As a business professional, it’s imperative that you gain insight over your competitors with respect to trends and consumer habits & behavior. If your target demographic is the over 30 set, you need to know where they can be found online. If you want to reach over 50’s, it’s important that you find out if they’re mostly on Facebook or on Twitter.
A solid understanding of social networking and how it’s being used by consumers is powerful information to have in terms of increasing sales and improving consumer engagement. As social media blogger, Jeff Bullas puts it: “If social media was a horse race then you might as well put down the glasses as the race has been won. The dominance of Facebook is well known but it is the scale of its growth, market share and time it takes from its users is what is intriguing.”
A May 2011 study conducted by Neilson found several interesting facts – here a few of them –some you would expect and some that might surprise you:
1. Facebook dominates time spent online by a ratio of greater than three to one as compared with Yahoo (Facebook’s closest web brand competitor).
2. People spend a great majority of their time on social networks, including blogs – 22.5% of their time, in fact – twice as much time as they spend on online games (which came second) at 9.8%.
3. Females, ages 18 to 34, are the most frequent visitors to social networking sites, including blogs; however, males are also frequent users of the sites as well as all other age groups.
4. But, males tend to use LinkedIn more frequently than females and Internet users with post-graduate degrees are three times more likely to visit LinkedIn compared with the average user.
5. Facebook, according to Neilson this past May, was the top site visited by unique users at 140,336 million, with Blogger in second place at 50,055 million. The rest of the list is as follows:
- Twitter (23.617 million)
- WordPress (22.417 million)
- MySpace (19.25 million)
- LinkedIn (17.786 million)
- Tumblr (11.87 million)
- Six Apart Typepad (8.578 million)
- Yahoo Pulse (8.397 million)
- Wikia (7.601 million)
6. Social media is becoming more and more aggressively mobile. With the advent of smartphones, social media use has become a most used mobile feature, second only to downloading & playing music.
7. With respect to smartphones, social networking apps, growing at 30%, ranked third in terms of most used, with Facebook ranking as the most popular app amongst all mobile operating systems.
8. The most aggressive growth of social media use on smartphones is the over 55’s with 109% growth. The 35-54 age group growth rate holds at 68% year on year and 18-34 year olds are rising in numbers of visits to social media sites on their mobile devices by 61%.
9. Social media networks afford the influential a platform within which to relay their ideas and the influence of peers on these platforms can certainly propel increased sales. Fifty-three percent of active social media users follow a brand.
10. Tumblr, a social networking site that incorporates elements of both blogging and Twitter, is now the eighth largest social network and tripled its audience in a 12 month period.
By studying trends in social media, you can become so much more in tune with the audience you want to target. So, get on, get connected and start growing your business with social media. We can show you how to make the most of your social networking experience through our full-day, hands-on workshop, Social Networking for Business. For a schedule of workshops in your area, please visit: http://www.escomputertraining.com/courses/details/industry/2/course/20
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