Social Media Marketing Facts and Trends

Here is an interesting report with statistics for social media, which is the sharing of information and opinions online. The research firm called Datamonitor reveals an increase in the number of people participating in online social networking, and it is not all here in the United States.

In a separate report by Nielsen Research, the UK currently leads Europe and is expected to increase to 27 million users by 2012. In fact, in Britain, users spend the majority of their time online on social media sites. They spent four billion minutes on consumer generated content sites in April 2008, which is up 47 percent, according to Nielsen Research.

Social media sites that people visit include blogs, social networks and photo and video sharing sites. People are spending time online in community groups where they share common interests with one another on things that are important to them. The trend is that now, consumers are in control because they can choose what they want to read online. And they can share their thoughts, and opinions.

According to VNU.net, nearly half of the online adult population around the world is a member of at least one networking site, with Facebook and MySpace being the most popular. They have more than 170 million monthly active users combined.

People no longer log online just to read relevant news. Following are some other new stats on the latest social media activity:

394 million people watch video clips online
346 million people read blogs
321 million read personal blogs
307 million visit a friend's social network pages
303 million share video clips
272 million create and manage a profile on a social network
248 million upload photographs
216 million download video podcasts
215 million download podcasts
184 million start a own blog
83 million upload a video clip
160 million subscribe to an RSS feed
(Source: Wave3 research of active users)

It also appears as if blogging and reading blogs is big with 34 percent of bloggers posting opinions about products and brands quite often. This is why it is so important for companies to be part of those conversations, or even to start the conversations. In fact, 36 percent of online users state that they think more positively about companies who run their own blog.

MarCom has been testing a variety of social media approaches with our clients over the last couple of years. Social media helps clients with building their brand, and a community of people for things like opt in lists, relationship management, and that can include crisis and reputation management, product development and customer support. And last but not least is known as defensive SEO. Nicely put, this is when you can get rid of negative mentions on the Internet or bad press by building positive online mentions. We have done this successfully for one client who wishes to remain anonymous, through his educational and charity website, a blog and articles distributed on the Internet.

What we have learned, is the most important thing is to have a social media marketing strategy. And in order to develop a strategy here are some issues that need to be considered:
1) Determine your goals - SEO, PR, traffic, etc. Are you trying to drive awareness, or advertising click through? Or is a conversation your goal?
2) Who is your audience - where does your target demo hang out online?
3) What are your realistic resources and budget?

First you need to look at social media as one of many Internet marketing channels. Second, social media marketing both Web 2.0 and Web 1.0 sites- so you need to be anywhere that there are discussions, people are sharing, and users are generated content. This includes:

• Blogs, discussion boards and forums
• Consumer review websites
• Online Communities and social networks
• Social news websites (e.g. Yahoo or Google News, etc.)
• Social bookmarking websites
• Social photo/video and music websites
• Directories
• Article websites
• Wikis

At first you cannot expect social media to provide a return on investment (ROI). It will engage your audience(s), and should encourage user generated online conversations which increases your web presence, and can expand brand awareness. It also will generate publicity and provides measurable SEO benefits – but it will not necessarily convert. It can convert if you own the community, and can capture your own leads.

It is important to first gather all the blogs, forums, websites that are out there and monitor what people are saying. Then develop your strategy. Put a method in place to monitor what is being said. Then be prepared to go in and interact. However know that trust is a HUGE factor when it comes to social media marketing. It’s most effective when those in the community know and trust you, so you need to hire someone like MarCom to spend a lot of time online and track and manage your social web strategies.

Much of MarCom’s work is creating ghostwritten blogs, monitoring discussions in Forums, and knowing how to jump in with linking strategies back to our client’s websites using key words and phrases, which are picked up by Google and the other search engines.

This is evidenced by our client the Entertainment Career Connection, which is all about courses where you get a mentor. We have been improving their lead generation through SEO for over a year while reducing their Pay per Click budget. Now we have been able to take the funds saved, and invest in a social media network of writers that are building content on a special website. This site will be designed to track and capture leads. Once the community is flourishing, we can drive conversations, call-to-action, ads, promotions, and contests, anytime. Check out our MarCom Los Angeles SEO consultants case history.

Tactically, we also do blogger tours or we can gather a team to fan out into the blogosphere and engage in conversations, or go to forums with key messages for posts there.

Another method is via social sites like Digg, StumbleUpon, Readit, or the Newsvine, where articles posted there work for you if your news item relates topics that the community likes.

Finally today’s press use these sites to troll for trends and story ideas, so your articles and news can get picked up by bloggers.

The bottom line is that sales are a secondary benefit of social media, which is mostly about awareness.