Social media is a phenomenon that’s turning everyone into a publisher and distributor of media through a variety of social sites with some of the biggest being Twitter, Facebook, MySpace and LinkedIn.
Social network and blogging sites are now the fourth most popular activity on the Internet; the first three being search, general interest portal; communities, and software manufacturers, in that order. The total amount spent online globally increased by 18% between December 2007 and December 2008. In the same period, however, the amount of time spent on ‘Member Community’ sites rose by 63% to 45 billion minutes; and on Facebook by a massive 566% – from 3.1 billion minutes to 20.5 billion. Facebook’s time is so high because it is the ninth most popular social network online and has the highest average time per person (three hours 10 minutes) amongst the 75 most popular social media online sites worldwide.
Social networks are ultimately about friendships and social relationships, where members add value to each other’s lives through interaction. Therefore, advertising should follow the same philosophy of adding value through interaction and consultation. As the world is experiencing a long and deep recession, the ‘old school’ rules of marketing have changed. Consumers are better educated, more internet savvy and market competition is fierce. The current trends used to combat this harsh competition are through the use of low cost ‘guerrilla marketing’ techniques that can be implemented quickly and easily. The social media platform has provided an arena for just that.
Fan sites or MySpace is smaller globally than Facebook and, outside the US, is considered more of a niche player because of its more focused targeting towards teenagers and young adults through the vehicles of entertainment- encompassing music and video -and self-expression (decoration options allow profile pages to be highly customizable). Reports estimate that in 2008 Facebook earned around $US 300 million in ad revenue compared to around $US 1 billion for MySpace. If Facebook has made a conscious choice to go for the quantity vs. quality strategy it has yet to overtake MySpace in the all-important revenue metric.
According to ‘comScore’, more than 50% of Facebook’s users in the U.S. are over 35; the single biggest age demographic in the U.S. on Facebook is now between 35 and 44, and Facebook’s fastest growing demographic is 55-plus.
With 52 million U.S. users and 170 million worldwide the graying of Facebook is to be expected simply because Facebook does not have a lot of growing room left among the younger set. “For those to grow, they’d have to have aged,” said Deep Focus CEO Ian Schafer. “It’s from growth and expansion to ubiquity.”
So what does it mean for marketers that social networking is getting older? Adage had a post on this recently and they pointed out that for Facebook, the upside is they’re now being considered for a wider array of marketing budgets.
“A year ago, they thought about it as a place to reach people in college or high school; now we’re talking about moms, or reaching families looking to go on vacation,” said Kevin Barenblat, CEO of ContextOptional, which has implemented Facebook campaigns for Guinness, Microsoft and the Los Angeles Times.
The worry for marketers is that the graying of Facebook will turn off the younger, college age members. That does not seem to be the case at the moment as Facebook is still the most popular website on campus above Google and Yahoo, according to an Anderson Analytics poll of college students last fall.
On the other hand, 99% of 18-24 year olds engage in social media, but only 22% use Twitter. Of the 22% that do use Twitter:
85 percent follow friends
54 percent follow celebrities
29 percent follow family
29 percent follow companies
Twitter, the microblogging service that’s taking the online world by storm, may be the most addictive social media tool of them all and its success has been both unexpected and inspirational. As Network Marketers, twitter gives us the ability to drive traffic to our website; build brand awareness and thus credibility; monitor our business reputation; and spy on our competition.
Most social sites frown on self promotion - Twitter seems to be promoting the practice, at least for small businesses. Small businesses – use Twitter as a low cost way to connect with patrons and ultimately improve profits. There are two things that really distinguish Twitter, though. The first is its simplicity – Twitter remains nothing more than a way of describing what you’re doing in no more than 140 characters.
The second characteristic is critical mass – the hardest moment for any social Web service is at the beginning. It takes a special push to get a social media site snowballing to a size big enough for everyone to feel comfortable about climbing on board. Twitter’s initial boost was it receiving the SXSW Award, which had everyone talking about the service as the next big thing. This has quickly accumulated to a mass of over 3 million twitterer users and rising.
Most of us know that people, companies, and organizations use twitter, but not everyone is aware of Twitter bots: a bot is an automated twitter account that returns some kind of data in response to a specially formulated message. The majority of bots only respond to direct messages, which means you have to follow them first and then they automatically follow you back. A couple interesting bots are:
1) A Map bot - If you need a quick map of a city or town go to the twitter 411 bot named t411. Go to http://twitter.com/t411and click the follow button, the t411 bot auto follows you back. Send your request using the following format: d t411 map place ( place is the city or town you want to see). Then the t411 bot sends you a URL back. Click on the link to see the map.
2) Amazon data bot- the Amazon.com store has data on millions of books, dvd’s, and albums. You can easily receive all this information using the jungle bot. This bot also requires a direct message so go to http://twitter.com/junglebot and click the follow button so that it can automatically follow you back. Some of the message formats are:
a) d junglebot book title
b) d junglebot dvd title
c) d junglebot music title
d) Replace “title” with the name of book or dvd.
To check out more bots go to http://twitter.pbwiki.com/Bots
As you can see, Social Media offers a gigantic opportunity for any Business Owner to promote his or her products to exactly the sort of market he or she wants to reach.
