfolding in social media as the video market is poised explode.
By video I do not mean repurposing commercials on YouTube. Video is producing original content for the web.
In recent months we have seen an explosion in demand for .TV domain names major professional sports leagues and sports network ESPN have started to acquire of develop .TV domains. For example look at:
Great article on social media and Ashton Kutcher in Fast Company. Within the article, Fast Company discusses two successful social media campaigns that Kutcher’s social media agency have been involved in.
Twitter Campaign
Kutcher was working with a small organization called Malaria No More on getting people to help them get malaria nets to people in need.
The campaign started with siple twitterable message’s from Kutche – “Every 30 seconds, a kid dies of malaria. Nets save lives” — and an affordable call to action: $10 buys a net.
The goal was to drive people to Malaria No More web site to donate. Read more...(374 words, 1 image, estimated 1:30 mins reading time)
It’s that time of year when companies start to look towards 2010 and marketing executives are busy developing marketing plans for the new year.
If one of your tasks is to develop a social media marketing plan for 2010 then these resources, from Examiner.com will help you get started.
Creating Your Social Media Plan written by Outspoken Media’s Chief Branding Officer, Lisa Barone, details the essential steps involved when creating and pursuing a social media strategy.
10 Small Business Social Media Marketing Tips on Mashable discusses how small businesses can use specific social media tools to increase their visibility and follow online discussions about their business or related topics. Read more...(208 words, 1 image, estimated 50 secs reading time)
Wanted to share this data with you before I went away for the holidays.
It is pretty apparent that traffic to Twitter.com has peaked, and is now in a downward spiral.
According to data provided to eMarketer by Nielsen, traffic to Twitter.com fell 27.8% between September and October 2009, falling to 18.9 million unique visitors. comScore said unique visitors were down 8.1% in October, while Compete reported a 2.1% decline.
All these different reporting agencies capture data differently, so sometimes it is difficult to compare Compete with comScore with Nielsen. But when they all report the same trend, you cannot deny it. Less people are going to twitter.com than before. Read more...(225 words, 3 images, estimated 54 secs reading time)
