Many marketers still treat mobile as a marginal or still-novel use case that they can afford to think about "later." Nothing could be further from the truth. The device and Internet landscape have forever changed. The PC is now just one of several pieces of hardware that people use to access the Internet, and increasingly, it won't be the "primary" device. The PC will be "at work" or "in the other room." Consumer PC sales are flat and are unlikely to grow again in the future, absent some radical change (Surface probably ain't it). In the past, people might have bought multiple PCs; now t [...]

Related Topics: Channel: Strategy | Statistics: Mobile Marketing | Statistics: Online Behavior | Statistics: Social Media | Top News

Twitter says its mobile audience is more engaged than the average user by following more brands, interacting more with tweets and spend more time using the service. The company has released a host of statistics from a study it did with Compete -- one that will surely be music to a lot of advertisers' ears because it paints a picture of Twitter's mobile users as an ideal audience for their messages. According to the study: Twitter users that primarily access via mobile devices are 96 percent more likely to follow 11 or more brands, while the average Twitter user only follows five or m [...]

Related Topics: Channel: Strategy | Mobile Marketing | Statistics | Statistics: Mobile Marketing | Statistics: Online Behavior | Statistics: Social Media | Top News | Twitter | Twitter: Mobile | Twitter: Statistics

A new Pew survey on Facebook usage patterns leads me to want to coin a new term: "Facay" -- for "Facebook vacation." According to survey data collected in December, "61 percent of current Facebook users say that at one time or another in the past they have voluntarily taken a break from using Facebook for a period of several weeks or more." Pew says that its data, based on a survey of 1,006 US adults, "indicate there is considerable fluidity in the Facebook user population." In addition to the above finding, 20 percent of survey respondents say they no longer use Facebook, while 8 percent [...]

Related Topics: Channel: Industry | Facebook | Facebook: Business Issues | Facebook: Privacy | Facebook: Statistics | Statistics: Popularity & Usage | Statistics: Social Media

Despite arguments that four million dollars are better spent online than on a Super Bowl commercial, there's rarely an advertising opportunity that can raise awareness of your brand and get people talking like a Super Bowl commercial done right. From kick off until final play, I tracked 42 brands and 53 commercials with an eye toward how those brands might be tracking success. Did they want viewers to talk about their brand? Visit their web site? Go online to see the commercial again? Or just go out and buy the product? Eight of the ads had no calls to action at all, so apparently the ad [...]

Related Topics: Branding | Channel: Strategy | Facebook | Features & Analysis | Social Media Marketing: Hashtags | Statistics: Social Media | Top News | Twitter

The Baltimore Ravens just beat the San Francisco 49ers to win Super Bowl XLVII in a game that came down to the final seconds. But online, the social network showdown belonged to Twitter in a dominating win over Facebook, Google+ and all other social networks. According to my count, Twitter was mentioned in 26 of 52 national TV commercials -- that's 50 percent of the spots that aired during CBS' game coverage. Facebook was mentioned in only four of those commercials -- about eight percent. Google+, which is reportedly the No. 2 social network in the world, wasn't mentioned at all. YouTube [...]

Related Topics: Branding | Channel: Industry | Facebook | Facebook: Instagram | Facebook: Marketing | Facebook: Pages | Features & Analysis | Google | Google: Google+ | Google: Marketing | Social Media Marketing | Social Media Marketing: Hashtags | Statistics: General | Statistics: Social Media | Top News | Twitter | Twitter: Marketing

Marketers that want a better sense of where a Facebook Page is most popular can do that now via a new tool from the social analytics firm, SocialBakers. The company announced its Local Page Ranks tool today, which shows where Page fans are located geographically. This data has been available to Page owners in Facebook Insights, but only for their own Page(s). SocialBakers' Facebook Page Statistics page now has a "Country" dropdown where the local ranks of Pages that SocialBakers monitors can be accessed. The data shows, for example, that Walmart is currently the most popular Facebook p [...]

Related Topics: Channel: Strategy | Facebook: Pages | Facebook: Statistics | Marketing Tools: Social Media | Social Media Marketing | Statistics: Social Media | Top News

Online-only news sites get the most engagement on Google+, but traditional media are catching up ... and fast. That's according to Adam Sherk, a consultant that works with many news and content sites. Studying a total of 48 news organizations, Sherk collected the overall engagement counts for each on Google+ -- how many +1s their posts get, how many comments and how many shares. He ran a similar study a year ago and compared the new results to see which organizations are doing better in engaging their fans. Mashable has ascended to the top spot overall, according to Sherk's study, with [...]

Related Topics: Channel: Strategy | Google: Google+ | Social Media Marketing | Statistics | Statistics: Popularity & Usage | Statistics: Social Media | Top News

Facebook continues to be the dominant platform for websites that offer social logins, but Google is gaining ground in the latest report from Janrain. The company says that Facebook's overall share of social logins fell to 49 percent as of Q4 2012, down from its all-time high of 54 percent in Q3. Google was the main reason or benefactor of that decline, with its share of social logins growing from 25 percent to 31 percent at the end of 2012. Twitter's share of social logins also dropped a bit, down to seven percent from it's previous high of 10 percent. Here's the current social login [...]

Related Topics: Channel: Strategy | Facebook | Facebook: Open Graph | Facebook: Statistics | Social Media Marketing | Statistics: Market Share | Statistics: Online Behavior | Statistics: Social Media | Top News

According to financial analysts Facebook Q4 revenue (including payments, fees) could reach $1.5 billion. Search and social marketing platform Kenshoo says that just over 20 percent (20.3 percent) of the company's ad revenue is now coming from mobile. More than one in five ad dollars spent on Facebook are "delivered on mobile devices" according to Kenshoo. The Kenshoo data are drawn "from a representative sample of global advertisers using Kenshoo Social to manage Facebook advertising campaigns tracking impressions, clicks, and conversions. The data set covers more than 2 million Faceb [...]

Related Topics: Channel: Strategy | Facebook: Mobile | Facebook: Statistics | Statistics: Mobile Marketing | Statistics: Social Media | Top News

What happened in social media over the past year? In 2012, everything from President Obama holding a Google Hangout to Facebook buying Instagram and going public to the Pope joining Twitter and Psy's Gangnam Style breaking one billion views on YouTube. The folks at The SEO Company working with NowSourcing produced a nice infographic documenting some of the many social media highlights of 2012: Want the infographic for yourself? You'll find it here: The State Of Social Media 2012. Any highlights or important moments you think are missing? Share them below. And Happy New Year's Eve [...]

Related Topics: Channel: Strategy | Features & Analysis | Infographics | Statistics: Popularity & Usage | Statistics: Social Media | Top News

Google videos were shared nearly 5.9 million times in 2012, making it the most shared video brand of the year according to Unruly Media's 2012 Social Video Share Index. Google ranked seventh in the 2011 index, and Unruly Media credits this year's jump to Google's success with its Project Glass: One day... video, the video that Google released in the spring to introduce how consumers might some day use the Google Glass product. (see below) Google videos were shared almost 200 percent more often this year than in 2011. Nike ranks second on Unruly Media's list with about 5.5 million video s [...]

Related Topics: Channel: Video | Features & Analysis | Google | Google: Glass | Google: Marketing | Social Media Marketing | Statistics: Social Media | Top News | Video

The market is now awash in data. Each new day brings a dozen surveys or reports to my inbox. Most of these data are generated to promote individual companies but some of the metrics are nonetheless useful and interesting. A lot of the data I'm now seeing pertain to the growing importance of mobile devices and their impact on commerce. Below are a selection of some recent data from several companies and research firms that add more color to the rapidly developing picture of mobile user behavior. For example, comScore recently reported that in Q3 one-tenth of retail e-commerce spending came f [...]

Related Topics: Channel: Strategy | Statistics: Market Share | Statistics: Mobile Marketing | Statistics: Social Media | Top News

"Ghost town" is a phrase that's been tossed around when describing the apparent low activity levels on Google+, but a new study suggests that it could also apply to business activity using Facebook Pages. Recommend.ly, a social media tools/analytics company that we've covered before when it looked at Wal-Mart's Facebook Page strategy, is now out with a wider study that looks at overall Facebook Page activity ... and it isn't pretty. In October, the company examined more than 5.7 million Facebook Pages with at least 10 "Likes", and used a subset of about three million Pages to dig deeper [...]

Related Topics: Channel: Strategy | Facebook | Facebook: Pages | Facebook: Statistics | Statistics: Social Media | Top News

A new report from the Pew Internet & American Life Project finds that most US parents are concerned about their kids' online privacy and also about how much advertisers are able to learn about their kids' online behavior. The findings are based on telephone interviews of 802 US teens and their parents in late Q2 2012. The survey identified four areas of concern: Interaction with Strangers Online Reputation Management Information Available to Advertisers Impact on Future Opportunities Parents were most worried ("very concerned") about interaction with strangers o [...]

Related Topics: Channel: Strategy | Legal: Privacy | Statistics: Social Media | Top News

Facebook is still tops when it comes to how much its average users spends on the site, but that time has declined by nearly a half-hour over the past six months. My assumption is that you can blame mobile for that. The numbers are from Nielsen's Top 10 web brands list for September 2012. Nielsen estimates that Facebook users spent about six hours, 40 minutes on the site in September. That's more than triple the time spent on Yahoo and Google and almost four times the amount of time that users spent on YouTube. But six months ago, in its March 2012 report, Nielsen estimated time spent [...]

Related Topics: Channel: Strategy | Facebook | Facebook: Statistics | Social Media Marketing | Statistics | Statistics: Popularity & Usage | Statistics: Social Media | Top News

You simply couldn't escape it. The social media turnout in #Election2012 was as impressive as the actual voter turnout across the country. So much so that it broke Twitter records for a US Political event: With 20 million tweets, Election Day just became the most tweeted about event in US political history. #election2012 — Twitter Government (@gov) November 7, 2012   Twitter tapped out at 31.7 million election-based Tweets that maxed out at 327,452 Tweets per minute at some points. Notable election moments according to Twitter: 327,452 TPM - 11:19pm ET - Networks call Ob [...]

Related Topics: Channel: Strategy | Politics | Social Media Marketing | Statistics: Social Media | Top News | Twitter | Twitter: Statistics

We know that Instagram is one of the most popular social destinations for users, but brands are following suit. Back in August, Simply Measured, a social analytics  firm, discovered that 40% of brands had adopted Instagram for marketing. Since then, brand adoption has jumped a whopping 35% quarter-vs-quarter increase -- up to 54% adoption rate as of November 1st. Instagram crushed all competitors in quarterly growth, thanks in part to the near 100% adoption of Facebook and Twitter. Surprisingly Google+ saw only 5% growth while Pinterest jumped 24% to a 63% adoption rate, just [...]

Related Topics: Channel: Strategy | Facebook | Facebook: Instagram | Social Media Marketing | Statistics: Social Media | Top News

You could see this one coming a mile away: Social image-sharing site Pinterest has finally cracked comScore's monthly list of the top 50 web properties in the U.S. The September Top 50 is just out, and Pinterest squeaked in at No. 50 with an estimated 25.3 million visitors. That puts it still slightly behind the declining MySpace (26 million estimated visitors). Instagram and Tumblr are also slightly ahead and Pinterest and stand at 44th and 42nd, respectively. Pinterest has been growing dramatically for at least a year, but its recent growth is no doubt being fueled by the site' [...]

Related Topics: Channel: Strategy | Pinterest | Pinterest: Statistics | Social Media Marketing | Statistics: Popularity & Usage | Statistics: Social Media | Top News

A new survey of small business (SMB) members of the local directory and lead-gen site Merchant Circle (owned by Reply.com) finds that a majority are using social media to promote themselves. Yet only small minorities are doing anything else; and most survey respondents resist paying for advertising or other marketing services. The online survey ran during the final two weeks of September and had just over 3,400 responses. There were a range of industries represented among the respondents. Much of the focus and PR push is around SMB confidence, hiring outlook and the question of whether r [...]

Related Topics: Channel: Strategy | Features & Analysis | Statistics: Mobile Marketing | Statistics: Online Advertising | Statistics: Social Media | Top News

This should come as no surprise to anyone that's done more than just take a quick glance at Pinterest: Consumers rely heavily on the site when they're looking for product- and shopping-related inspiration. It's also, as I'll explain below, good news for Pinterest's future business plans. A recent BizRate Insights study compared why online shoppers in the US and Canada use Pinterest and Facebook. Both sites scored highly as a source of entertainment, but Pinterest users are there for commerce-related reasons more so than Facebook users. Seventy percent of Pinterest users say they use the [...]

Related Topics: Channel: Strategy | Pinterest | Pinterest: Statistics | Social Media Marketing | Statistics: Online Behavior | Statistics: Social Media | Top News