Ahh, the new buzz word but how does this phenomenon translate to business?
It would be easy to throw in a bunch of stats here and the sheer potential is awe inspiring, but we won’t. Don’t worry, we will post them for you to see but first we need to share a few thoughts regarding social networking.
Embarking on this social journey requires discipline and responsibility. It is true that a well-crafted social networking campaign can lead to unlimited potential but it can also lead you down the rabbit hole.
Recently a large game manufacturer decided after months of pressure to relent and create a Facebook page. The idea was to create a live forum from which the designers and employees of the company could interact and share new and exciting game updates with the public. In theory this worked well. In practice the Facebook page quickly became a breeding ground for complaints, bugs, disgruntled users demanding help and feedback. With such an overwhelming response, it is not surprising that the reply’s and comments from the employees and developers quickly dried up. Not being able to keep up with these responses only fueled the animosity further. At this time the company had two courses of action, to simply close down the page and admit that the whole exercise had failed or to “fess up” and acknowledge the comments and complaints and work with their customers to ensure the next release met with far more acceptance.
We will let you know which way they decided to go when they make a decision.
This is just one example of how a social networking campaign can get out of hand. Have a clear idea of what it is you want to achieve and have the resources to maintain it.
At BOOTIT we have grown with Social Networking. Building specialized content for Facebook for over 5 years, we have seen it all. We were among the first to develop fully dynamic content for specialized Facebook pages having developed our own iFrame applets. We have created seamless integration of Twitter, Blogger and Facebook content into new and existing sites. We understand social media because we are social media. Let us help you strategize your social networking campaign, help you organize resources either internally or within our own team, help you get connected.
It truly is an exciting time, with rewards abundant. Together we can tap into the social market. Who knows where it will take you.
The statistics we promised
(these will link to the relevant stats)
- Facebook Business
- YouTube
- Google Plus
- Other Social Netwworks
- QR Codes
- General Statistics
- There are now more than 800 million active Facebook users (this was reached on July 1 2011)
- 200 million accounts were added in 2011
- Facebook is the most visited website on the internet (reaching one trillion pageviews on June 30 2011)
- 11% of the world population has a Facebook account
- There are more Facebook users than cars (800 million vs 750 million)
- 50% log onto Facebook every day
- The average user has 130 friends and is connected to 80 pages, events and groups
- The average user spends 700 mins per month on the site
- Every 60 seconds on Facebook there are:
- 510,000 posted comments
- 293,000 status updates
- 136,000 uploaded photos
- 30 billion pieces of content are shared each month
- Facebook reached 55% of the world’s global audience accounting for roughly 75% of time spent on social networking sites and one in every seven minutes spent online globally
- Facebook is blocked in China
- Almost 50% of 18-34 year olds check Facebook when they wake up – 28% before even getting out of bed
- 20 million Facebook applications are installed per day
- Over 250 million people access Facebook via their mobile phone
- In just 20 minutes, over 1 million links are shared, 1.5 million event invites are sent, 1.8 million statuses are updated, 2 million friend requests are accepted, 2.7 million photos are uploaded, 2.7 million messages are sent and 10.2 million comments are made
More than 2.5 million websites have integrated with Facebook
Facebook Business
- FritoLay set a World Record with 1,575,161 Facebook likes in 24 hours on April 11 2011
- 95% of Facebook wall posts are not answered by brands
- Auto-posting to Facebook decreases likes and comments by 70%
- 56% of consumers say they are more likely to recommend a brand after becoming a fan on Facebook
- Two most popular reasons for liking a brand on Facebook: 1. because they are a customer (58%), 2. to get access to discounts and promotions (57%)
There are over 36.5M fans of Coca-Cola on Facebook
- Twitter has 225,000,000 users
- 100 million of these users are logging in at least once a month, 50 million are logging in every day
- 190,000,000 tweets are sent on average per day
- 1 billion tweets were sent every five days in 2011
- The record is 25,088 tweets per second (when Castle in the Sky was broadcast in Japan)
- A great majority of tweets are just 40 characters long
- The average user has 115 followers
- Lady Gaga is the most followed person on Twitter with over 17.8M followrs
- 40% of Twitter users don’t tweet, but instead use it to keep up to date
- 55% access Twitter via mobile
- Twitter handles 1.6 billion queries per day
- Nearly 500,000 users are added each day
- About 21% of Indonesians are on Twitter, making them the most Twitter-addicted nation
Japan is the only country where Twitter is more popular than Facebook
Twitter Business:
- 34% of marketers have generated leads using Twitter and 20% have closed deals
Tweets that include verbs have a 2% higher shareability than average tweets
- LinkedIn has 135,000,000 users (as at Nov 2011), up from about 85 million in late 2010
- Every second two new users sign up
- Age demographics are: 21% 18-24, 36% 25-34, 36% 35-54, 7% 55+
- LinkedIn membership includes executives from every company listed on the Fortune 500
49% of LinkedIn users have a household income over $100k
YouTube
- YouTube has 490 million unique visitors per month (as at Feb 2011), which generates 92 billion page views
- In 2010 YouTube reached 700 billion playbacks
- 35 hours of video is uploaded every minute
- More video is uploaded to YouTube in 60 days than the 3 major US networks created in 60 years
- Users on YouTube spend a total of 2.9 billion hours per month (326,294 years)
Google Plus
- Google+ was the fastest social network to reach 10 million users at 16 days (Twitter 780 days and Facebook 852)
- Google Plus experienced an increase of 55% in traffic in December 2011 from November 2011
- Though Google+ is secretive about the number of users, it has been reported that there are 62 million Google+ users (Source: Paul Allen)
Other Social Networks
- 3,500 photos are uploaded each second on flickr
- Flickr hosts over 5 billion images
- Instagram reached 13 million users 13 months after launch
- There are over 150,000,000 photos uploaded with instagram
- Foursquare sees 2,000,000 check-ins a week
- 15 million people have Foursquare accounts (as at Dec 2011)
- Wikipedia hosts over 17 million articles
- There are over 91,000 Wikipedia contributors
QR Codes
- QR code uptake has increased 4589% from early 2010 to early 2011
- 56% of QR codes appear on product packaging
- The majority of users expect to receive a coupon or deal from scanning a QR code
- 11 out of 50 Fortune companies are incorporating QR codes into their marketing strategy
- 68% of QR codes are scanned via an iPhone
General social media statistics
- Women are more active on social media than men – 55% vs 45%
- Social media is responsible for one third of the web traffic in Malaysia
- North American consumers show the strongest interest in using social media for deals (45%), followed by consumers in Asia-Pacific (34%) and Latin America (33%)
- A 2011 study confirmed that social media users dine out more and are more likely to become return customers
- 43% of all online consumers follow or are a fan of a brand
- 57% of people talk to people more online than they do in real life
- 15% of 16-24 year olds prefer to receive customer service via social media over any other method, compared to just 8% of 25-34 year olds and 3% of those aged 35-44