March 21st, 2012 by Mathias Buerk
Networks and videos dominate in social media. They combine for more than 50% of the worldwide usage of the Top 20 social media platforms. Wikis, blogging platforms and micro-blogging services follow. The aim of ethority’s study about the usage and importance of the variable platforms and channels was: Which platforms are being used most each month and how high is the number of unique visitors? The latter tells more about the success of a platform as, for instance, the number of registered (active/inactive) user accounts (e.g. facebook: 850 Mio) or of page views.
The Top 5 surprise little: Facebook ranks 1st place with 950 Mio unique visitors, YouTube ranks 2nd with 880 Mio, and Wikipedia is 3rd with 410 Mio unique visitors. Blogspot, accounting for 340 Mio unique visitors is the biggest blogging platform worldwide and takes the 4th place, Twitter being 5th with half of that, 170 Mio unique visitors.
Google+, which has been written off by many, at least conquered a respectable 8th place considering their short existence. Soon, then, a channel hardly known in most of the Western World follows: Dailymotion, in Tunesia, France, Turkey, Belgium, Morocco, Algier, and Pakistan according to Alexa among the Top 50 sites, in the USA only takes 214th spot. Badoo, popular in the Mediterranean region, Cameroon and Latin America, and Orkut in Brazil are further channels to be mentioned here.
Social Media Top 20 sites 2012 infographic
The graphic shows in the first place, which platforms the Top 20 social media platforms are. Furthermore it lays out how the usage is distributed among variable categories of social media usage. Networks account for 36% of it, and 27% to video sites. Blogging platforms surmount Wikis in their importance, 15% and 12% of social media usage respectively. 5% is allocated to micro-blogging services. Others is made up of picture platforms like flickr and Photobucket, pinning site Pinterest, review site tripadvisor and the content platforms Scribd and Slideshare.
Related to this we want to point to the fact that very common apps like Foursquare and Instagram do not appear here. The do have relatively few unique visitors (5.6 Mio and 9.9 Mio, respectively), but many more registered accounts (15 Mio and 27 Mio, respectively). As they are used on mobile devices they do not require a visit to their website. This is why the number of unique visitors is not as relevant to those services as to others to capture their significance. In future articles we will consider the numbers of the mobile use of apps we do not have at the moment, though.
March 19th, 2012 by Sten Franke
Facebook still is the most underestimated platform for corporate communications. This may sound odd, yet most companies and brands don’t exploit social media platform’s potential sufficiently.
A research by Recommend.ly shows 82% of all facebook fanpages are updated less than 5 times a month. A surprisingly low number. Even worse are accounts of local businesses. Only 6% of them engage in conversations on their fanpages.
Facebook study: Fanpages in March 2012
Furthermore, Recommend.ly found out that on average 91% of comments of facebook fans remain unanswered. As a basis of this analysis 1.7 Mio. fanpages of enterprises serve.
Most companies apparently don’t know how to use their facebook account, these results show.
The conversion into new timeline gives reason to expect better. It forces businesses to reflect on their facebook strategy. Indeed ever more companies evaluate the challenges the social network poses.
Starbucks' Facebook Fanpage
Allfacebook.de reports 8 Mio pages have switched to the new design in the first fortnight. I.e. “of the 37 Mio pages with more than 10 fans (December 2011) 20% shifted to the timeline voluntarily”, experts say. Further it reads: “The remaining 80% hopefully are planning the makeover right now.” Otherwise on March 30 there will be a rude awakening: At the end of this month all pages are converted automatically. Futurebiz offers a worthy tutorial.
6 steps to change your fanpage successfully:
- Adapt your cover and profile image
- Create highlights and allocate pictures
- Look through and highlight past posts
- Prepare your community management to the new communication channels
- Optimize tabs
- Evaluate Concepts for campaigns à integrate your chronic
March 16th, 2012 by Mathias Buerk
Dave Kerpen
Dave Kerpen is the co-founder and CEO of Likeable Media, an award-winning social media and word-of-mouth marketing firm, NYT Best-selling author and speaker. In his book “Likeable Social Media: How to Delight Your Customers, Create an Irresistible Brand, and Be Generally Amazing on Facebook and other social networks.” he reveals the secret to successful word-of-mouth marketing on the social web.
Dave Kerpen’s Homepage
likeable Media
1. Which 5 recent numbers in social media impressed you most?
- 11.7 million – the number of active monthly users that Pinterest reported in February, making them the fastest growing website ever to 10 million users.
- 75% – the percentage of Facebook likes that their new advertising product “Reach Generator” promises to reach. This ad product manages to collect revenue by allowing brands to reach their own fans in the News Feed (most of which have been generating by Facebook ads to begin with!) – and yet will massively appeal to most large companies.
- 50 million – the most recently disclosed number of Twitter’s daily active users. Twitter remains the 2nd most important social platform for brands across the globe, outside of China.
- 250 million – the number of registered users on Weibo, a Chinese social network akin to Twitter operated by public traded company Sina.
- 66% off – the discount I receive off at Gilt Group, thanks to my Klout score. A recent promotion gives each person a % off equal to their Klout score. This influence-based promotion not only gives Justin Bieber free swaq – it may be a sign of things to come in social commerce.
2. Social Media Trends – which is the next big thing in your opinion?
- The next big thing in social media is the rise of the interest graph. The rise of Pinterest is proof that people like paying attention to people with similar interests – so much so that interest graph data may end up proving a more viable indicator of social commerce than social graph data. In other words – are you more likely to purchase something if your cousin, the novice golfer, likes it on Facebook – or if someone or plays golf all the time like you do and that you follow on Pinterest – pins it? The combination of the interest graph and the social graph will likely be most potent.
3. Will mobile use change social media?
- Mobile use has already changed social media, and it will continue to do so. Half of all Facebook’s nearly 900 million users access the social network from mobile devices. Designers and developers must create products with this is mind – simple, and useable via mobile – is always best.
4. Which is your favorite social media tool?
- My favorite social media tool is Buffer. It allows you to easily schedule Tweets, Facebook posts and LinkedIn updates ahead of time, spacing them out with minimal effort.
5. Will G+ challenge facebook’s “like”?
- Google Plus and their +1 will challenge Facebook’s like, due to Google’s search dominance. But ultimately, this will make for healthy competition, and both platforms bettering their products for consumers and advertisers alike. In the end, Facebook’s “like” – and maybe even Pinterest’s “pin” – or another interest graph’s light indicator – will prevail over the +1.
March 7th, 2012 by Sten Franke
We have been teaching it a while already, in the meantime most businesses seem to have understood. The acknowledge that their own social media activities, and of their employees, are a huge treasure of data that yet has to be heaved, ordered an analyzed.
Latest research supports this thesis. For instance a new Iron Mountain study concluded that most European businesses still do not know how to deal with data stemming from social networks like facebook, twitter, or linkedin. “Although 94% (Europe: 86%) of the German businesses asked in this study are aware of the fact that communication via social media channels can possibly be classified as a formal business process” the paper states. “At the same time 72% of German businesses (Europe: 63%) do not consider themselves as being able to capture the data and information exchanged in social media accordingly”. The authors see this as one possible reason why 90% of businesses ban the use of social media while working to their employees.
However, this hardly affects ever more individuals using social media. A current analysis by Statista depicts how regularly users surf their favorite networks by now:
Not without my facebook
In their examination the colleagues of Iron Mountain picture the situation very negative. They believe that facebook and Co. constitute a similar problem to companies than when email was introduced to the business world. Nevertheless, this example convinces only partly. Even though when emailing started it posed a difficulty to businesses, then firms could not handle the data for analysis properly.
The data and information social networks can provide surmount in importance multiplicately. Social media monitoring and intelligence tools (e.g. the gridmaster) allow the analysis of tweets and posts extensively and to continue working with the gained data.
At Iron Mountain the generated data is perceived as highly huge and unstructured that it is hard to control. Hera again I have to object and refer to our gridmaster. Nevertheless the study is right in remarking that the immediateness and informality in social networks raise the risk of violating copyright or revealing confidential information.
March 2nd, 2012 by Mathias Buerk
Lon Safko
We are honoured to interview Lon Safko (@lonsafko) in today’s Friday5. He invented “the first computer to save a human life” (Steve Jobs) and numerous other software and hardware solutions for the physically challenged. 18 of his inventions and more than 30.000 papers are in the Smithsonian Institute, Washington. Furthermore he is the author of “The Social Media Bible” that ranked #1 in both marketing and business on Amazon, and is available in four languages. Moreover, Lon Safko founded 14 successful companies.
1. Which 5 recent numbers in social media impressed you most?
1) Of course the number of Facebook members always impresses me, especially as they approach their 1 billionth member.
2) Myspace is still out there and growing with over 200 million members.
3) Twitters is still going strong with their 106 million users and active use.
4) It’s China that surprises me. Their Qzone has 190 million members and RenRen with 170 million members. This surprises me because Facebook is still banned and doesn’t compete, and they also have 1.3 billion people! I would have thought their two largest social networks would have larger memberships.
5) Lastly, the number of people calling themselves “social media gurus”.
2. Social Media Trends – which is the “next big thing” in your opinion?
It’s what my next book is about, “The Fusion Media Bible”. If you are still calling yourself a “Social Media Expert” then you’re announcing to the world that you have been left behind. Fusion Marketing is the next step that brings our 6,000 years of traditional marketing, the exciting digital marketing tools of the Internet, and social media together, and fully integrates them into one seamless tool set that will accomplish every goal you set. Fusion Marketing is about looking at all of your campaigns, conversion strategies, tools and tactics as one integrated marketing strategy. If you have a V.P. of social media, then why don’t you have a V.P. of billboards? Traditional, Digital, and Social Media is all just media; technology that allows us to communicate with our customers.
3. Will mobile use change social media?
It already has. The Nielsen Company announced in 2011 that for the first time in history the number of televisions in America dropped from 98% to 96%. We are rapidly moving to mobile for our news, television show, movies, and social connections. The rest of the world is driving this phenomenon as most of the world’s population cannot afford a desktop, a laptop, a tablet, and broadband, but they can afford one smartphone. Smartphone marketing is growing exponentially and smart marketers today have to embrace mobile.
4. Will Google+ challenge facebook seriously?
I think so. This is reminiscent of the Apple vs. Windows battle of the 80’s and 90’s. When you have $24 billion in contextual advertising at stake, there will be war. Both Google and Facebook have been knocking off each others features / benefits for the past three years. This also part of a trend where the technologies are also integrating such as Google Hangouts Skype like video chat and Twitter like chat. When you have the kind of budgets that Google and Facebook have, you can afford to reverse engineer the best features of each others platform. This is only the beginning of the battle.
5. Social Commerce – what do you expect in the future?
Absolutely! We’ve seen the power of “reviews” and “Others who have purchased this has also purchased these…” what technically isn’t social commerce, but it was the beginning and heavily influences purchases. We will see more NFC (Near Filed Communication” or “Tap-&-Go” payment systems. Again, Europe is way ahead of of implementing NFC than the U.S. The smartphone will someday replace the credit card much the same way the credit card replaced the personal check.
March 1st, 2012 by Sten Franke
As crazy as it sounds: Even global enterprises, who never would make the least decision without investing in extensive prior data analyses and tools to fend off all eventualities, invested in social media campaigns and activities without targeting aims, and define and measure the success thereof.
Though, every responsible marketing, PR or social media manager has to abide to the demand of Return on Investment (ROI) and Key Performance Indicators (KPI). ROI in many companies still is a term that not all decision-makers can depict. King Fish Media found out that not yet half of the companies measure the ROI of their social media campaign, disregarding social media intelligence and monitoring tools – like the gridmaster – that can analyze ROI easily. The free ethority social media ROI calculator can be used anyway.
KPI & ROI - define and measure your social media success
Of those companies that are measuring the ROI of their campaign, a third stated that their activities worked or rather proceeded according to their plan. 13% even had results exceeding the expectancies.
Of particular interest is the latter group as the future is theirs. King Fish Media – for instance – found out that 29% of the questioned have to account for a positive ROI to receive a social media budget the following year.
ROI is only one point though, another are the KPI’s. Without them, hardly any relevant and comprehensive measurement of success of social media campaigns is possible. Only that way, activities can be placed sustainably and targeted. Globally what counts is to increase brand awareness, sales, profit, customer satisfaction and loyalty. However, many businesses define the success of their campaigns only by amassing the three f’s (friends, follower, fans). No matter whether on facebook or twitter, the mere amount of the fans or followers doesn’t illustrate the level of interaction. Often, it is standard marketing to increase number of a brand’s fans by advertisements or lotteries. The mass of generated fans amounted like this doesn’t tell how valuable and sustainable it is, when your aim is to increase brand awareness, sales, profit, customer satisfaction and loyalty. I.e. fans recruited by lotteries show actually little interest in your brand. Community management that is authentic and based on dialogue can animate your fans to raise their level of interaction: you’re winning when your fans become so-called superfans, who contribute to building and creating a worthy brand-community by showing above-average engagement. Whether your own community has reached this state, or rather how your community matured already can be seen with global and industry-specific KPI’s. ethority over the past years has developed a substantial set of tools and industry-specific standard KPI’s. We will report further about them in this blog.
I am convinced that the coming 18 months ever larger budgets will be allocated to social media campaigns. This, in turn, means that general, and at the same time individual KPI’s have to be defined urgently, to actually measure the success of social media activities and campaigns.
February 21st, 2012 by Sten Franke
ROI measurement will soon be crucial to any social media marketing strategy and analysis. In my opinion, the most recent study conducted by King Fish Media leads only to this conclusion.
Social Media ROI 2011/2012 Survey - King Fish Media
The marketing agency King Fish Media found that, up to now not even half of all businesses measure the ROI of their Social Media campaigns, although for long there are already Social Media Intelligence or Monitoring tools which can easily analyze Return on Investment – like ethority’s gridmaster. In addition to these tools, the free ethority Social Media ROI Calculator may be used.
A third of the businesses that have calculated the ROI of their campaigns stated that their measures have had the expected impact. For 13 percent the results even exceeded all expectations.
Now, these businesses are particularly interesting because they are the future. Analysts of King Fish Media revealed that 29% of the surveyed companies need to show a positive ROI to receive their Social Media Budget next year.
The most important findings of the study were:
1. Social Media ROI tracking will become much more relevant in the future because half of the surveyed companies still do not conduct ROI analyses.
2. It can be predicted, however, that more than the current 29 percent need to develop an appropriate ROI to be able to plan with respective budgets for future campaigns.
3. The time of social media success being determined only by the number of fans, friends or followers or by rule of thumb will pass.
And this is just as well, because everybody profits from a reasonable ROI measurement strategy and analysis: Users, because campaigns are specially tailored to their needs, and businesses, because they can use their budget more efficiently.
February 27th, 2011 by Sten Franke
Social media users see “Black Swan” as Best Picture, Darren Aronofsky as Best Director, Natalie Portman as Best Actress in a Leading Role and Jeff Bridges as Best Actor in a Leading Role.
Social media users see “Black Swan” as Best Picture, Darren Aronofsky as Best Director, Natalie Portman as Best Actress in a Leading Role and Jeff Bridges as Best Actor in a Leading Role.
ethority has analyzed over 40,000 user opinions relating to the Oscar nominations in forums, blogs and on Twitter with the help of its Web-Monitoring Software Technology. The most interesting question for the research team was: Which of the nominated films and stars are being most heavily discussed in English and German language social media channels? Who are the hottest candidates for the Academy Awards in user-generated media?
The results of the study provided a few surprises. According to social media users, the films are running neck and neck. The differences between Black Swan (17%), True Grit (14%) and Inception (13%) are so small that we will be waiting with bated breath until the envelope is finally opened on Sunday night. The picture is clearer for Best Director: Darren Aronofsky, with 31% of all posts, is significantly ahead of David Fincher (23%) and David O’Russel (18%) – according to the users, we at least know that the winner’s name begins with the letter “D”.
Things are even closer in the race for Best Actor: Jeff Bridges holds a lead over James Franco (both 24%) of only a few hundred posts. Jesse Eisenberg is only 4% behind. By far the clear favorite amongst film bloggers and commentators for Best Actress is Natalie Portman with 45% of all posts. Anette Bening (17%) and Michelle Williams (15%) can’t even make out the leader’s tutu from that distance.
Sten Franke, founder and CEO of ethority comments: “As a film buff and enthusiast, I would have expected The King’s Speech to have been discussed far more strongly and to have stood higher in the users’ favor. But at the end of the day, we are only showing what the community thinks. The Academy has the final say! We’re keeping our fingers crossed.“
The core of social media lies in the interaction with the target group. Automated social media monitoring offers the possibility to identify what users think about a film, a brand or a company. Users utilize the social web to air their views and opinions honestly, without any sugarcoating.
“Monday will mean going into the office early after a long Oscar night.” Adds Benedikt Köhler, COO of ethority. “We will want to compare our own generated data with the Academy results as quickly as possible and see how buzz developed during the Oscar night. The results will, of course, be available to read in our blog.”
About ethority: ethority GmbH & Co.KG as a Social Media Specialist is one of the leading providers of social media monitoring, strategy consulting, marketing, branding and market research in the field of social media. Ethority has been working successfully with large German and international businesses for more than 10 years. The company’s client base includes global and online brands and medium-sized companies in the field of B2C and B2B who are looked after by the more than 50-strong ethority team based in Hamburg, Munich and Atlanta.
January 14th, 2009 by Sten Franke
After Thestrategyweb.com had explicitly published the survey’s results of Community Monitor 2008 for Brain-Injection consulting and the Cologne Business School, I would like to take a closer look on the presented profits models of each network. The survey’s results show a fresh a quite sober picture. Banners are still the prevalent marketing tools in social networks, but at the same time brand’s marketers appeared to be somehow completely ignorant of the fact, that those kinds of advertising are actually inefficient in the realms of social media. Myspace and Google have had their experience, e.g. the click rates of banner ads in Dickschiff social network is sinking continuously:
The ads’ so-called click-through rate plummeted from one in 100—a decent return by Web standards—in 2006 to one in 1,000 in 2007. “Users became more or less desensitized to the advertising,” says Seremet, a veteran of Take-Two Interactive (TTWO) and now president of video game publisher Green Screen. “You won’t make money on it.”
Google was quite unhappy about the development, considering that the internet empire based in Mountain View, California had promised different numbers, when it bought the sole commercialization rights in 2006 for the News Corp. network for almost $ 900.000.000 (article).
Trouble is, Google pays News Corp. for that right even when the ads don’t generate much, if any, revenue. “We have found that social-networking inventory is not monetizing as well as expected,” said Google Chief Financial Officer George Reyes…
This development is certainly not specifically for Myspace, but rather it applies to the whole networks. I agree and support the comment made by the authors of the survey:
“We assume one of the reasons is that the advertising industry needs time to adjust to new ways and possibilities of advertising in Web 2.0.”
Firstly, marketers must learn to actually listen in social media. Hence, after all the years of doing the talking, it’s now high time that they go into open dialog with the consumers. Invitational ads as banner can certainly be a medium to connect users or consumers to brand community etc. but the dialog with consumers should be the core focus.
Unfortunately, if it’s about profit models, then a central investigation object is missing in this analysis. Brand communities, Fan pages or sponsored groups should have been definitely subjected to the analysis. After all there are excellent examples, which accentuate, how important and meaningful these advertising forms are in social media. German version of MySpace is one of it and for me Jägermeister and Niveacamp of Beiersdorf stand out the most.
Even StudiVZ is successful with its sponsored group of Brands4Friends. This shows again how meaningful a brand community in social networks can be used as an oriented dialog marketing tool.
Well I do think that the survey lacks in the pivotal choice of investigation for profits models of social networks. Since the future of profits models lies for certain also in the area of brand communities.
Profits models like, e.g. Membership fees are certainly not for the big networks. It’s quite different for niche products like the business networks Xing or Linkedin. There, users are pretty concrete about their value added, which they expected from the usage of these networks and therefore willing to pay the fees. On the other hand the value added in Facebook&Co. is much more diffuse.
It’s quite interesting as well that 26% of the investigated networks do actually offer the integration of shops and this development has potentials, which yet to be fully exhausted. A good example from social media E-commerce is e.g. Brands4Friends and also edrugsearch.com. The American search engine for pharmaceuticals had huge success with the implementation of a community. It’s not of importance if at first the shopping and then the network or vice versa, since the outcomes would still be the same. Communities and E-Commerce can have a successful relationship and as former StudiVZ CEO- Markus Riecke said to this connection:
“Online Marketing is easy there, since user’s interests equal the offers”. Therefore shops can certainly be the profits driver for the big networks.
To sum it up: In my opinion the profits drivers lie in the future of social networks in the brands communities and in the alliance with E-Commerce. These two advertising forms are the closest as tools to generate an adequate successful marketing in social media, hence creating a profitable model for social networks. Overall, the future success of big communities would surely lie less in the area banner ads as well as membership’s fees.
January 14th, 2009 by Sten Franke
Defriending will surely be the big trend of 2009 in everyday use of social media. Burger King has anticipated this trend – dump 10 friends and get one free Whooper. Well I asked myself all the time, when I’m using LinkedIn, etc.: who is in god’s name with over 1000 business contacts on his/her a list could speak from “real” contacts or how one even should follow twitter stream, which follows more than 1000 streams? Perhaps it applies in social media, as well as in the world outside of social media: Less is more.
For Charlene Li, the downsizing of followers and Facebook “friends” is surely the trend for 2009:
“Having thousands of friends becomes “so 2008″ and defriending becomes the hot new trend, driven by overwhelming rivers of newsfeeds. The movement is rooted in a desire to have quality, not quantity, as people cocoon in the face of the economic crisis. Facebook apps will emulate Twitter Grader, allowing you to prioritize your friends based on their overall social ranking — and prune safely to ensure the highest quality friends“.
Even Peter Blackshaw – consumergeneratedmedia.com – also foresees quite similar development for year 2009:
“Many of us will feel compelled to join the social media equivalent of Weight Watchers, eager to trim the excess and rediscover a modicum of don’t-follow-everything discipline.”
In my opinion this development is certainly right. A social graph is only then a functional one, if one really communicates with his/her virtual contacts. This kind of communication is by far more than just the act of clicking the confirm button. Truthfully, I find it quite difficult to keep an eye of all the conversations happening in my Twitter streams, facebook, Linkedin, Myspace, etc. contacts, and then to actually be involved in a constructive dialog in the end. In the mean time a flood of information emerges, which are mostly irrelevant. Probably tools like TwitterGrader or Benedikt’s Twitterfriends are needed to accomplish an overdue network optimization. 2009 will be the time for all to join the social graph watcher movement and hence strengthening the networking.
