It's not just about consuming, it's about sharing
Brian Solis sat down with for a wide ranging interview on the state of social media in 2012. It's a half hour video, but worth a watch. I enjoyed this take among the other things he spoke about:
"We live in an era where people can skip ads, whether it's on television, whether it's online. If you look at any heat map study on where eyeballs are focused on the sreen, it's never on the advertising, it's always on the content. So what if you made the ad worthy of engagement. What if you made the advertisement something that was so compelling, something that was so fascinating that it not only sucked you in but made you share it. That's what the future of this is all about. It's not just about consuming, it's about sharing. And we live in a world where sharing is actually taken for granted. We have the ability to share content, and we don't appreciate the ability to actually package these things and share them in ways that improve our dialogue."
You can see the full interview below:
Social Networking Sites by Market Share
Dreamgrow looked at the top 10 social networking sites from 2008-2012 in order to analyze growth of the major online platforms. Here are a few highlights:
Twitter broke through the 2% level with 2.06% of market share of visits in July 2012. This is the highest percentage of market share for them, ever. Twitter has posted 10 months of solid growth and the trend continues.
Pinterest has bounced back up to 0.98 percent of market share. This is almost as much as they had in February when the pinning site started to slide. This is a really big jump... Pinterest is number 4 on the list. It is likely to go even higher in the short future.
LinkedIn moved down slightly, from 0.75 to 0.72 percent of market share of visits. August might still be weak for LinkedIn but from September it should start moving up again.
Here is their summary of the Market Share of Visits in July 2012 for the top 3, with the full chart of the top 10 sites below:
Facebook 62.21% (-)
Youtube 20.30% (+)
Twitter 2.06% (+)
Reach of the 8 Major Social Media Channels
In this piece by Jeff Bullas about why PR should take Social Media Seriously, he compiles some great statistics about the reach of the eight major social media channels through many different sources:
Facebook: Over 200 million members and 80 billion monthly page views (Techcrunch)
Twitter: It now has over 44 Million unique visitors a month (according to Comscore)
YouTube: Over 100 Million visitors in March and over 13.8 Billion video views in March alone (YouTube report)
LinkedIn: Over 16 million unique visitors a month with a a very affluent demographic where the average user is 39 and makes $139K ayear and over 500,000 C-level members (Quantcast)
MySpace: Just under 100 million visitors a month and 43 Billion page views (Techcrunch)
Digg: More traffic than the New York Times with 23 million unique visitors a month and 4.5 billion pages views (Techcrunch)
Blogs: Over 5 million blogs are tracked by Technorati, the “Bible” of Blogs with 600,000 being corporate blogs (Technorati)
Wikipedia: Nearly 63 Million Unique visitors June 2009 (Compete)
Then he compares it to the statistics for reach utilizing "old media:"
“USA Today” (largest read newspaper in the USA) 2.1 Million a day (Audit Bureau of Circulations) which if it was unique views per month of 63.1 million (which it isn’t it.. would still be 3 x smaller than Facebook)
AARP is the most widely circulated magazine in the USA and reaches 24.5 million which is slightly more than Digg (Audit Bureau of Circulations) but still 8 times smaller than Facebook
Fox News Channel (highest rated news channel for 90 months) has 15.6 million viewers a day (Huffington Post)..The same as the number of unique LinkedIn vistors sees monthly.
Rush Limbaugh the largest talk radio in the States has 14.75 million a day is less than half the 40 million unique visitors to Twitter each month (Talkers Magazine)
It's a pretty stark comparison. Think about that potential audience and then ask yourself, why isn't my business or organization playing in this game yet?
Will Businesses Heed The Warning From Progressive's Social Media Fail?
If you haven't seen by now, Progressive has a problem and their public relations efforts have only served to make it worse. Here's the story from the Wall Street Journal:
Progressive Corp. was trying to save $75,000. Instead, it unleashed a flurry of social-media rage against the company...
The car insurer found itself in the middle of an online firestorm last week after a blogger named Matt Fisher took to his Tumblr page to complain about the way Progressive treated his family as they sought to collect on his deceased sister’s insurance policy.
Fisher’s story went viral, and four days later, Progressive agreed to settle with the family for an undisclosed sum. Whatever the settlement amount, the total cost of the incident will be much higher, with a tally that will include those people who made good on their Twitter threats to switch their insurance away from Progressive, as well as those who won’t consider Progressive for their insurance in the future.
This is exactly what is meant by the statement that customers using social media have the power to influence millions where they used to be able to tell just ten. It all started with a blog post that Fisher posted. This is the latest unfortunate example of the ability for stories to go viral in an instant leaving your traditional marketing and public relations efforts in the dust. Follow me below the fold for more of the social media outrage.
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When should I post this?
I can't tell you the number of times I have been asked when the best time of day to post, tweet or email. The digital agency Raka is cited in this post at Ragan Communications regarding the best time to tweet:
If brands want their followers to click links shared in tweets (referred to as “click throughs”), they should post to Twitter early in the afternoon—1 p.m. to 3 p.m.—Monday through Thursday, according to a study by link shortening service Bitly. The study also stressed the two worst times to tweet for click throughs: After 8 p.m. any day of the week and after 3 p.m. on Friday.
You can see the infographic they put together below: