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.
