Posted by Manuela Barreto @ February 5th, 2010 in Social Marketing

The following data is a compilation of social media statistics put together by Econsultancy showcasing the most significant facts and figures surrounding networking sites such as Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and online activities such as blogging and photo sharing.

If you’re a newcomer or are beginning to consider taking a plunge into the social media arena and exploit the opportunities (and challenges) social media offers, take a look at the following numbers:

* Facebook claims that 50% of active users log into the site each day. This would mean at least 175m users every 24 hours.
* Twitter now has 75m user accounts, but only around 15m are active users on a regular basis. It’s still a fair increase from the estimated 6-10m global users from a few months ago.
* LinkedIn has over 50m members worldwide. This means an increase of around 1m members month-on-month since July/August last year.
* Facebook currently has in excess of 350 million close to 400 million active users on a global basis. Six months ago, this was 250m… meaning around a 40% increase of users in less than half a year.
* Flickr now hosts more than 4bn images. A massive jump from the previous 3.6bn I wrote about.
* More than 35m Facebook users update their status each day. This is 5m more than towards the end of July 2009.
* Wikipedia currently has in excess of 14m articles, meaning that it’s 85,000 contributors have written nearly a million new posts in six months.
* Photo uploads to Facebook have increased by more than 100%. Currently, there are around 2.5bn uploads to the site each month – this was around a billion last time I covered this.
* There are more than 70 translations available on Facebook. Last time around, this was only 50.
* Back in 2009, the average user had 120 friends within Facebook. This is now around 130.
* Mobile is even bigger than before for Facebook, with more than 65m users accessing the site through mobile-based devices. In six months, this is over 100% increase. (Previously 30m).

Other significant facts include:

* There are more than 3.5bn pieces of content (web links, news stories, blog posts, etc.) shared each week on Facebook.
* There are now 11m LinkedIn users across Europe.
* Towards the end of last year, the average number of tweets per day was over 27.3 million.
* The average number of tweets per hour was around 1.3m.
* More than 700,000 local businesses have active Pages on Facebook.
* Purpose-built Facebook pages have created more than 5.3bn fans.
* 15% of bloggers spend 10 or more hours each week blogging, according to Technorati’s new State of the Blogosphere.
* At the current rate, Twitter will process almost 10bn tweets in a single year.
* About 70% of Facebook users are outside the USA.
* India is currently the fastest-growing country to use LinkedIn, with around 3m total users.
* More than 250 Facebook applications have over a million combined users each month.
* 70% of bloggers are organically talking about brands on their blog.
* 38% of bloggers post brand or product reviews.
* More than 80,000 websites have implemented Facebook Connect since December 2008 and more than 60m Facebook users engage with it across these external sites each month.

Keep these handy for when you begin developing your brand’s social media strategy, however, the info presented above is only a bird’s eye view of this particular sector.

In order to be able to achieve your objectives using social media, it is best you understand your audience well and identify the right channels in order to be able to properly cater to your selected audience.

Posted by Manuela Barreto @ February 4th, 2010 in Marketing Analysis

New figures from the Internet Advertising Bureau’s Social Media Council revealed that 88% of UK brands rated social media as important to their business.

The study also shows that advertisers are planning to allocate between 6 and 20% of their digital marketing budgets to social media this year, compared to just 14% in the previous year.

The main reason for this dedicated budget is to drive brand awareness and consideration, as declared by 77% of respondents, while another 75% said to use it to drive engagement and advocacy and 47% to drive product sales.

Though respondents didn’t exactly pinpoint which department should handle all social media initiatives and implementations, the vast majority, 73%, said that the marketing department should cover such activities, whilst another 33% declared it’s a job for the PR department, followed by 16% who said customer services should handle it.

The greatest challenge for the social media industry? 74% respondents declared that providing ROI was the hardest to attain, followed by 64% who made reference to seeing measurable results- a topic we covered on one of our previous articles.

The study revealed the following to be amongst the top social media activities mostly claimed by marketers:

* Twitter & brand monitoring= 51% of respondents

* Facebook Pages= 47% of respondents

* Branded communities= 39% of respondents

* Blogger outreach= 37% of respondents

* Video Distribution= 37% of respondents

* User Generate Content= 37% of respondents

More interesting data from the study includes the percentage of marketers who have not yet embraced social media at all, which made up 7% of respondents. In contrast, 22% of respondents have made it a core part of their communications strategy.

Posted by Manuela Barreto @ February 3rd, 2010 in Search Engine Marketing

So far Google’s real-time search has proven quite effective for many of us. For those who are pursuing social media as part of their online marketing campaigns, Google’s real-time search capability is certainly a strong point in favor.

What marketers should be considering right now is that having an active role in social media can really help drive traffic to their websites and help them attain better rankings on the SERPs. With the inclusion of live Twitter streams,(and the likes), in the SERPs, social media has never been so important.

Here are some quick-tips we put together to get your brand found in Google’s real-time search:

1. Keywords are key- in our previous post we mentioned the importance of content and keywords. This time, we’re advising you to use keywords in anything you write, from content and titles, to updates on Twitter and status updates on Facebook.

2. Have a social media presence- create your brand’s Facebook Fan Page, Twitter profile, YouTube channel, but first understand your audience and harness the social media channels that fit your brand. Get social, go live, and gain exposure on the Web.

3. Share your content- make sure its easy for you readers to share your articles by including share links, icons and buttons that are visible enough to just click & share.

4. Fresh content- make sure you post information as it happens. Be timely. The quicker your post the news, the quicker you’ll occupya space in the SERPs.

5. Be social- once you have an online presence and have created a series of public profiles in diverse channels, the next step should be to engage and interact with your audience. Increase your community, your followers, your fans, and dont’ be afraid to foster relationships. The bigger your audience, the easier it will be to spread your content and give visibility to your brand throughout the web.

Posted by Manuela Barreto @ February 2nd, 2010 in Search Engine Optimization

Creating SEO-friendly content can be a daunting task, but it’s the only way to make your website popular. Search engines rank your websites according to the quality of your content, therefore, it’s important to be relevant.

It works the same way for content marketing – the creation or sharing of content for the purpose of engaging current and potential consumer bases.

If your website has a decent  SEO, not only will search engines love it, but they will give it a higher ranking compared to non-optimized pages. What we try to tell marketers is to keep in mind SEO and content work hand in hand.

With the current social media explotion, it might be the case that some of you may be forgetting the importance of good content. In a social media strategy, good content means content that is engaging, easy to read/digest and incites people to leave comments and share it with friends and colleagues. Add to that rich keywords and phrases that appear naturally within the text and your content will be taking you places you’ve never been before.

Experts talk about a certain density for keywords in order to improve search engine rankings- that is- an average of 3 to 7 keywords for every 100 words. We advise you use Google’s Keyword Tool to help you choose the most relevant words for your website with the highest amount of monthly searches and the lowest amount of competitors.

Here are some of the factors we recommend you keep track of while developing content for your website:

* make it engaging

* frequency of updates on your website

* placing your target key words in positions of prominence

* using your target words in everything that you do that is related to your site

* keywords in meta tags and descriptions

* relevancy and quality of your content

The more relevant and valuable your content is, the easier it will be for those interested in your product or services to find you on the web.

Posted by Manuela Barreto @ February 1st, 2010 in Social Marketing

Social media marketing strategies take planning. In order to have successful conversations with customers, you will need to dedicate a lot of time connecting to them, interacting with them and engaging with audiences in the right way.

Many things can be done the wrong way if not embraced properly and your brand or product can be easily damaged.

For instance, try to avoid selling your product to your audiences. Selling, bragging, pushing the product into the consumer’s mind can have a negative effect to it. What consumers are really interested in is the what’s in it for me. What your brand or product can do/offer or how it can help them.

There’s a second part to the first statement and it is self-promotion. It’s a great thing that you believe in yourself, in your brand and what you’re selling, however, there’s a lot of useful information out there that you might be overlooking. Information that can be valuable to both you and your consumers. Don’t be afraid to learn from your competitors.

You’re not listening, therefore, you’re not engaging in conversation. You must always listen in order to know what’s going on, find out about what people are talking about and especially, what they’re saying about your brand. Do not ignore criticism, respond to it and try to tackle it the best way possible as to be able to turn the situation around to achieve positive results.

Don’t bombard your audience with millions of facts, figures and articles just to show them that you’re savvy. Do share information that you find offers interesting insights, even if it’s just one piece of information. However, make sure you share it, discuss it, comment on it, involve your readers and ask for opinions.

Have you spotted the right channels to place your brand? If you’re not sure, it’s important that you identify who and where your audience is. Make sure you’re listening and addressing your messages to the right people, if not, it’ll be quite hard to get anyone’s attention.

Do not use only one social network. If you want your brand to have the most visibility and exposure, why narrow it down to just one…especially when many social networks today cover all possible niches, therefore, there’s a much greater chance your content, brand or product will go viral.

These are only some of the actions you should avoid doing as part of your social media strategy. It’s important because, with technology being ubiquitous and accessible to all, we’ve been given the tools to carry on conversations, engage with prospects and customers, share and place our brand/product in the eyes of many, hence, it’s imperative that we embrace these tactics and exploit the opportunities available to us.

For more dont’s, check out this article.