What can you do with LinkedIn?
LinkedIn is the largest business-related social networking site.
Although it can boast an impressive amount of users in each country, the visitor numbers are still relatively low. Note, however, the exceptionally high reach in the Netherlands:
- Members: 1M (Belgium), 2M (Netherlands), 2M (France), 135M (global)
- Unique visitors: 1.8M (Belgium), 8.2M (Netherlands), 5.6M (France), 250M (global)
- Page views: 23M (Belgium), 130M (Netherlands), 60M (France), 3B (global)
- Reach 8.9% (Belgium), 21% (Netherlands), 4,6% (France), 5.0% (global)
- Avg time on site: 7:20 (Belgium), 8:00 (Netherlands), 7:20 (France), 8:50 (global)
(Source: Google Ad Planner, infographiclabs)
What can you do with LinkedIn?
From How Linkedin works, an infographic by infographiclabs:
- Establish your professional profile: career info, position, experience, skills. Tip: Custom public profile URLs are changeable on a first come, first served basis.
- Find experts and ideas and resolve a unique business challenge. Tip: You can also discover which skills you'll need to succeed.
- Stay in touch with colleagues and friends.
- Explore opportunities e.g. by seeing detailed statistical information on the companies' business page, or by following interesting companies' hiring info.
Pinterest: images about design are the most commonly pinned
Using a dataset of more than 11,000 pins, Hubspot's Dan Zarrella compiled a few statistics about how to get more pins and repins for your content.
The Most Pinned and most Repinned Words show exactly what the atmosphere at Pinterest is about:
More where this came from:
- [Infographic] How to Get More Pins and Repins on Pinterest @ danzarrella.com
Facebook Advertising: mostly targeted by age, country, interest
From 2012 Facebook Advertising Report @ socialfresh.com:
More where this came from:
- The 2012 Facebook Advertising Report [INFOGRAPHIC] @ socialfresh.com
- Download the 2012 Facebook Advertising Report @ kajabi.com
Study: Consumers are highly influenced by their friends
Sociable Labs just released their Social Impact Study, a 1088-person survey of online shoppers to understand the influence and impact of social sharing on consumer purchase.
Highlights from the study:
- 38% of online shoppers take action in Engaged Sharing (e.g. recommendation, Facebook share);
- 56% of online shoppers participate in Light Sharing (low friction sharing, e.g. Facebook Like)
- 62% of online shoppers have read product related comments from their friends on Facebook.
- 75% of shoppers who read social sharing comments have clicked on the product link in their friends’ Facebook posts, taking them to the product page on a retailer’s website.
- 53% of the shoppers who have clicked through to the retailer’s site have made a purchase.
- 81% of consumers who purchase products they learn about through social sharing are valuable social sharers themselves, thus creating a cycle of sharing and buying.
Social proofing is the activity of showing friends activities on a website is a powerful motivator for buying.
From the Sociable Labs study:
- 32% of visitors are more likely to stay and shop on a site that shows activities of shoppers who have purchased there, even when those shoppers are not their friends.
- 62% of visitors do so when the shared activities include the shopping behavior of the visitor’s friends
- 57% of shoppers are more likely to purchase on a site that shows their friends who have purchased on that site.
Further reading:
- 5 Reasons Why Facebook Drives Consumer Buying – Infographic @ jeffbullas.com
- Download "Social Impact Study" @ sociablelabs.com
Belgacom’s new Facebook Page: a more human approach
Belgacom, the largest telecommunications company in Belgium, has taken the new Facebook Timeline feature to tell their own story, right from the start in 1992. They're filling up the page with more content as we speak, but their brand new facebook.com/Belgacom clearly has a more human feel to it:
The Facebook Page notes point out that the people in the videos are real people, not actors. This is Dax, for instance:
By the way - did you notice the Belgacom/Proximus co-branding? What do you think?
How do you measure how reactive your fans and followers are?
When it comes to your audience, there are two main parameters:
- Reach - any number that gives an idea of the size of your audience, and how it grows or declines
- Engagement - any number that gives an idea of how reactive that audience is
Reach is pretty easy to measure. You could track the amount of Facebook Fans, Twitter Followers, YouTube channel subscribers of your brand's presence in social media.
Or you could apply this metric to a specific social object you've launched, like a YouTube movie, a Tweet message, or a Facebook Post. In that case you'll focus on clicks, impressions, views, etc.
The hard part is in measuring Engagement. For lack of better tools, most use something like a Klout Score, a Net Promotor Score, and anything in between.
Socialbakers.com have just published their formulas for Facebook and Twitter Engagement rate. Facebook Engagement is calculated "on a given date", while the time stamp seems less important in the Twitter formula. Still: a very interesting and yet surprisingly simple look at social media metrics.
For your reference:
More where this came from:
Formulas Revealed: The Facebook and Twitter Engagement Rate @ socialbakers.com
How to find your company’s natural social media rock stars
When it comes to their social media strategy, businesses have two options:
- Hire an outside firm
- Hnable employees to manage social media
From How to train your employees to handle your social media infographic @ Mindflash.com:
Though outside firms sometimes seem like the safest choice, many companies find that their own employees make natural brand ambassadors and can use their networks to create new clients and generate buzz.
In order to do this successfully, your employees must be effectively trained based on their social media skills.
Mindflash.com distinguishes 5 different groups:
- The digital native: social media is a part of his daily life. Training should focus more on the company's specific social media goals and how to measure returns, and less on how to use the techology.
- The savvy technologist: not raised on social media platforms, but taught himself to use them. Focus on the social media platforms the company wants to utilize, and how you wish to engage audiences on them.
- The reluctant user: is familiar enough with social media, but has not adopted them into his daily life. Teach advanced use of the social networks they are familiar with, and how to get started with less familiar tools.
- The digital contrarian: opposes the digital age and feels that social media is just a passing fad or waste of time. Explain how and why businesses benefit from skilled social media campaigns, and why such tacts are useful to the company.
- The digital newbie is extremely new to social media and the digital world, and may not have the skill necessary to freely navigate the networks. Train them on how to use the social media platforms your company has deemed important to its digital campaigsn, and educate them on what the company's goals are.
Pinterest: 82% female, very selective in 35-44 yr age bracket
From A Case Study in Social Media Demographics @ onlinemba.com:
Over 66% of all adult online users are connected to one or more social media platforms. Use of these platforms and tools has been increasing steadily over the last 10 years, for both personal and business reasons.
Image below is part of an infograph that takes a look at the statistics behind some of the most popular platforms.
Facebook Page Virality: most posts never “go viral”
There is definitely a connection between viral phenomena and social media platforms. Social media are essentially about sharing. Facebook in particular is very prominent as a sharing platform, with Twitter coming in as a close second. Facebook is especially suitable for spreading interesting content, because shared material can show up for a number of days in your network’s news feed, making its shelf life much longer than in the ‘easy come, easy go’ environment of Twitter.
Facebook defines Virality as "the number of people who have created a story from your post as a percentage of the number of people who have seen it."
According to EdgeRank Checker, 61 % of Facebook Page Posts have a virality rate of 2.5 % or less. The median rate came out to 1.9 %.
The conclusion? Very few Pages leverage incredible Virality rates, however the ones that do are experiencing tremendous success in terms of exposure.
Nielsen: Women make up the majority of bloggers
Put simply, blogs are the easiest content management systems, and they have the added advantage of being social media-optimised and search engine-optimised by default.
Most blog platforms have unique urls and rss feeds as a standard feature, which makes the sharing of blog posts via (for example) Facebook or Twitter extremely easy. By allowing comments, blogs also encourage the use, reissue and remix of your content and ideas.
As a result of their many incoming links and freshly updated content, social media tools – and blogs in particular – score high in organic search procedures.
And yet are often overlooked as a significant source of online conversations, while all this time consumer interest in blogs only keeps growing.
NM Incite, a Nielsen/McKinsey company, tracked over 181 million blogs around the world, up from 36 million only five years earlier in 2006.
Overall, 6.7 million people publish blogs on blogging websites, and another 12 million write blogs using their social networks.
Some of the highlights from the report:
- Women make up the majority of bloggers, and half of bloggers are aged 18-34
- Bloggers are well-educated: 7 out of 10 bloggers have gone to college, a majority of whom are graduates
- About 1 in 3 bloggers are Moms, and 52 percent of bloggers are parents with kids under 18 years-old in their household
- Bloggers are active across social media: they’re twice as likely to post/comment on consumer-generated video sites like YouTube, and nearly three times more likely to post in Message Boards/Forums within the last month
Further reading:
- Buzz in the Blogosphere: Millions More Bloggers and Blog Readers @ blog.nielsen.com
- State of the Media: U.S. Digital Consumer Report, Q3-Q4 2011 @ nielsen.com [regwall]
- State of the Media: Social Media Report Q3 @ nielsen.com [regwall]