What social media means to you ...
Social media has grown exponentially over the last three years and so have the number of articles about them. But the real question is "What does that mean to me?" First you need to know a couple of important things about how people use social media.
A recent Nielsen study found that global consumption of social media increased 82 percent from December 2008 to December 2009 in the ten countries surveyed, with users spending an average of 5.5 hours on their sites of choice per month.
Australian addicts are among the heaviest users of all, spending nearly seven hours on social networks per month. The biggest networks in social media are Twitter (at the time of writing about 50 million 'tweets' each day), and Facebook whose user base grew 368 percent in 2009 alone.
That means that as of December 2009, Twitter hosted 18.1 million active members in the countries studied. And Facebook had 206.9 million unique visits in December - a whopping 67-percent share of all social-media users in those countries. Myspace, while still big, is on the decline. Linkedin with its more targeted audience is considerably smaller but holding steady.
To succeed on these platforms today, marketers need to understand just how these sites are being used. Here's a quick summary:
Twitter users share
A MarketingProfs report released last year found that people favour Twitter for sharing cool things and making discoveries. Those things can be anything from a new site to useful information to the latest B2B video. Importantly for you, new communities are springing up around topics of interest, industries and events like trade shows and conferences. Simply monitoring these conversations can alert you to information and trends that you may have missed otherwise ... all pre-filtered by others.
Facebook fans connect
Facebook fans mostly use it to keep in touch with friends, family and colleagues, the report found. They keep others updated on what's new with them, and what they like. Hence the popularity of fan pages or sponsored gifts, both of which show what brands users love.
The key to participating well in either medium? Getting to know your audience. The key to marketing through them? Humanising your brand.
Know them before you sell them. Twitter and Facebook can be great for building brand equity and even better for learning about and understanding your clients. Use them as a way to get to know, and share with your target audiences.
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