The Blog of Target Marketing

10 Insights into the State of Social Media in 2012

The smart phone is changing how we use and consume information. Add a dose of social media obsession and you have two powerful forces that are transforming everything.

How we find information, learn, publish, express ourselves, do business and interact with other people is going through the biggest change in history and we don’t know exactly where it is all heading. All we know is that is is exciting and it is making for a more open, intelligent and transparent world.

The industry changing invention of the iPad has added another layer of change that has personal computer manufacturers worried about their growth predictions. The convenient and always on tablet is becoming a must have device that travels easily and lightly on the planet.

Discovering recommendations for a great restaurant while travelling  is no longer just left to friends and word of mouth but thoughtful strangers that are providing crowd sourced reviews on platforms and apps such Trip Advisor, Yelp and and the Alfred dining app.

Nielsen have just issued a report that looks at what are some of the significant changes over the last 12 months with social media that are worth noting.

#1. Time on Social Networks on PC’s vs Mobile in 2012

The mobile is quickly becoming the place to access your social networks and it is now more than one third of all social networking time when compared  to PC’s in 2012. In the age group of 25-34 and 35-44 year olds,  the amount of time on social networks now exceeds time spent on a PC.

The figures also reveal that women are spending more time than males on social networks both on the lap, desktop and the mobile.

 #2. Top 10 Social Media Networks

It is apparent that in the USA that Facebook has reached a saturation point at 152 million unique visitors with a decline of  4% in 2012 compared to 2011. Twitter continues to grow with 37 million users (up 13%).

Of course the standout of the last 12 months is the growth of Pinterest at over 1,000 percent.

Google+ is sometimes overlooked but with over 26 million users in the US and  growth rate of 80%, it is a social network that shouldn’t be ignored but seriously considered especially for its social signals and future potential.

MySpace is the star of the non performers declining by 13%.

 #3. Time Spent on the Top 10 Social Networks on Mobile

The transition to accessing social networks on mobile is obvious when you see that despite the drop of 4% in visitors to Facebook last year the time spent on Facebook is up over 80% on both mobile apps and mobile web.

The top 5 performers on mobile web YOY (Year on Year) with growth rates over 100% are:

• Pinterest – 4,225%
• Tumblr – 162%
• Reddit – 153%
• Twitter – 140%
• LinkedIn – 114%

 #4. The Growth of Pinterest

Pinterest is leveling off, but the launch of the Pinterest business page may help in continuing to drive growth. Its growth across mobile web, PC and apps is by far the largest compared to any other social network.

#5. The Demographics of Pinterest

Pintrest has piqued the interest of women much more than men and with 70% plus demographic share across the 3 access types, it is a platform that the fashion, food and female oriented categories should not ignore. The age groups that dominate are the 25 to 49 year olds.

Also its role as a driver of traffic for online stores is already been shown.

#6. How We Connect to Social Media

The tablet is the big mover here up from 3% to 16% in just one year. The convenience and increasing user base of the tablet is the biggest influencer of this change. The PC has declined slightly from 97% to 94%. One small move to note but one to watch is the increase by Internet enabled televisions from 2% to 4% .

#7. Where We Connect to Social Media

The always on and connected anytime anywhere generation is obvious in this statistic. You just have to love the fact that for nearly one third of all people aged 18-24, that social media is accessed in the bathroom.  I just wonder how many mobile devices have met a watery grave because of this habit!

#8. Why We Connect to Social Media

The number one reason to use social media is seeing what your friends are doing, mutual friends follows close behind and interested in keeping up with the the latest news comes in at third on reasons why we connect on social media.

Interested to see that a person’s physical attractiveness is a significant reason the male of the species connects at 14%. The ladies already know this one to be true!

 #9. Simultaneous Smartphone, Tablet and TV Use

The impact of the tablet is noticeable on two levels.

1. Shopping online while watching  TV
2. Accessing social networks while also watching Television

Advertisers will need to take note of this trend and make it easy for clients to find either information or buy when creating television ads to tempt and tease the potential multi-tasking shoppers.

#10. Twitter Drives Social TV

Twitter as a real time news and event related social network has been apparent for years. The more recent trend of adding value to TV and socializing a previously passive medium has been building for a while. (I reported on this trend over 12 months ago).

Social TV interaction is up over 27% in just 6 months.

What Surprises You?

Some of these trends are apparent and others are not so obvious. The implications are broad and far reaching and the impact reaches into how we market and advertise our brands and also includes how we design and build websites, online stores and blogs so that they are accessible on mobile devices.

Apps are becoming widespread and are a convenient and quick  way to obtain and create information and media and then share that on social networks in an instant.

What surprised you with some of these facts, figures and statistics?

6 Tips on Marketing Your Online Content

Content marketing is a simple phrase. It involves just two key elements.

“Content” which can be articles, videos and images in all their various multi-media formats.

“Marketing” which means taking that content and letting the online world knows it exists. In essence it is implementing strategies and tactics of making your ideas spread.

Marketing your content though is a challenge in a world where there are over 2 billion internet users who are bombarded with emails, streams of tweets and banner ads.

The process of content marketing involves the creation of material that is informative but is also written on a perspective which shows your business in a positive light. Good content marketing will create interest in your business, attracting traffic to your website and hopefully, sales or conversations as well.

Great content will position your business as a thought leader in its industry and it will also educate, inform, entertain and inspire.

There are many ways of doing content marketing but not all methods yield the positive results! Here are six tips to get you started on marketing your own content:

Tip 1: Drip feed your content

There is a tendency to create too much content, unleash it on the Internet and then expect it to carry traction throughout the year but this isn’t always a good idea. News and current events change all the time which means your target audience may not be searching for the same things as they were searching for two or three months ago. Publish content consistently and persistently making your sure the content you produce has some relevancy to current events and what your target audience may be interested in at the present time.

Tip 2: Monitor old content

Use Analytics and visitor level call tracking software to monitor your content. Once you find out what types of articles seem to be the most effect, you will have a better idea as to what types of content your target audience are interested in. The success of your content will be measured in many ways but broadly speaking, an article that produces a high level of the following would be considered good content:

• High Traffic
• Prompts interest and enquiries
• Generates sales

Tip 3: Make use of social media

Once your content has been published, the main objective is to get as many people to see view it who may be interested in your business and leveraging social media is an excellent place to start in order to achieve this. Posting content on your social media accounts will bring your content to those following your social media accounts. If these people like your content, they may choose to share it with their followers and a snowball effect is created which may possibly result in your content going viral!

In addition to this, we already know that Google uses social media signals when deciding your positions in the search results so an article that gets a good number of ‘Likes’, shares, comments, tweets, +1s is likely to improve your search engine positions as well.

Tip 4: Aim for quality not quantity

Hundreds, if not thousands of pieces of content are created every day. A web surfer is spoilt for choice when it comes to choosing content to read. Creating an interesting title will definitely be effective in getting a user to click on your article rather than the next person’s article but a poorly written, uninteresting article will just get scanned and then discarded. This means no social love and definitely no enquiries or sales.

Find out what your target audience are interested in and create high quality, engaging, thought provoking content that they would be interested in. no doubt in the time needed to create one high quality article, you could’ve possibly created two, or maybe three low quality articles but that one high quality article will prove more beneficial than three lower quality ones.

Tip 5: Incorporate the right amount of SEO

Your article needs to be able to turn up in search engine results pages (the holy grail is to be on page one at the top of the page) and then by having the right headline and description attract the right people. To do this, you should include some relevant keywords into your article but don’t overdo it. Adding too many keywords may result in the article losing its readability factor. As a general rule you should always add keywords but the article should be written for a human, not a search engine.

Tip 6: Inform rather than sell

People receive sales pitches all the time, be it in the electrical store, through the post, a popup advert on the Internet or whilst passing a billboard. They’ve become very good at noticing a blatant attempt to make them purchase something which is why all marketing articles should aim to inform rather than sell a product. Provide genuinely useful information on a topic which would allow you to mention your product or service along with some of its merits. A well written article will make the reader come to a conclusion without sounding like a sales pitch.

At the centre of any content marketing strategy is the creation of high quality content. Once high quality content has been created, it needs to be promoted and monitored using web analytics and call tracking solutions. Do this and you will well on your way to having a successful content marketing strategy.

Guest Author:  Rashed Khan from Response Tap who specialise in call tracking.