Eighty-two percent of social network users selected their leisure travel destination online in the past twelve months, versus just 68% of non-users. The same pattern of online destination selection holds for micro-blog users (83%) and mobile early adopters (91%).
That and four other travel trends from recent PhoCusWright Consumer Technology surveys include these (available to buy online):
- Despite advanced mobile devices like the iPhone making headlines almost daily, the majority of travellers are not using their phones to visit travel-related mobile Web sites or make travel reservations.
- Travel reviews have a significant impact on booking decisions, and, for now, are cited as influential more often than any other type of social media. But not all reviews have equal sway. Their location and content have an effect on how influential they ultimately are, with reviews offered via online travel agency Web sites ranking highest.
- The most popular methods for online travellers to share their leisure travel reviews involve two technologies that are rarely mentioned these days. When asked to cite up to three methods they prefer to use when sharing trip experiences or reviews, the largest percentage of travellers opted for spoken conversation in person or via phone, and email.
- It won't be long before social media will be as common as mobile phones, and savvy travel companies have already started engaging in this space.
Online travellers who have joined/participated in a micro-blog are also slightly more likely than non-users to have stopped using social networks.
(Travelmole.com, August 2010)
eMarketer forecasts that worldwide social network ad spending will rise 31% this year, to $3.3 billion. Next year, spending is expected to increase by an additional 29%, to nearly $4.3 billion.
The US accounts for just over half of that total. But in 2011, as outlined in the new report, "Worldwide Social Network Ad Spending: A Rising Tide," US dominance will start to wane and international social network ad spending will increase more rapidly.
There are several reasons why this is the case.
Social networks are popular in the US, but even more popular in many other markets. According to The Nielsen Company, the social network/blog category reached 86% of active internet users in Brazil in April 2010, and 78% of active users in Italy, for example. Reach in the US was 74%.
Chinese social networks are strong performers. According to the Data Center of China internet, the number of social network users in the country reached 245 million in 2009, up 34% over 2008. Social networks such as Tencent's QQ, search giant Baidu's Baidu Space and RenRen (formerly Xiaonei) dominate usage.
Although China has just over 500 million internet users, according to eMarketer estimates, QQ has even more accounts than that-587 million as of March 2010. Tencent, a public company, reported $141 million in online advertising revenue in 2009 and $30 million in Q1 2010.
Facebook is growing rapidly outside the US. In New Zealand, Hong Kong, Canada and Singapore (as well as in the US), Facebook was the No. 1 website based on market share of visits in June 2010, according to Experian Hitwise.
Homegrown sites are holding their own. In Western Europe and Russia, several midsize social networks have succeeded in maintaining their dominance in their individual markets, even as Facebook has encroached on their territory. In Poland, for example, Nasza Klasa reached 58% of internet users as of spring 2010, making it the No. 3 website, according to Millward Brown SMG/KRC. Facebook did not rank in the top 10.
Hyves in the Netherlands, Odnoklassniki.ru in Russia and Netlog-which is based in Belgium but has a Europe-wide presence-all are continuing to grow. Netlog, for example, has increased its user base to 68 million members as of July 2010, from 56 million in October 2009.
As Facebook and other social sites expand their worldwide presence, they will become more attractive to marketers that want to buy ads across multiple markets.
So far, most companies have been focused on the US opportunity. According to a survey of brand managers conducted by Harris Interactive for Buddy Media, 43% used Facebook to reach customers in local markets worldwide. Among the obstacles the brand managers said they needed to overcome were the difficulty of keeping country-specific content fresh, customizing the same content for multiple markets and creating scalable campaigns across regions.
(emarketer.com, August 2010)
Social networking sites reach a higher percentage of women than men globally, with 75.8% all women online visiting a social networking site in May.
Globally, women demonstrate higher levels of engagement with social networking sites than men. Although women account for 47.9 of total unique visitors to the social networking category, they consume 57 percent of pages and account for nearly 57% of total minutes spent on these sites. Women spend significantly more time on social networking sites than men, with women averaging 5.5 hours per month compared to men's 4 hours, demonstrating the strong engagement that women across the globe share with social sites.
Across each global region, Social Networking reached a higher percentage of women online than men. Social Networking's reach among women is highest in Latin America where it reached 94.1% of females online, and in North America where it reached 91.0% of females. Europe saw 85.6% of its female online population visit a social networking site in May 2010, while in Asia Pacific, where parts of the region still face low broadband penetration and site restrictions, reported a 54.9% reach.
Additional findings from the report include:
- Although men are in the majority across the global Internet, women spend about 8% more time online, averaging 25 hours per month on the Web.
- Globally, women spend 20% more time on Retail sites overall than men. Among the various retail sub-categories, Comparison Shopping and Apparel sites reached the highest percentage of women at 24.8% and 18.7%, respectively, in May 2010.
- In the U.S., women are more avid online buyers than men, with 12.5% of female Internet users making an online purchase in February 2010, compared to 9.3% of men.
- Health sites show some of the largest overall differences in reach between female and male, with a nearly 6-point gap between global women and men.
- In most countries women spend far less time watching online video than men, but women spend a much higher share of their time watching videos on YouTube than men.
- In both the U.S. and Europe, smartphone usage is dominated by men with both markets experiencing close to a 60/40 split in smartphone adoption between the genders.
(Comscore.com, July 2010)
Social network giant Facebook has registered its 500 millionth member, the firm has announced. The site, which launched in 2004, has gained around 100 million new users in the last six months.
As Facebook has grown, many of its competitors have shrunk or disappeared. MySpace, owned by News Corp, was once the poster child of social networking. However, Facebook raced past it in 2008. MySpace currently has around 65 million unique users. Another competitor, Bebo, has also faced difficulty. In June this year its owner, AOL, sold the site just two years after it bought it for $850m (£417m). The company said it was unable to provide the "significant investment" Bebo needed to compete with its social networking rivals.
One site that appears to be growing alongside Facebook is Twitter. Measurements of Twitter traffic are notoriously difficult as many users do not interact with the service through the website. Instead, they use desktop software and mobile phones. However, it is estimated to be approaching 200m users.
(BBC, July 2010)
According to comScore data, TripAdvisor leads the way with the highest number of unique montly website visitors in the online travel segment - more than 35 million unique visitors from across the globe, a few million more than the next largest site, Expedia.
TripAdvisor, for a long time the world's largest travel community website has now also become simply the largest travel website in the world - of any kind. Worldwide comScore figures for the previous 2 months have confirmed this significant development in the online space.
TripAdvisor now leads the way with the highest number of unique monthly visitors on its website - 35,382,000 unique visitors. The next largest travel website in the world is the world's leading online travel agent - Expedia - with monthly traffic figures of 2,122,000 visitors less than TripAdvisor.
(Hotelmarketing.com, July 2010)
Expedia® Media, the advertising sales division of Expedia, Inc., has released insights from a new study on destination marketing organization (DMO) advertising trends. Commissioned by Expedia and conducted by Revel, the study most notably revealed that DMOs are significantly shifting ad dollars online and away from offline media, with some DMOs saying that online now accounts for more than 50% of the organization's total advertising budget.
According to the Expedia study, the shift of DMO marketing dollars to online media has occurred largely because of budget cuts and increasing pressure from governing bodies to measure results.
Underscoring the opportunities that exist online for DMOs, other recent data have shown how important online sources are to leisure travellers. A 2009 PhoCusWright study reported that 56% of U.S. travellers select their vacation destination online. Destination marketers also have the opportunity online to influence leisure travellers in the decision process, as a 2009 Google-Compete study showed that as many as 4 in 10 leisure travellers are undecided on an exact destination when they think about planning a trip.
Social media is also an increasingly important channel for destination marketers seeking to connect with travellers online. According to a January 2010 report from Destination Analysts, 43.5% of consumer respondents said they had used some form of user-generated content to plan leisure travel in the last 12 months, and 24% said they had used a mobile phone or PDA to access travel information - 80% higher than the prior year. DMOs recognize the need to capitalize on this trend, and according to Expedia's study, many DMOs said they want to incorporate social media into the marketing mix, but have not yet determined the best way to leverage the channel in their marketing plans.
(Travelindustrywire.com, July 2010)
New research has indicated that corporate travel professionals are increasingly using social media to communicate with travellers and to stay on top of latest travel industry information.
The latest research report "Social Media in Business Travel Management" by American Express Business Travel's eXpert has revealed that social media has proven to be a useful and effective tool to share pertinent information with employees and drive change in organisations.
According to American Express Business Travel, respondents also reported high expectations regarding their companies' future social media usage plan, reporting that within the next year forums, webcasts, and online video are the most likely to be implemented by businesses.
Social media has evolved to play a role in business travel programmes. While half (50%) of respondents said that they use social media to some extent to support travel management today, mid-size companies ($3M to $10M USD in air volume) were the largest adopters (59%) of social media to support business travel management to date.
Many respondents indicated that the primary benefit of social media in supporting managed travel is educating themselves or their organisation about the market. In fact, 44% indicated that staying on top of the latest travel information was the most important social media benefit. This response was followed closely by the interest in using social networking to learn and communicate best practices and reduce business travel costs (43%).
Other findings include:
- 42% use social networking to look for preferred vendors and services from travellers
- 34% seek to uncover travel patterns that could lend to better vendor rates and services
- 26% use social media tools to encourage travellers to network with each other
- 18% network with other travel manager/procurement officer peers.
Of those survey respondents who do use social media to support travel management, when asked specifically what features or functionality would they add if they could design their own social media tools for professional use, the majority (61%) indicated they wanted flexibility to accommodate business travel management processes.
Other top ranking features/functionality include:
- Real time updates such as mobile application, the ability to push out notifications and alerts (39%)
- Supervision of the entire social media sharing process and specific monitoring of those using social media tools (35%)
- Reporting ability - notification to website abuse, comments and security issues (29%).
The most significant barrier to adoption of social media as an organization has been the lack of direct benefits realization, 20% found the business case for social media tools and usage within travel management programs unclear. Lack of strategy or understanding and lack of support from upper management each followed at 15% respectively.
Notably, only 5% of respondents indicated that they have had no barriers or challenges to adopt social media tools as an organization.
(Eye for Travel, July 2010)
Social networking will become the number one choice of communication within a business for a growing number of companies. This is the conclusion of analyst firm Gartner, which claims 20% of businesses will use social networking as their method of choice for workplace communications, by 2014.
Wireless email - defined by Gartner as accounts on email servers accessible through mobile networks on mobile devices, either through an application or web browser - has seen a surge recently. Gartner thinks the number of people using email in this way will break the one billion mark in the next four years. However, the analyst firm believes email will continue to integrate with social networking and it is only a matter of time before the latter becomes the dominant communications tool.
(ITPro, July 2010)
The video, "Social Media Revolution" was first posted on July 30, 2009 and the newest version, "Social Media Revolution Refresh," was released May 5, 2010. This refresh was necessary because so many things had changed in so little time. The video is based on the book Socialnomics by Erik Qualman.
In developing the refresh, they considered whether or not they should include MySpace and they replaced Bebo and Orkut logos with Renren (China) and a Russian site.
As it was a "refresh," some data in the first video is also included in this new one. Below are some data points that are new to this latest iteration:
- Over 50% of the world's population is under the age of 30.
- Facebook tops Google for weekly traffic in the US.
- Facebook added over 200 million users in less than a year.
- We don't have a choice on whether we do social media; the question is how well we do it.
- If Facebook were a country it would be the world's third largest, ahead of the US and only behind China and India. Please note in the first video it was only the fourth largest.
- Yet, QQ and Renren dominate China. Please note that in the first video some data showed QQ was larger than Facebook; this is no longer the case.
- 80% of companies use social media for recruitment; 95% of these use LinkedIn.
- Ashton Kutcher and Ellen DeGeneres (combined) have more Twitter followers than the populations of Ireland, Norway, or Panama.
- 50% of the mobile internet traffic in the UK is for Facebook - people update anywhere, anytime. Imagine what that means for bad customer experiences?
- Generation Y and Z consider e-mail passé - some universities have stopped distributing e-mail accounts. Instead they are distributing e-readers, iPads, and tablets.
- While you watch the above video, 100-plus hours of video will be uploaded to YouTube.
- Wikipedia has over 15 million articles. Studies show it's more accurate than the Encyclopedia Britannica. 78% of these articles are not in English.
- Because of the speed in which social media enables communication, word-of-mouth now becomes world-of-mouth.
- If you were paid $1 for every time an article was posted on Wikipedia, you would earn $1,712 per hour.
- Only 18% of traditional TV campaigns generate a positive ROI.
- Kindle e-books outsold paper books on Christmas Day 2009.
- 60 million status updates happen on Facebook daily.
- Successful companies in social media act more like Dale Carnegie and less like Mad Men - listening first, selling second.
- The ROI of social media is that your business will still exist in five years.
(ClickZ, May 2010)
Facebook will debut location-based features during the next month that will first be tested as a marketing platform by McDonald's, according to an Advertising Age article. The social site will provide users the ability to employ status updates in a manner similar to how Foursquare users "check in." The story said that users - when at a McDonald's location - will be able to check in while featuring one of the quick-serve chain's products, such as a Big Mac, in their activity feed. (ClickZ, May 2010)
Membership of professional social networks like LinkedIn and Viadeo has bloomed since late 2008 as tens of millions of consumers from around the world have sought to widen their "safety networks" fearing worsening economies.
Professional sites seek to distance themselves from social networks like Facebook, taking a more sober approach and giving members more control over their profiles.
When economies have started to improve, advertisers and recruiters are returning to use the services, while continuing uncertainties over sustainability of the recovery and European economic problems are still boosting the take-up of services.
LinkedIn said there are around 500 million professionals who could become its members. This compares with some 100 million members in professional social networks today. LinkedIn has more than 65 million members, compared with some 30 million members of Viadeo.
LinkedIn is among the Web's fastest-growing social networking sites along with Facebook and Twitter, fueling speculation that it is positioning itself for an initial public offering. (HOTELMARKETING.COM, May 2010)
Among all marketers surveyed in January 2010, Twitter barely edged out Facebook as the social tool used most, according to the "2010 Social Media Marketing Industry Report" from Social Media Examiner. These sites have gained in importance as blogs have moved down the ladder. But among those most experienced in using social media, habits were different.
Social media tools/sites used by SMB marketers worldwide, January 2010 (% of respondents):
- Twitter: 88%
- Facebook: 87%
- LinkedIn: 78%
- Blogs: 70%
- YouTube or other video site: 46%
- Social bookmarking sites (i.e. Delicious): 27%
- Forums: 26%
- Digg, reddit, Mixx, StumbleUpon or similar site: 22%
- Ning sites: 17%
- MySpace: 1%
Fully 96% of marketers with years of social media experience were using Twitter, while 91% used Facebook and 89% LinkedIn. Marketers with some social media experience were also big on Twitter (92%), followed by Facebook (88%) and LinkedIn (76%). The biggest difference between the two groups was in usage of social video marketing, such as through YouTube. Nearly two-thirds of the most experienced respondents said they used the technique, compared with only 42% of marketers who had several months of experience with social media.
In contrast, marketers new to the social scene, who said they were "just getting started," focused on Facebook. Four in five said they marketed on the social networking giant, compared with a below-average 71% using Twitter and 67% using LinkedIn. This group was least likely to leverage social video, at just 28%.
Overall, fewer than a third of marketers told Social Media Examiner they fell into the most experienced group, up from 23% last year.
Experience level of SMB marketers worldwide who use social media for marketing, Janaury 2010 (% of respondents):
- Been doing this for a few months: 43%
- Been doing this for a few years: 31%
- Just getting started: 22%
- No experience, but plan to use social media: 3%
- No experience and do not plan to use social media: 0%
B2B companies were more likely to report longer experience, with 79.5% saying they had been marketing on social media for at least a few months, compared with 68.7% of B2C marketers. (eMarketer, April 2010)
A small group of business users are getting emails from the Twitter team, inviting them to test "the Twitter Toolkit". Mashable has an overview of some of the new features that businesses can expect to enjoy in the near future.
Twitter's new Business Center features four tabs:
- Overview tab: it provides basic information about business accounts
- Business Info tab: it allows a company to change the information that it submitted during initial registration.
- Verification tab
- Contributors tab: it gives businesses the ability to add multiple users to a business account so that they can tweet on its behalf.
Twitter has also a new feature for businesses: the ability to accept direct messages from any of their followers, regardless of whether they follow that person or not. This is huge for businesses that perform customer service via Twitter: they can get feedback and deal with private customer issues without having to follow the person back first.
There are no details yet as to how much Twitter will charge businesses for these features. For now though, the company is refining and testing its Twitter Toolkit before its eventual public debut. (HOTELMARKETING.COM, May 2010)
68% of all Twitter users aren't followed by a single person they are following, according to a group of researchers at Korea's Advanced Institute of Science and Technology. This makes Twitter more like a broadcast medium than a social network.
After analyzing over 41 million user profiles and 1.47 billion follower/following relationships, the researchers concluded that only 22% of all connections on Twitter are reciprocal. On Flickr, this number is closer to 68% and on Yahoo 360 it's 84%. The large majority (78%) of connections between users on Twitter are one-way relationships.
Given that Twitter was set up for these kinds of non-reciprocal follower/following relationships, it doesn't come as a surprise that many users would use Twitter to follow breaking news channels and celebrities. The fact that almost 80% of these relationships are one-way relationships, however, does come as a surprise and hints at how Twitter's mainstream users use the service more as a news medium than as a social network. (HOTELMARKETING.COM, May 2010)
Twitter is launching the first phase of its Promoted Tweets platform with a handful of advertising partners. The list of partners includes Best Buy, Bravo, Red Bull, Sony Pictures, Starbucks, and Virgin America (with more to come).
According to Twitter, Promoted Tweets "are ordinary Tweets that businesses and organisations want to highlight to a wider group of users". The company shared that users will start to see Tweets promoted by Twitter's partner advertisers called out at the top of some Twitter.com search results pages.
Twiiter indicates that they will attempt to measure whether the Tweets resonate with users and stop showing Promoted Tweets that don't resonate. Promoted Tweets will be clearly labeled as "promoted" when an advertiser is paying, but in every other respect they will first exist as regular Tweets and will be organically sent to the timelines of those who follow a brand," stated the company.
Promoted Tweets will also retain all the functionality of a regular Tweet including replying, Retweeting, and favoriting. Only one Promoted Tweet will be displayed on the search results page. (eyefortravel, April 2010)
Launching its universal "like" button, Facebook extended its tentacles across the internet, setting up pipes (see definition) to gather user data from anywhere on the web. At the F8 developers conference, CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced a platform that aims to connect the entire internet through the social network. With those like buttons appearing on major publisher sites directly after the announcement, users can thumbs-up individual pages with one click and publish that to Facebook. Meanwhile, that Like is stored for later.
Facebook's new tools, including the like button, activity feeds for other Facebook users and recommendation engines, are designed to embed Facebook functionality on outside websites. With like buttons on 75 sites, including publishers such as CNN and the New York Times, from day one, Facebook expects to serve more than 1 billion buttons in the first 24 hours. Once a user likes a page, the publisher gets a link on the user's page, and means to later publish to that user's newsfeed. (HOTELMARKETING.COM, April 2010)
Customer service, recruiting, contests, giveaways and promotions - these are all standbys for businesses using Twitter as a medium to connect with customers and fans. Given that Twitter as a platform supports nearly limitless applications for business use, Waggener Edstrom Worldwide thought it time to highlight some of the newer Twitter-for-business opportunities that aren't so obvious.
Here are some unique ways to use Twitter in social business strategy as detailed in an article in Mashable:
1. Pitch your followers: Find a way to give your biggest brand advocates creative control over your next event, campaign or company initiative. Spend the time internally to craft a few solid ideas and then pitch them to your followers. This should be much more than a poll or vote, and instead more akin to empowering your Twitter influencers as project stakeholders.
2. Reward loyalty: If you can find a way to automatically reward loyalty for Twitter-sharing, you'll be motivating your audiences to spread your message for you. It's a win-win for everyone, as long as you carefully consider the image of your customer and the message they push out to their followers.
3. Market Research: Create a list of your biggest brand advocates and loudest brand naysayers and hang on their every word - even if that means reading up on their weekend activities. If you can get into the minds and lives of the people you're trying to serve, you'll have a better idea of what your customer wants.
4. Target niche audiences: No brand or business should turn to Promoted Tweets or alternative Twitter advertising options for a cheap Twitter win. Your audience will only respect your Twitter presence if you demonstrate that your ultimate goal is to serve their needs (and not your own). If used wisely, targeting niche audiences with Promoted Tweets could be a powerful way to use Twitter for business on a whole new level.
5. Add your own metadata: Beginning next quarter, Twitter will introduce annotations as a way for developers to attach any kind of metadata (tags, notes, location) they want to tweets. While we'll no doubt see a number of developers build applications for unique purposes, we see this as a prime opportunity for radical businesses to craft their own applications with metadata specific to their goals. Used in combination with the simplistic developer tools available via @anywhere, this could be a powerful way to add Twitter integrations to your site, append notes about visitors' on-site Twitter behaviors, tag tweets that originate from your site, or attach your own identifiers and figure out ways to reward actions (perhaps even loyalty).
(HOTELMARKETING.COM, April 2010)
TripAdvisor announced its new tourist board sponsorship of the Tourism Pages. The sponsorship provides an opportunity for tourist boards to incorporate highly targeted banner advertising, photos and videos, direct links to their own website, brochure links, promotional messaging for deals and announcements, an events calendar, and a visitors' centre placement within the destination map. All of these unique placements will be incorporated into the Tourism Pages on TripAdvisor.
Participating tourist boards will also be able to regularly update their advertising and content modules on their pages. Using a private login, sponsors will be able to keep up to five promotional links of their choice current, as well as their local events calendar, and seasonal photos and videos.
Alongside the unbiased reviews and opinions posted by more than 32 million unique monthly visitors on TripAdvisor, this highly targeted, relevant, and integrated advertising allows tourist boards to best reach an engaged and passionate travel audience while they actively consider traveling to their destination.
Given the successful launch of the TripAdvisor Business Listings subscription advertising for hotels, TripAdvisor expect that tourist boards will be equally as enthusiastic about reaching travellers in this new and integrated way.
TripAdvisor indicate that travellers will now be able to see valuable destination content including regularly updated events information from tourist boards who know their destinations best. (HOTELMARKETING.COM, April 2010)
Social networkers have chosen their platform, and they're reluctant to move. Whether it's Facebook, Twitter or a combination of networks, InSites Consulting Social Media Study shows that social networks are becoming stable and are now finding it difficult to expand as quickly as before.
The InSites Consulting research project Social Networks around the World asked over 2,000 internet users globally about how and why they use social networks. The answers give a fascinating and detailed picture of the similarities and surprising differences across countries and continents.
On average 72% of internet users belong to at least one social network. But this figure hides major differences: 95% of South American internet users are members of a social network, in contrast to 40% of Eastern Europe and Asia. South Americans tend to have the most friends (an average of 360) but they're also the most likely to unfriend their contacts.
Not everybody loves Facebook despite the hype. 63% of Dutch internet users prefer visiting the social network Hyves, while 61% of Portuguese use Hi5. (InSites Consulting - Four Words newsletter, April 2010)
Visual DNAs of travellers are to be created through travel start-up Explorra.com. The aim is to connect internet users with other people, content and products they will find useful. Created by Ciprian Morar, formerly with Expedia, users answer a demographic quiz using a series of photographs in a matrix.
From the visual references, the VisualDNA patented technology collects user's feelings, motivations and emotions and creates a VisualDNA profile scoring each picture on a variety of psychological and preferential axes. This, along with the company's travel search and recommendation engine, aims to provide relevant travel content such as holidays, travel guides, hotels for the user.
The response is almost instant returning results from more than 70 billion combinations of traveller needs, according to Explorra. The company also plans to offer real-time recommendations in the style of Amazon's recommendations. (travelmole, April 2010)
As growth in US traffic to Twitter.com began to flatten toward the end of 2009, the service's staying power was questioned. Had new users migrated to third-party platforms and mobile usage, or had they simply tired of sending 140-character bursts of information?
Research from social media analytics firm Sysomos supports Twitter's stickiness. The company examined more than 1 billion tweets over a four-month period and found that 41.6% of the tweet volume in March 2010 came from users who had joined Twitter at least nine months prior.
As recently as December 2009, these percentages were substantially different, with 26% of tweets coming from nine-month veterans and the largest single percentage, 28.9%, coming from users who had joined six to nine months prior.
A posting on the Sysomos blog sums up the significance of this data: "New users are continuing to tweet at a steady pace while the veterans are becoming more and more active."
Dynamic Logic and Millward Brown reported that, in Q3 2009, 58% of Twitter users surveyed had used the service for less than six months, while another 25% had been using it for 6 to 11 months. This indicates that Twitter usage was still ramping up significantly in mid-to-late 2009, compared with other social media sites such as MySpace and LinkedIn, which had smaller percentages of recent users and much larger portions of longtime users.
Further, a combined 90% of Twitter users said they used Twitter the same or more than six months prior.
These usage patterns suggests a high level of experimentation by new Twitter users, while more experienced users are the most active members of the Twitter community. (eMarketer, April 2010)
Social networks reach an estimated 940 million people around the world, according to January 2010 research from InSites Consulting. Most are there for personal reasons, such as sending messages, looking at pictures, and posting and responding to status updates. But interactions involving information about products and services have proliferated as brands encourage online word-of-mouth.
Asked what source was most believable when it came to information found about brands on social networking sites, internet users were most likely to favour their peers. But "the brand itself" came in a close second, far ahead of journalists, considered traditionally to be an objective source. Notably, users were much less trusting of marketers-a separate response from brands-and didn't put much faith in a brand's competitors either.
Opinions varied by geography, with respondents in Southern and Eastern Europe most trusting of consumer-based word-of-mouth and those in Asia and South America favouring the brand.
The research supports earlier data on trust in word-of-mouth from fellow consumers as well as the ability of brands to foster earned media through their own social network presences, which are also highly trusted.
InSites also found that, while brands were not the top presence that users became fans of, they made a respectable showing. Among those users that had become a fan of anything, 35% showed their support for brands.
Overall, 58% of respondents worldwide had become a fan of something, and 79% had become a member of social networking group. (eMarketer, April 2010)
In 2009 e-mail marketers started to get social, but 2010 will be the year social media makes e-mail marketing more powerful. Social media is a partner, not a threat, to e-mail marketing because it provides new avenues for sharing and engaging customers and prospects.
More than 4 in 10 business executives surveyed by StrongMail said integrating e-mail and social was one of their most important initiatives for 2010, just after improving e-mail performance and targeting and growing opt-in lists.
About a quarter of respondents had already implemented an integrated strategy, and another 24% had formulated a strategy and were researching how to put it in practice. But 18% of business executives wanted to add social components to their e-mail campaigns and did not know where to begin.
So far, the consensus of the value social media adds to e-mail marketing has been in the area of softer metrics. 81% of marketers surveyed by MarketingSherpa in summer 2009 said social media helped to expand the reach of their e-mail content, most likely because of sharing buttons incorporated into e-mail newsletters. A further 78% said social helped to increase brand awareness. (eMarketer, March 2010)
At the 6th annual Hostelworld.com hostel conference that took place in Dublin at the end of January 2010, Hostelworld.com took the opportunity to release some new research from budget travellers, in particular in relation to social and mobile. Highlights included:
- Older generation using hostels more, 13% of respondents over 45
- 47% of respondents use facebook
- 87% bring a mobile phone with them travelling
- 5% use a smartphone to book online
- Europe is top destination for 2010.
Hostelworld.com launched their iPhone app in January of this year which has already proved extremely popular, peaking at number 2 in the free travel apps charts. (TravelDailyNews, February 2010)
In March 2010, both Twitter and Facebook have come out with big location news. Twitter is adding geolocation features and Facebook will soon let users share their location.
While Twitter's geolocation feature has been live through its API since last November 2009, there was no sign of integration into the main twitter.com site until now. For tweets tagged with location, right next to the source of the tweet there is a location placemarker. When you hover over it, it turns blue, and clicking on it brings up a little Google map showing the location that tweet was sent from.
Facebook plans to launch its new location-based feature in late April 2010 at f8, the company's yearly developer conference, according to several people briefed on the project, who spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss unannounced services. The new location feature will have two aspects, according to the people familiar with Facebook's plans. One will be a service offered directly by Facebook that will allow users to share their location information with friends. (HOTELMARKETING.COM, March 2010)
Facebook continues to attract the lion's share of searches relating to online communities and chat services in the UK, according to data from Experian Hitwise. Searches around the Facebook brand accounted for over a quarter of queries in that category during January 2010. However, that portion is far greater than in the US, where the term "facebook" accounted for just 10.41% of searches in January and "facebook login" accounted for 5.22%. In the UK, those terms attracted 22.14% and 6.12% of queries, respectively, in the online communities category. (ClickZ, February 2010)
A video "Social Media Revolution: Is social media a fad?" by Socialnomics details out social media facts and figures that are hard to ignore. Socialnomics believes that social media isn't a fad, it's a fundamental; shift in the way we communicate.
Some of the findings featured in the presentation/video include:
- By 2010, GenY will outnumber Baby Boomers. 96% of them have joined a social network.
- Years to reach 50 million users: Radio (38 years); TV (13 years); Internet (4 years); iPod (3 years). Facebook added 100 million users in less than 9 months. iPod Application downloads hit 1 billion in 9 months.
- If Facebook were a country it would be the world's 4th largest.
(Social Media Revolution video, July 2009)
Less than 1 in 5 marketers worldwide measured their social media ROI in 2009, according to a survey by Mzinga and Babson Executive Education.
Professionals worldwide who measure the ROI of their social media programs, August 2009 (% of respondents):
- Measure ROI: 16%
- Do not measure ROI: 84%
Marketers believe that measuring true ROI for social media is difficult, according to eMarketer. 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.
There is a widespread tendency for social media marketers to focus on Website traffic as their default measurement tool. In several independent surveys and studies, Website traffic was deemed the most popular way of measuring social media marketing efforts.
But there is much more to measurement than simply watching Website visits. Marketers ready to go beyond the toe-dipping stage should define their marketing goals and connect them to social media objectives. Marketers should consider soft metrics as well as hard ones and try to tie a dollar value to them, if possible. And they should not overlook other sources of ROI, such as market research and the customer service value of brand monitoring.
Importantly, marketers should strive to systematically monitor social media interactions and use this valuable ‘listening/learning' data to inform their online and offline media and creative messages, according to eMarketer. (eMarketer, February 2010)
One in five (20%) tweets posted on Twitter includes an inquiry or information about a specific brand-related product or service, according to research at Penn State University. The study focused on micro-communicating and the value of this word-of-mouth medium. It included observation of more than half a million tweets that used brand names, and found out that brand-tweeters are tweeting to connect with products.
Businesses use micro-communication for brand awareness, brand knowledge, and customer relationship, according to the research. Personal use is all over the board. It may be right up there with e-mail in terms of its communication impact.
The study revealed that this passionate cohort of brand-related tweeters is providing companies (increasingly using Twitter for brand-building, brand awareness, and CRM) robust and rich source information regarding their products. Tweets are about as close as one can get to the customer point of purchase for products and services. (brandchannel, February 2010)
Social media is no longer a trend for marketers; it is a reality. Social network ad spending will reach $2.5 billion worldwide in 2010 and $1.3 billion in the US, according to eMarketer. About 64% of US internet users will interact with user-generated content in 2010 and 26 million US adults will use Twitter at least monthly. Mobile social networks will reach 223 million people around the world.
Online social network advertising spending worldwide, 2008-2011:
- 2008: US$1,985 million
- 2009: US$2,220 million
- 2010: US$2,540 million
- 2011: US$2,880 million
Already, more than half of marketers are engaging in some social media activity, according to survey data from a number of researchers.
With so much intense interest and activity, the big question is - are marketers doing it right?, according to eMarketer. Since social media marketing has the potential to affect so many areas of an organization, the enormity of this opportunity leads many marketers to chase after every technique, tactic and metric that passes them by. Instead, marketers should focus on fewer but better-defined objectives and remember that listening, establishing trust, adding value and projecting authenticity are among the best practices that are critical to their success with social media.
Listening is a core competency that all marketers must master. Without good listening skills, marketers will not be able to effectively use social media to reach their customers. (eMarketer, February 2010)
Buzz is Google's new social network and it's already created a stir. There have been concerns over privacy but all in all, the reaction has been very largely positive. Buzz is Google's answer to Twitter and Facebook, remarkably similar to another service (that Facebook acquired and still exists) called Friendfeed.
Buzz is a way for you to share status updates, video, audio and images with friends. Buzz also lets you import your activity from other sites including Picasa, Flickr, Twitter, your blog and others are bound to come.
A little like Facebook, but Google does dramatically improve on the stream based UI that Facebook has become synonymous with. Buzz is fast, imports more services, adds location features and it automatically ‘follows' recommends people you communicate with frequently. (HOTELMARKETING.COM, February 2010)
By 2014, social networking services will replace e-mail as the primary vehicle for interpersonal communications for 20% of business users, according to Gartner.
Greater availability of social networking services both inside and outside the firewall, coupled with changing demographics and work styles will lead 20% of users to make a social network the hub of their business communications. During the next several years, most companies will be building out internal social networks and/or allowing business use of personal social network accounts. Social networking will prove to be more effective than e-mail for certain business activities such as status updates and expertise location.
Gartner believes that the rigid distinction between e-mail and social networks will erode. E-mail will take on many social attributes, such as contact brokering while social networks will develop richer e-mail capabilities. (HOTELMARKETING.COM, February 2010)
Users of virtual world Second Life spent $567 million on user-to-user transactions in 2009, up from $344 million in 2008.
Second Life user-to-user transaction value, 2007-2009:
- 2007: $333 million
- 2008: $344 million
- 2009: $567 million
Second Life's worldwide user base increased by 15% to 769 million, while the amount of time spent in the virtual world climbed even faster, by more than 21%, indicating increased engagement.
Number of unique Second Life users worldwide, 2007-2009:
- 2007: 536, 000
- 2008: 668,000
- 2009: 769,000
In 2009, Piper Jaffray predicted more than $2.2 billion in virtual goods revenues worldwide, including $621 million in the US. By 2013, more than $6 billion will be spent worldwide on virtual items. The research firm also predicted that virtual worlds such as Second Life would fall behind in the virtual-goods economy while social network players like Facebook become more involved in the space.
Cary Rosenzweig, CEO of IMVU, another virtual world with extensive user-to-user virtual item offerings, described that service as more like "an e-commerce company ... in the sense that we get our money from the purchase of these virtual credits that people use to buy virtual items". Virtual goods have value to people, according to Mr. Rosenzweig. People buy virtual goods usually for one of three reasons: to express themselves (so they're buying virtual goods to make their avatar look terrific) or to build relationships with other people in the form of gifts. And the third reason, especially in gaming environments, is that virtual goods enhance your power to effect change, to win, to do what you would like to do in that area. (eMarketer, January 2010)
Senior marketers worldwide reported that social networks and applications were their biggest priority for 2010, followed closely by digital infrastructure, according to research from the Society of Digital Agencies (SoDA). While social media marketing looks set to stay top of mind, a majority of respondents considered a range of digital activities at least "important," with only games failing to inspire widespread interest.
Top priorities in 2010 according to senior marketers worldwide (% of respondents):
- Social networks/applications: 45.4%
- Digital infrastructure: 44.5%
- Search optimization: 27.0%
- Mobile: 26.8%
- Blogger outreach: 18.4%
- Viral campaigns: 18.3%
- Digital advertising: 15.9%
- Email marketing: 14.1%
- Games: 8.8%
Marketers are looking closely at measures of engagement. Respondents considered time spent on a site to be the most important performance metric, followed by unique page views.
Advertising performance metrics in which senior marketers worldwide are most interested, 2nd half 2009 (% of respondents):
- Time on site: 27.9%
- Unique page views: 23.7%
- Click-through rate: 16.0%
- Page views: 11.9%
- CPM: 8.0%
- Other (cost per click conversation, ROI, etc.): 9.4%
(eMarketer, January 2010)
After a peak in growth rates in early 2009, uptake of Twitter slowed dramatically toward the end of the year, according to data from HubSpot. Based on a study of user profiles on the microblogging site, HubSpot found worldwide growth was highest in March 2009, at 13%, and dropped to just 3.5% by October.
Decreased growth rates may have a positive effect, however. The user base has matured and, on average, Twitter users have been members of the site for longer, making them more engaged. Users are following more feeds, for example, and being followed more in turn. In January 2010:
- Users followed 170 profiles, on average, compared with about 45 in July 2009.
- Users had an average of 300 followers, versus about 70 in July 2009.
- The average user had made 420 Twitter updates, compared with 120 in July 2009.
Twitter users were also including more complete information in their profiles, such as location, bio and Web address. Still, 82% of Twitter users have fewer than 100 followers, and 81% are following fewer than 100 people.
Twitter users worldwide who added information to their profile, January 2010 (% of total):
- Location: 65% (up from 31% in July 2009)
- Bio: 53% (up from 24%)
- Web address: 41% (up from 20%)
As Twitter matures, it is becoming more international. Less than 51% of Twitter users were from the US in December 2009, down from 62.1% in June 2009, according to Sysomos. Brazil saw the greatest user growth, rising from 2% of the total in June to 8.8% in December.
Leading countries, ranked by Twitter users, December 2009 (% of total):
- US: 50.88%
- Brazil: 8.79%
- UK: 7.20%
- Canada: 4.35%
- Germany: 2.49%
- Indonesia: 2.41%
- Australia: 2.39%
- Netherlands: 1.32%
- India: 1.27%
- Japan: 1.22%
- Mexico: 1.11%
- Philippines: 1.08%
- France: 0.98%
- Spain: 0.78%
- Singapore: 0.69%
- Italy: 0.65%
- Ireland: 0.52%
- Chile: 0.51%
- Sweden: 0.50%
- New Zealand: 0.47%
US users accounted for nearly 57% of tweets, however, showing they are more active than users in other countries, which can be easily explained by the fact that more experienced Twitter users are more engaged. Broken down by city, London had the most Twitter users, followed by Los Angeles, Sysomos found. But New Yorkers were the most active tweeters, accounting for some 2.4% of all posts. (eMarketer, January 2010)
Facebook plans to add a conversion tracking tool to its suite of advertising products based on demand from the marketplace. The platform will allow marketers to track clicks through conversion. The conversion tracking tool being tested by a "handful" of Facebook advertisers doesn't have a launch date, but Boland believes it should become available sometime before the end of March 2010. A JavaScript snippet will go into the Web page. Marketers will have an option to set up multiple tags to track numerous conversions.
Reports will provide a list of tracked conversions and the impressions and the clicks that led to each. The feature will help marketers build out messages as the campaign expands into a variety of pieces.
Conversion tracking aims to complement Facebook Connect, a tool that allows advertisers to target fans of brands, as well as friends of the connected fans. The Facebook Connect tool reports back on everything from demographics to interests listed in Facebook profiles. Ads connecting to Facebook Connect tie in social context, such as the person's name. (HOTELMARKETING.COM, January 2010)
If Twitter is all about answering that seemingly simplest of questions, "What are you doing now?" then the newest location-based services are all about answering the more intriguing question, "What are you doing next?" Not to be confused with basic GPS-enabled location tracking services, the new location-based check-in services encourage people to share what they like, dislike, and generally think others might find interesting about the place they're at right now in the context of the decision they're about to make. As a marketer, these new check-in services, powered by social Web technology, are worth taking the time to understand. (HOTELMARKETING.COM, January 2010)
Australian internet users spend the most time engaging with social networking sites and blogs, according to data from Nielsen. The firm estimates the average Australian user spent almost 7 hours on such sites during December 2009, followed by the US and the UK which both averaged around 6 hours and 9 minutes per user.
In terms of reach, the US continues to dominate, with 142.1 million unique users of social media during the month. Japan followed with 46.6 million users, followed by Brazil with 31 million. In Australia, social media attracted just shy of 10 million users.
Unique users of social media by country, December 2009:
1. US: 142,052,000
2. Japan: 46,558,000
3. Brazil: 31,345,000
4. UK: 29,129,000
5. Germany: 28,057,000
6. France: 26,786,000
7. Spain: 19,456,000
8. Italy: 18,256,000
9. Australia: 9,895,000
10. Switzerland: 2,451,000
(ClickZ, January 2010)
As Facebook reached 350 million users worldwide, its largest single source of growth was still the US. The US gain of more than 4.5 million monthly active Facebook users was the highest number of any country, according to Inside Facebook. Because of the large installed base of US Facebook users, it represented a 5% gain, compared with 10% growth in countries such as Indonesia, the Philippines and Malaysia.
Top 10 countries, ranked by gain in Facebook users between December 2009 & January 2010:
1. US: +4,576,220 (+5% compared to December 2009)
2. Indonesia: +1,431,160 (+10%)
3. Philippines: +780,880 (+10%)
4. Turkey: +633,260 (+4%)
5. Italy: +507,180 (+4%)
6. India: +483,880 (+9%)
7. Mexico: +459,940 (+7%)
8. Spain: +425,560 (+6%)
9. Malaysia: +399,040 (+10%)
10. Argentina: +339,560 (+5%)
For its size, India added relatively few new users in December 2009. Its high 9% growth rate was from a very small base, and Facebook still reaches only 0.5% of the population of the country.
The substantial increase in US users put Facebook's domestic monthly active user audience over the 100 million mark. And at the same time as the most overall growth came from the home market, the biggest increases in the US came among younger adults, Facebook's core audience. The largest gain came from males ages 18 to 25, followed by women 26 to 34. Despite the already-large base of users under 35, those groups also posted the highest rates of growth. Increases in usage among older users, which was relatively stronger earlier in 2009, had slowed.
The rise of Facebook among older users led to worries that the younger demographic would be turned off by a social site that now included profiles of their parents. But Facebook has remained popular among young adults and especially college students.
According to Inside Facebook, 4 in 10 active US Facebook users are under 25 as of January 2010, and another 23% are between 26 and 34. (eMarketer, January 2010)
The accelerated growth of the Social Networks over the past 12 months now make it imperative to understand different nuances of consumer behaviour, and the new marketing etiquette required to respond to these changes, according to Experian Hitwise.
Top-level findings from this research include:
- Over the past 12 months the US has experienced the largest usage growth of 52.4% (the week ending 17 October 2009 compared to the week ending 18 October 2008), followed by Hong Kong growing at 38.6%, Singapore 30.5%, Australia 27.8%, UK 20.0% and New Zealand with an increase of 14.3%.
- In Hong Kong Social Networks and Forums are a dominant force with almost 1 in every 4 visits (23.9% share in the week ending 17 October 2009) and continuing to grow while the share of visits growth by Search Engines have been minimal.
- Social Networks and Forums hold 14.1% of the visits from Singapore internet users compared to Search Engines' 10.1% for the week ending 17 October 2009, with a growth trend favouring Social Networks and Forums.
- Based on share of visits for the week ending 17 October 2009, Facebook is currently the number two website in other Experian Hitwise monitored markets - US, UK and New Zealand and is the leading website in Canada (since the week ending 15 August 2009), Singapore (since the week ending 22 August 2009) and Hong Kong (since the week ending 13 December 2007).
(Hitwise Singapore Newsletter - November 2009, November 2009)
Worldwide data from Trendstream and Lightspeed Research sheds light on the user-generated content activities of internet users around the world.
In the US, a mature internet market, managing a social network profile was the top online user-generated content activity, participated in by 44.2% of Web users. This was followed closely by uploading photos (42.6%). Uploading video (15.3%), blogging (12.8%) and microblogging (7.0%) were significantly less popular.
Users in the UK and Canada had similar rates of social network use and photo-sharing, and also tapered off dramatically when it came to more advanced user-generated content activities.
Japan, another mature internet market, has markedly different participation in user-generated content activities. Much lower percentages of Web users manage social network profiles or upload photos, for example. The "Global Web Index" report notes that this is actually a sign of advanced behaviour: The survey measured only activities conducted on a PC, and in Japan, many such activities are now mobile-based. For example, 34% of users accessed social networks only via mobile during the month of the study.
Online user-generated content activities of internet users in Japan, June 2009:
- Written their own blog: 24.5%
- Uploaded photos online: 19.5%
- Managed a social network profile: 14.9%
- Used a microblogging service: 8.0%
- Uploaded a video online: 5.7%
Meanwhile, participation was generally high in China, where overall internet penetration is only 29.6% according to eMarketer estimates. A majority of users uploaded photos (60.3%), and nearly half had a blog (46.0%). More than one-fifth used a microblogging service, far ahead of the more advanced economies.
Trendstream and Lightspeed noted that microblogging usage was fairly low across the board, despite the hype surrounding services such as Twitter. The 7% of US users participating in microblogging was somewhat lower than eMarketer's estimate of 11.1% Twitter penetration this year. (eMarketer, December 2009)
While social media users may not find social sites quite as trustworthy as traditional sources of news, according to research from Crowd Science they do see it as an important communications medium. Users want to be heard. Overall, 45% reported liking when others notice them, leading some to stretch the truth or reveal too much personal information. Young people were especially vulnerable to activities that might haunt them later.
But 36% believed others are simply interested in what they have to say. That shouldn't come as too much of a surprise to marketers, who know many users will tell all their contacts about good (and bad) experiences with products and services.
Females lived up to their reputation as prime targets of marketers seeking the benefits of earned media. Among users over age 30, women were significantly more likely than men to think others wanted to hear what they thought. In addition, women overall were more than three times as likely as men to say online social media was their favourite leisure activity.
Though not everything appearing on social media is trustworthy, nearly half of users responding to the survey claimed they could "easily" tell whether information they got from social media was true. Less than a quarter disagreed. These savvy users believe they can spot the difference between the real deal and insincere efforts.
While face-to-face contact with friends was generally preferred, about a third of users said they would rather communicate by social media than by telephone. (eMarketer, December 2009)
Twitter has worked on a mobile site for its social networking and microblogging service. Leland Rechis, who leads the user experience on the @twittermobile team, said the mobile team have built a brand new mobile web client from scratch using only Twitter APIs. Although no launch date has been given it is expected to be rolled out soon. (EyeForTravel, December 2009)
The marketing tactics most often used on social sites are not necessarily the best ones, according to a September 2009 MarketingProfs survey of business-to-business (B2B) and business-to-consumer (B2C) marketers.
The most common marketing tactic used on Facebook was attempting to drive traffic to corporate materials through status updates, followed by friending customers.
But the most effective tactic for consumer-oriented companies was creating a Facebook application, which was done by less than a quarter of total respondents. Both B2B and B2C companies also reported surveys of their fans as effective; fan surveys were the third-most-common tactic attempted. Unsurprisingly, buying ads (even targeted ones) was the least effective type of social media marketing overall.
Like those on Facebook, marketers using Twitter were also most interested in increasing traffic. Driving traffic by linking to marketing Webpages was the most common activity on the microblogging site, followed by driving sales by linking to promotional pages. But again, the most effective tactics were different.
B2C marketers had the most success with monitoring Twitter for PR problems (done by half of all respondents) and contacting users who posted negative comments about their brand (done by only 22.4% of total respondents). B2B companies also succeeded with brand monitoring, as well as with using Twitter invites for in-person events (the least common tactic of all).
Though some firms, such as Dell, have reported success in the area, the study found that driving sales was the least effective marketing tactic attempted by companies using Twitter. (eMarketer, January 2010)
Facebook recently announced a series of changes to its platform, and the roadmap has a substantial impact on how brands approach building a Facebook presence.
1. Email is now a supported channel: Facebook has long hidden user emails, but soon Facebook will provide developers access to a user's verified email address. For brands that are serious about engaging in an ongoing dialogue with their fans, email becomes a powerful communication method. Email will allow brands to better reconnect with users who have interacted with them on Facebook. This becomes important given that...
2. Status updates are no longer guaranteed: Previously users' streams included everything their friends and pages (including brand pages) published. Now the news feed has returned to a default view showing select highlights that Facebook's algorithm thinks are most relevant to the user, which may or may not contain your brand's message. There's still a live feed view, but it's no longer default, so only brand posts that fans interact with will appear in most users' streams.
3. Other communication channels are consolidating: Many brands rely on application-to-user and user-to-user notifications to reconnect with users, and this communication channel is disappearing. That means in order to remarket to users to let them know about new product launches, sales, events, or promotions, you'll need to acquire users' email addresses or send popular posts (per above).
4. Application canvas pages gain more control: The Facebook header is being removed from application canvas pages, giving brands that engage users via applications more real estate on the page and a more customized and branded look and feel. Users will still have the option of returning to Facebook near the top of the page, but for brands that were hesitant to build on Facebook until more branding was possible, now is the time to reconsider.
5. Profile boxes are disappearing: It's been a long time since profile boxes provided much value to brands, as most users don't spend very much time on that part of friends' pages. But that hasn't stopped many brands from creating applications to establish a presence on users' profiles. Within a few months, tabs will be the only way to integrate into the profile, so brands should be thinking now about creating an engaging communication strategy that best leverages email and status updates.
6. Enhanced Facebook share: For many brands and publishers, the value in marketing through Facebook is leveraging word of mouth. In fact, Facebook users share 2 billion pieces of content every week. The new Facebook share button includes a counter displaying the number of times that piece of content has been shared and is a valuable tool for any brand with a large existing audience on its site. This is a relief for content owners who struggle with replicating a presence inside of Facebook; instead, expect Facebook to offer more ways for your site to become more social.
7. Every webpage becomes a fan page: Facebook has long been about connecting people with each other, and it's expanding the graph from people to objects in what it's calling the Open Graph. Soon users will be able to fan not only your brand but a specific page, product, celebrity, movie, or SKU. These pages will also show up in users' profiles and in search results, and that page will be able to publish stories to the stream of its fans. This shifts social brand interactions from Facebook tabs to brand websites in a powerful way for brands and publishers. While currently farthest out in Facebook's announcement roadmap, the Open Graph has the greatest implications and opportunities for brands and publishers.
Expect 2010 to be a real breakout year for social marketing. For two-and-a-half years we've seen brands build strong followings inside of Facebook, but with these changes rolling out early next year, expect smart brands to better engage their best customers through their own channels by leveraging the power of personal relationships via Facebook's platform, according to Kevin Barenblat, co-founder and CEO of Context Optional. (TourismExchange company, December 2009)
Twitter is planning to launch paid-for commercial accounts, which would provide corporate users with additional services to those that are freely available on the microblogging service. In an interview with the BBC, Biz Stone said Twitter will begin offering the commercial services in 2009.
Biz Stone, the co-founder of Twitter, said the company was close to launching corporate accounts that would help the the popular microblogging site begin to generate revenues.
One of the first things Twitter is going to do is providing commercial accounts and that provide a special layer of access. Twitter will always be free to everyone whether it is commercial or personal, but you'll be able to pay for an additional layer of access to learn more about your Twitter account to get some freed back to get some analytics to help you become a better Twitter.
Stone also talked about possible syndication and said that Twitter was also interested in partnerships with media companies. (EyeForTravel, November 2009)
Most worldwide bloggers are men, ages 18 to 44, affluent and well-educated, according to a Technorati survey of bloggers worldwide. About a quarter work for a traditional media outlet in addition to blogging, and most still don't make any money from their self-publishing activities.
But there are other ways to create value. 70% of bloggers polled by Technorati said they talked about products or brands on their blog. The most common activity was to post about brands they loved or hated, as well as to write reviews or post about experiences with stores or customer service.
Bloggers who post about products and services may get some attention from brands in the form of free items and other perks but the visibility they gain through publishing their thoughts also helps them in less-tangible ways. Nearly 6 in 10 of all the bloggers surveyed said they were better known in their industry because of their blog, and a quarter had used their blog as a resume or sent it to potential employers.
Further, bloggers who post for a business reported even higher levels of success: 71% had increased visibility for their company, 63% had converted prospects into purchasers through their blog, and 56% have seen their blog bring their company recognition as a thought leader in the industry.
Negative personal consequences, such as losing focus on work or getting in trouble on the job, were far less common than gaining visibility or even changing professions entirely based on blogging activity. (eMarketer, November 2009)
The number of mobile users accessing social networks from their mobile devices will reach 607.5 million worldwide by 2013, representing 43% of global mobile internet users, according to eMarketer. In the US, mobile social networkers will total 56.2 million by 2013, accounting for 45% of the mobile internet user population.
Mobile social network users worldwide, 2008-2014:
- 2008: 76.0 million (1.9% of mobile phone subscribers / 19.0% of mobile internet users)
- 2009: 141.4 million (3.1% / 28.0%)
- 2010: 223.4 million (4.6% / 34.0%)
- 2011: 318.3 million (6.1% / 37.0%)
- 2012: 454.0 million (8.4% / 40.0%)
- 2013: 607.5 million (10.8% / 43.0%)
- 2014: 760.1 million (13.3% / 45.0%)
Social networking is one of the fastest-growing activities among mobile users around the world. And as one of the primary ways mobile users communicate with one another, it is proving a significant driver of internet usage on mobile devices.
Location-based networks such as Loopt and foursquare have not yet reached critical mass, but are worth keeping an eye on as they work to link people, places and interests. In addition, location-based services can also be used in other contexts to help marketers target social network users with relevant information and offers.
Location-aware branded applications and utilities that include a social component provide an avenue for marketers to engage their audience directly, according to eMarketer. But the combination of two emerging channels means that estimating the market for mobile social advertising and marketing is premature, despite the promising user base. Marketers are talking a lot about social and mobile and, on a slightly smaller scale, preparing to incorporate both environments into their marketing mix. But since both channels are still evolving, combining mobile and social together puts many marketers into a gray area from both a budgetary and oversight perspective, and programs remain small and experimental. (eMarketer, November 2009)
Although still beta testing, Google Wave, the new form of communication and collaboration online, is expected to be the next big thing on the internet after Twitter. Google Wave is due to incorporate email, instant messaging and social networking. This means consumers will not need to log in separately to individual social media networks.
Google Wave homepage is likely to be the first point of contact when users browse the internet in future and could become the strongest social platform on the web, according to The Longhaul Insight Report, released at the World Travel Market by UK travel PR and representation company BGB. The report points out social networks have received more traffic than any other category of website, with online reviews being seen as largely trustworthy. While Hitwise estimates that social networking websites are now the second biggest traffic drivers to websites after search engines.
The report predicts that after the Twitter growth in 2009, the next major disruptive technology for 2010, which tourist boards will need to be considering, is Google Wave. (Travelmole, November 2009)
The use of micro blogging site Twitter is gaining rapid penetration within the travel industry, according to a survey of 90 Twitter users who tweet on travel matters conducted by Andy Jarosz, writer and owner of travel blog 501 Places.
The survey revealed that:
- More than half of users (52%) tweeted between four and 10 times a day, with over a quarter sending more than 10 Twitter updates daily.
- Managing directors, commercial directors, hotel owners and government officials are actively using the social media tool to forge connections with their customers and stakeholders.
- The majority of users surveyed had started using Twitter within the last six months.
Jarosz said that this is no surprise given the exponential growth of the site in 2009, and it does indicate that it is not too late for those who are still considering whether they should get to grips with using Twitter as a way of communicating with the online travel community.
The survey responders included business owners and directors from both overseas suppliers and UK tour operators, with more than half of the sample group working in paid roles within the travel industry.
Of particular interest is the amount of travelling done by the sample (62% travelling internationally three or more times a year) and the fact that more than 60% used Twitter to connect with local suppliers, hoteliers or transport companies before they travelled, with 28.8% reporting that they made a reservation following an initial contact on Twitter. This suggests that travellers are starting to move beyond merely looking for information on destinations and services, and are actually making buying decisions based on their Twitter conversations. (Travelmole, November 2009)
Social sites Facebook and Digg are more likely to send returning traffic your way than search engines such as Yahoo!, Google and Bing, according to research by ad network Chitika. More than 1/5 of users referred to a site by Facebook visited at least four times in the course of a week. Less than 12% of Google-referred visitors were as loyal.
Search engines and social networks that are the leading sources of loyal* website visitors, September 2009:
- Facebook: 20.7%
- Digg: 16.1%
- Yahoo!: 15.9%
- Google: 11.8%
- Bing: 11.7%
- Twitter: 11.1%
* Loyal visitors meaning they came back to the sites 4+times over the course of a week.
Visitors coming from Twitter were the least likely to return among the sites studied.
Still, social media sites are only sending a tiny fraction of traffic. An earlier Chitika Study concluded that the overwhelming dominance of search engines is facing little, if any, threat from social networks. The company looked at the top sites sending traffic to the publishers in its network and found that Google alone accounted for 76.13% of referrals. Taken together, search engines made almost 98% of all referrals, while social networking sites made up just 0.55%.
Twitter in particular (despite the hype) was low on referrals, and falling. In July 2009, Twitter was No. 24 on Chitika's list of top referrers, with 0.05%. By September 2009, it had moved down to 44th place, with just a 0.02% share. (eMarketer, October 2009)
A list of 101 travel and adventure twitterers have been compiled by Abroadening.com . This is sought to be a great way to experience first-hand how travellers and the travel industry are using Twitter.
The list has been compiled in no particular order and is available at http://abroadening.com/161 (HOTELMARKETING.COM, October 2009)
Marketers monitoring Twitter for mentions of their brand may have noticed that microbloggers are more likely to give or seek information than to sound off about a product, good or bad. Researchers at Pennsylvania State University studied nearly 150,000 tweets that named brands and found that nearly half of them were simply "comments" (posts that mentioned a brand, but where the primary focus was something else). A further 18.1% were information-providing and 11.1% were information-seeking.
Tweets that mention brands, by category, April-July 2009 (% of total):
- Comments: 48.5%
- Sentiment: 22.3%
- Information providing: 18.1%
- Information seeking: 11.1%
That left just 22.3% of tweets about brands that expressed an opinion one way or another. One-third of all tweets that expressed brand-related sentiment were "great," and nearly one-fifth were "swell," according to the labelling scheme used by the researchers. 14.2% were "so-so", 15.9% were "bad" and 17.6% were "wretched". (eMarketer, October 2009)
No one knows how the microblogging site and similar online social networks will make money, but investors see a new Web revolution. Real-time Web is the term coined to describe the exploding number of live social activities online, from tweets to status updates on Facebook to the sharing of news, Web links, and videos on myriad other sites.
It's also a whole new field of dreams for entrepreneurs and investors. Amid the downsized remains of Web 2.0, with online advertising and e-commerce in a drought, they're viewing the real-time Web as the Internet's Next Big Thing-maybe even the source of the next Google. The emerging sector is so new, and its boundaries so fuzzy, that it's difficult to know how much money has been sunk into how many firms. But many dozens of startups are staking claims and drawing interest from investors. (HOTELMARKETING.COM, August 2009)
Ideahatching.com provides some advice on how do you build your credibility on Twitter. The first step is knowing that you need to build your Twitter credibility. Twitter is a medium like any other, its only the facilitator of the conversation - not the message.
The first tip - don't just dive in and start tweeting - that would be like joining a group mid conversation without knowing who they were and what they were talking about. So once you have opened your Twitter account you should start to look around and get comfortable.
1. You should "follow" the tweeters you know (either personally or through networks etc.). Get the lay of the land and check out what they are chatting about and with whom. Continue to build your network of Tweeple the honest way, one follow at a time, based on good content that is interesting to you. DON'T follow people because you think you need followers to fit in. You don't need followers to fit in. If you have interesting things to say and you are believable - tweeters will follow.
2. Once you have a good base of people to follow and you start feeling comfortable with the whole 140 Character thing - post a tweet. Try reaching out to one of the people you follow using the @ symbol plus their twitter name.
3. If you are going to self promote, just make sure that you acknowledge that you are doing so.
4. Use your manners. If you get a Re-Tweet (RT) (i.e. another tweeter posts your tweet giving you kudo's for your good content) make sure you send a thank you, and make sure you RT other content that you find valuable, interesting or funny.
5. Now...get comfortable, read and enjoy other conversations, join them, pass along good content that you think your network would enjoy.
And most of all - don't get stressed out because you think everyone is looking at you because you are a newbie. We were all newbie's once!
One more thing - don't tweet about what you are "doing now" even if that is what Twitter tells you to do. (that's just not cool). (ideahatching.com, September 2009)
To help you determine how to best measure social media, Gary Stein examined in an article in ClickZ five ways people go wrong when measuring social media.
- MISTAKE NO. 1: ASSUMING YOUR FANS/FOLLOWERS WILL SEE A POST: the biggest mistake in social media is assuming that your number of subscribed fans (i.e., to a Facebook page) or followers (i.e., to a Twitter stream) is your audience, and every time you post something, you get to count each one of them as an impression. That just simply isn't the way that people use social media. Someone you count as a follower may only log on once a month. Or, she may be a fan to 175 other pages and your post may get washed away in a deluge of other posts. Don't count your number of followers as your number of impressions. TIP: Watch the growth of your followers and pay attention to the deeper analytics provided by Facebook Pages. That will give you greater insight into the engagement you're generating from your page.
- MISTAKE NO. 2: FAILING TO ACCOUNT FOR OVERLAP ACROSS NETWORKS: Another big mistake is double counting people. Don't take the number of people who follow your brand on Twitter and the number of people who are subscribed to your YouTube channel and then add them together. There's a high possibility that many are the same people. Adding everyone up gives you a good, high number, but there's a good chance you're over-counting. TIP: Put out a short survey on one (just one) of your pages and ask people if they're connected to you on multiple sites. This should give you a good percentage of people and then you can reduce your overall count by a reasonable amount and have a more accurate count.
- MISTAKE NO. 3: FAILING TO COUNT CLICKS: A growing number of e-commerce sites are using sites like Twitter and Flickr to drive traffic. Most sites doing this say it works extremely well. Or, rather, they believe it works extremely well. They don't actually know because they aren't actually counting the number of clicks that their social media efforts are generating. They're simply dropping URLs into tweets (and things) and that's it. They have no idea if the post actually generated any real value. TIP: Use a URL shortener like bit.ly to keep track of the clicks you generate. This may be the easiest and most effective tip in this entire column.
- BIG MISTAKE NO. 4: DISREGARDING SEARCH: Increasingly, social media and search have converged. It's remarkable. Last month, the number-one thing you did on Twitter's home page was log in. Today, the number-one thing you do on the Twitter home page is search. You actually have to click to get to the log in. To measure the value you're generating from social media, therefore, think about how your brand shows up in search. You never know when a consumer will pop your brand name into a social search engine and make a decision based on what comes up. If you only pay attention to what people are saying right now, you're missing a long tail of value. TIP: Use tools like SocialSeek that enable you to get a very complete picture of everywhere your brand is being mentioned and capture that data.
- BIG MISTAKE NO. 5: FOCUSING ON FOLLOWERS: Whenever we measure online activity, we tend to focus on the number that is easiest to get. In social media, that number is fans or followers. The problem with that number is that it, like many other raw numbers, is deceptive. Why? It doesn't take into account the medium's characteristics. Click a button to follow or become a face is very easy and very low-impact for the consumer, so they do a lot of it. It's difficult, if not impossible, to determine if someone has become a fan because she wants to hear from you and interact with you, or if it was just some passing whim. You may see your fan numbers go up, but that doesn't necessarily mean you've created lots of value. TIP: Pay very close attention (and make a note of) the people who respond to the things you post up: the people who comment, retweet, or engage in discussions. Those people are the most valuable subset.
The bottom line with social media measurement: we're in some really early stages and there are plenty of bright lights to distract us. The biggest mistake of all, of course, is not to measure. With the effort you're putting into social media, it's like that famous bumper sticker: "If you're not concerned, you're not paying attention." (HOTELMARKETING.COM, August 2009)
When using social media to the advantage of your brand, there are basic do's and don'ts. An article by Jack Aaronson on Clickz considers a few of them. There are three simple ideas that every company should use when interacting via a social networking site, be it Twitter, Facebook, or something else.
- Actively participate: If you are simply there to promote your brand, but aren't actively communicating with your fans and participating in interactive dialogues, then you are not taking advantage of social media.
- Create content: Instead of just pushing a sales or brand message, you must create relevant content, news, or information, tailored specifically for that site and target audience. If it's not updated frequently, it gets boring fast.
- Tone of voice: If it sounds like a sales message being pushed from corporate headquarters, then that's how it will be perceived. Be aware that there is a fine line between your message and "spam." Sometimes, your message may feel off course from your corporate message, but your brand building will pay off in the long term.
(HOTELMARKETING.COM, August 2009)
A new Twitter application, Twihotels.com, that helps users to tweet their hotel requirements, has been launched. According to hotelsmag.com, users input their request parameters on TwiHotels.com, and the site then tweets the room requests from @twihotels. Several hoteliers are already monitoring the twihotels feed and would theoretically respond to the requesting person with relevant offers. It added the site is in beta mode right now.
Twihotels also includes a search feature on the site, according to a report filed by Inventorspot. To discover relevant hotel queries, one can do a specific keyword search or can also opt for advanced search that provides drop down results based on country and city names.
Twihotels.com is an incubation of MapXL, a division of Compare Infobase Limited.
The company mentioned that Twihotels is an OAuth based application. (It added that Twitter and other social networking sites such as Facebook recommend OAuth, which requires no registration. It does not involve sharing username details). OAuth is described as an open protocol to allow secure API authorisation in a simple and standard method from desktop and web applications. (EyeForTravel, August 2009)
Almost a third of brands on Twitter are completely ignored, according to the social media and online PR specialist Immediate Future. How does it know this? Because you can tell if your Twitter followers are engaging with your tweets by how much they forward them on to their own network of Twitter users, or "retweet" as it is called.
Immediate Future looked at the Twitter behaviour of 140 global and UK brands and analysed how they used the channel to communicate with "fans" or followers. A third of those brands' tweets received no tweets at all, meaning their tweets were as probably totally ignored.
When marketers talk about Twitter, the focus is too often simply on the number of followers. This doesn't give you a realistic picture of how well the organisation is engaging with its audience, since it can be quite easy to drum up a large number of followers, even if most of them aren't that interested in what the brand has to say, according to Immediate Future. But by examining how often its posts are retweeted we can get a much better idea of how interested people are in engaging with a brand. In effect, the more a brand is retweeted, the more it has the attention of its audience.
The research indicated that many brands are following quite high numbers of Twitter users compared to the number of users who are actually following them back. This is seen as spammy behaviour. Immediate Future believes that the problem is that many brands view Twitter as a broadcast channel and they measure their success on the size of their audience, rather than the level of engagement they have with their followers. The best brands attract followers by having something interesting to say and engaging their audience in a genuine conversation. Organisations which think it's good enough to build up a large number of Twitter followers and broadcast the same old tired corporate messaging at them are not only missing the point, but also the opportunity." (Travelmole, July 2009)
Over the past few months, Twitter has experienced explosive growth. Social media analytics companies Sysomos conducted an extensive study on 11.5 million Twitters accounts to document Twitter's growth and how people are using it and found that:
- 72.5% of all users joining during the first five months of 2009.
- 85.3% of all Twitter users post less than one update/day
- 21% of users have never posted a Tweet
- 93.6% of users have less than 100 followers, while 92.4% follow less than 100 people.
- 5% of Twitter users account for 75% of all activity
- New York has the most Twitters users, followed by Los Angeles, Toronto, San Francisco and Boston; while Detroit was the fast-growing city over the first five months of 2009
- More than 50% of all updates are published using tools, mobile and Web-based, other than Twitter.com. TweetDeck is the most popular non-Twitter.com tool with 19.7% market share.
- There are more women on Twitter (53%) than men (47%)
- Of the people who identify themselves as marketers, 15% follow more than 2,000 people. This compares with 0.29% of overall Twitter users who follow more than 2,000 people.
(HOTELMARKETING.COM, July 2009)
Growth in social network advertising spending worldwide will take a hit in 2009, but not as severely as in the US. eMarketer projects 9% growth in worldwide spending in 2009, to $2.2 billion. That is down from the 17% growth eMarketer forecast in March 2009.
Online social network advertising spending worldwide, 2008-2011:
- 2008: $1,995 million (+46%)
- 2009: $2,180 million (+9%)
- 2010: $2,565 million (+18%)
- 2011: $2,885 million (+12%)
The good news is that worldwide social network spending is expected to shoot up again in 2010, rising an estimated 18% to $2.6 billion. 2011 will see an additional 12% increase, to $2.9 billion.
Changes in the US market are the primary reason for the forecast revision. eMarketer now estimates that US social network spending will slide 3% this year, as marketers continue to cut back on ad spending during the recession and MySpace, once the leading social network in the US, loses traction.
In fact, non-US social network advertising spending is forecast to grow 27% in 2009. The US has led the way in the development of social networks, but entrants in Europe and Asia are ramping up. In addition, US-based social networks will see an increasing portion of their revenues from international operations.
Strong social networks outside the US include mixi in Japan, Cyworld in South Korea, VKontakte in Russia and QQ in China. (eMarketer, July 2009)
Last Updated on Thursday, 02 September 2010 15:40
