With Facebook and Twitter grabbing national news headlines, it may not be all that surprising to hear the number of users on social networking sites has doubled since 2007. However, the numbers are staggering to look at.
Almost 1/3 of the US population - 55.6 million adults to be specific - visit social networking sites at least monthly. This according to the latest report from Forrester Research. That number was 15% in 2007 and only up to 18% last year in 2008.
This puts the popularity of social networking among adults higher than instant messaging, streaming music, and reading blogs. Here is the complete breakdown from Forrester’s report:
The most important thing to keep in mind is that the tools driving these online activities (i.e. Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn at the moment) are constantly evolving. It is imperative for companies and their team members to be in position to benefit from these new technologies. If you simply cannot allocate the time and resources within to keep your company in the conversation, look for custom outsourcing options. You do not want to get passed up and left behind in the social conversation on the web.
Social Media tactics can be tough to measure and monetize, unless you do social media the right way. Today’s gleaming example comes our way from Starbucks. You may have heard Starbucks wanted to give away a free pastry with the purchase of a drink. And their savvy social media tactics are the reason you heard that.
Let’s start with their Facebook promotion. They created an Event, Starbucks Free Pastry Day: July 21, 2009, which by last count had nearly 600,000 “confirmed guests” on Facebook alone. That is a whole lot of foot traffic for Starbucks around the map, but we said “start” with Facebook because the biggest piece of their promotion puzzle was Twitter.
Twitter has an immense amount of potential when executing a promotion. We’ve seen a couple media companies in the recent past, Squarespace and Moonfruit, use hash-tags (#squarespace) to spread the word on Twitter. Their promotions actually required Twitter users to use that hash-tag in a tweet in order to be entered for a prize. It worked. Their names (because so many people were using their hash-tag) quickly jumped into Twitter’s top Trending Topics. Due to Starbucks already established brand and recognizable name, the Twitter population did the work, by simply doing what the do every day, tweeting. By just telling friends, family, and other “followers” they were headed to Starbucks or just got a free pastry, Trending Topics was soon taken over by “Starbucks” - thus adding fuel to the flames. Below is a graph from Twist showing Starbucks mentions as a percentage of total tweets. Their mentions were up nearly ten times due to their promotion.
As you can see, social media can absolutely be measured and monetized, if done correctly. Early evaluations look promising, and despite a fair amount of negative blog posts about individual hiccups, the data indicates this promotion was a success for Starbucks.
One company, local here to the Ann Arbor, Michigan area, just jumped into the social media space with a Facebook promotion of their own. That company is Weber’s, a boutique hotel/upscale restaurant/ultralounge that has always had a terrific following via word-of-mouth, but like everyone else it was time to take that online. They kicked off their Facebook Page opening with a giveaway (are you getting the hint that we all love free stuff?!). With a beautiful landing page setup (taken down after the promotion expired) at Facebook, they emailed their existing client database with the offer to enter for a chance to win 1 of 50 free rooms at the hotel. The email gave them the Facebook fan page link and simply required they “become a Fan” to enter. Within 3 days of launching their Facebook fan Page, Weber’s had over 500 Fans and an interactive Wall packed with compliments and praises.
It certainly helped in Weber’s case to have a Facebook Page that was clean and professionally complete with photos, visual tabs, and a thorough company bio. You can check it out at facebook.com/WebersAnnArbor. They definitely disproved the myth that small businesses can’t effectively use, measure, and monetize social media. Execute them correctly and Facebook + Twitter can equal big rewards for your company.
More adults are using Facebook every day now, and the hard evidence is finally here. Mashable published a post this week citing an analytics report from iStrategyLabs that indicates Facebook’s userbase is growing increasingly older.
As you can see in the chart below, the overall number of users between 18 and 24 years of age has grown only 4.8% between the fourth of January and the fourth of July of 2009. In comparison, the number of users aged 25 – 34 has grown 60.8%; the number of users aged 35 to 54 has grown 190.2%, while the number of users older than 55 years has grown a tremendous 513.7%.
The real value of Facebook for the adult crowd is realized when they put their companies online. This is the way to actually capture a share of all these users, give them your business. With a business profile on Facebook, known as a Facebook Page, everyone online can become a Fan of your business. Think of it as Word-Of-Mouth on steroids, Facebook users proclaiming a relationship with your brand, for ALL of their friends and family to see!
Facebook goes live with their username vanity URLs on Saturday at 12:01am (in your time zone).
So you might have seen a warning about this at the top of your Facebook page within the last couple days. Facebook is calling them “usernames” and people in the industry refer to them as “vanity URLs” but you don’t realize how important this can be!
On a first come, first serve basis, Facebook will be allowing you to customize your profile URL. For instance, if you are the first to claim “facebook.com/johndoe” that URL will point to your Facebook page. This will NOT change your name or anything else within your profile, it simply makes it much easier to point someone to your Facebook page.
Why do you NEED this?
Facebook is viewed as extremely important by search engines. Meaning if you can grab “facebook.com/yourname” it will go a long way toward establishing your name on the internet, and within the search engines. For instance if your LinkedIn URL is “linkedin.com/in/yourname” and your Twitter URL is “twitter.com/yourname” and then you can do the same with uber-popular Facebook URL, you will own the search returns for “yourname”
Straight from the Facebook Blog:
We’re planning to offer Facebook usernames to make it easier for people to find and connect with you. When your friends, family members or co-workers visit your profile or Pages on Facebook, they will be able to enter your username as part of the URL in their browser. This way people will have an easy-to-remember way to find you. We expect to offer even more ways to use your Facebook username in the future.Your new Facebook URL is like your personal destination, or home, on the Web. People can enter a Facebook username as a search term on Facebook or a popular search engine like Google, for example, which will make it much easier for people to find friends with common names. Your username will have the same privacy setting as your profile name in Search, and you can always edit your search privacy settings.
Looking for brand ambassadors? Turn to your employees.
AdAge recently published an interesting article on how to turn your own employees into great brand ambassadors for your company. They speak on many points, with an overwhelming conclusion that “consumers increasingly base their feelings about a company on what they know about its people, rather than what an ad agency’s creative team can portray.“
Business as we know it is becoming more and more transparent. Companies are (whether by choice or not) giving consumers a look inside their operations. People can, and will, find whatever they can about you on the internet. You need to make sure these people are reading credible and official information about your company and employees.
AdAge sums it up, “There’s a new and largely untapped resource within corporate walls that can help companies build brand equity, and it’s your employees — specifically those employees with individual personal brands.”
The article goes on to emphasize the importance for individuals to have established personal brands on the internet.
As companies begin to understand the interdependent relationship between employees and profits, a new model for hiring and sourcing talent emerges. Social media will pave the way for applicants to build strong relationships with recruiters well before a face-to-face interview. Now, instead of taking traditional applications, jobs will find recruits after they have built powerful personal brands online or through other forms of recognition. Hiring employees who have established personal brands will help companies immediately inherit value and relevance in a crowded market and may lead to quicker results in meeting growth objectives.
Our own conclusion? Get yourself online! Even if you’re not the type of person who surfs the web to network, establish your personal brand out there! At the very least you need to have a presence, ensure people find the right information about you, put it out there yourself!
Independent insurance agents are a great example of a well established industry, uniquely positioned to greatly benefit from Web 2.0 and social media.
Independent Agent Magazine, the official publication of the Independent Insurance Agents & Brokers of America, is strongly advocating that, “Agents take advantage of Web 2.0 technologies to increase sales.” The cover story of their May issue is titled, “Find Us on Facebook.”
In the article they quote Rick Morgan, the president of Rick Morgan Consulting, an insurance technology consultancy. He is also chairman of the Agents Council for Technology (ACT) committee on Web 2.0. “Social media and other Web 2.0 capabilities are creating new opportunities,” says Morgan, by facilitating communication “inside your agency and extending collaboration beyond agency walls.”
IA Magazine went on to make a strong point, “If most young adults use their computers and smart phones to communicate with friends, look for jobs, research products and buy or sell them, shouldn’t insurance agencies be part of the trend?”
Ed Higgins, president of Thousand Islands Agency in Clayton, N.Y., gave the magazine his view, “I think (social media) will be a significant part of our agency’s growth and a way to build customer loyalty,” he says. “The more links you have out there, the more positive it can be.”
As strong advocates ourselves of social media and Web 2.0, it’s great to see industries like this not only taking notice, but realizing the benefits and becoming proactive. It is no longer a secret that well established professionals, like these independent insurance agents, can immediately boost their business through social media on the web. The waiting period is over, this stuff is being proven right now, as you read. Get on board.
What is Social Media? Does hearing social media all the time send your head into a spiral?
We’re going to slow Social Media down for you, so grab a note pad or open your word processor.
So what exactly does Social Media refer to?
Social Media is information content created by people using highly accessible and scalable publishing technologies. At its most basic sense, social media is a shift in how people discover, read and share news, information and content. It’s a fusion of sociology and technology, transforming monologue (one to many) into dialog (many to many) and is the democratization of information, transforming people from content readers into publishers.
OK, so then what are the different outlets?
Well it can be as simple as a blog, internet forum, or wiki. Some of the most popular specific outlets that you have probably heard around town are MySpace, Facebook, and Twitter. And while these are very fun and useful as our society moves towards transparency (even amongst large corporations), it’s important to keep business benefits in mind. Enter business social networking giant LinkedIn.
Business Social Networking? Go on…
The act of building and managing a network of business connections online, through the use of social media tools and tactics. Business social networking is the new way to grow your business and build equity in your brand online. This is the quickest way to spread your name and get people talking about your business.
For more information on how you can utilize Social Media and Business Social Networking, visit Social Harbor.
Search optimized profiles are the key to being found on the Internet. And one of the essentials to search optimized profiles is keywords.
Keywords come in all languages, shapes, and sizes. There are long ones, short ones, and even hyphenated keywords. There’s keywords that you’ll never be able to compete for, and ones that you could own within a week. Whatever your keywords are, it’s always helpful to be able to visualize them and see just what words actually appear most on your web page.
There’s a fun AND useful tool called Wordle that allows you to enter long text from a web page (or a blog URL) and then builds you a word cloud, showing you which words are most prominent on that site. For example, Social Harbor does extensive keyword research for their clients, deciding which words are best to optimize for. Below is the keyword cloud Wordle pulled for Ingenex Digital Marketing’s company page on Social Harbor.
You can see that Ingenex’s page uses the words Marketing and Digital most prominently, as these are the keywords the client wished to be search optimized for. So Wordle has shown that Social Harbor correctly and efficiently built Ingenex’s page with the keywords needed for search engine optimization.
Are the keywords you want to be found for the most prominent ones in your word cloud? Do you need help optimzing your company for searches? Social Harbor builds custom company profiles with extensive keyword research and implementation, a solution that works for search optimization.
Right here. On the Internet. This is where all those eyeballs go.
Ever since newspapers started circulating, they have been an ideal spot to promote your business. Well it’s no secret that medium is being phased out. So what should you do? Where are all of those readers going now? They have migrated to the web, and you need to follow.
Need to hear it from a reputable source? CNN will tell you all about it here. A few excerpts to chew on:
More bad news could be coming this week as newspapers struggle to meet challenges posed by changing reader habits, a shifting advertising market, an anemic economy, and the newspaper industry’s own early strategic errors.
The industry’s advertising revenue in 2008 was $38 billion, a staggering 23 percent drop from $49.5 billion the year before. Print media companies are failing to achieve market expectations each quarter, scaring away investors, venture capitalists and potential buyers in droves.
Newspaper classified ad expenditures tumbled nearly 17 percent in 2007, according to the Newspaper Association of America. The recession is affecting auto dealerships, real estate companies and other local businesses, accelerating the advertising downturn.
If you want to compete and keep your business promotions where the consumer is looking, you need to promote on the web.
There are many ways to do this… many expensive ways. We have an inexpensive solution that is proven to work.
Essentially we create a store front for you and your business, in multiple outlets across the Internet. The result is a strong presence for your company where the audience looking, search engines.
Establish a strong, credible and professional appearance on the web with Social Harbor.
Click here to see a breakdown of what you get.
