Fascinating Insights into Social Media

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

For Once, Long Commutes and High Traffic are What You’re Looking For: 3 Tips to Creating Website Traffic Using Social Media

Alright, so you’ve taken the first step to “getting yourself out there”, but you still aren’t experiencing an increase in business or customer movement. Well, you may be suffering from a lack of what social media experts call website traffic deprivation.  For many businesses, websites have become a comfort landing spot, where they are able to trust what they see.

Social Networks, due to their proliferous popularity, have become an inexpensive or even cost free method of creating links to hard-to-find websites.  So, as we can blatantly see, social networks such as Facebook are the escalators that direct a person towards the convincement of purchasing a product or service.  Three easy tips on how to achieve this are listed below:

1.   Exploit Facebook fan page “tabs”! On each created tab, talk about, show and list the products/services your company provides. Give users information that they can explore and help encourage them to “like” the page. Give decent levels of information that will have the viewer intrigued, but still wanting to find out more. This will act as a teaser. At this point, post links to your website, and suggest for them to follow this, and determine if what they are looking at is right for them.

2.   Articles and blogs are a fantastic method of presenting facts, knowledge and the overall pros of your product or service.  By creating these, you will give the customer a consistent stream of information that inevitably establishes them into loyal customers and supporters.  On the tabs, provide catchy phrases that may intrigue the viewer to click. At this point, by taking this route, they will still be drawn to the website for later exploration.

3.   With so many people using social networks such as Facebook, traffic on your fan page will likely be greater than on your website.  Take advantage of the already-established traffic on your page!  Contests and special offers are attractive points that get a viewer’s attention. Any way of saving money or receiving something for free intrigues a viewer. By listing these contests and offers on Facebook, you will immediately grab their attention.  At this point, you’ve got them hooked, and all that is left to do is reel in the line.  You can do this by posting pictures, links and tags that will directly take them to the page where they can apply for the contest or find out more about the offer…Oh, but wait, you’ve tricked them because this page you have taken them to is actually just a tab on your company website!

Website traffic deprivation has become a fatal business-borne-illness that has many people stranded wondering which way to turn.  Each tip above if followed carefully is guaranteed to improve consumer traffic on your website.  Each tip provides bait to get the viewer’s attention, and have them click on links that draw them to the place where they will find what they need. It’s not being sneaky, but rather being clever.  Facebook and even other social networks have provided you with the convenience of being able to draw customers to your products and services, why not exploit this amazing opportunity?!  With all that said, I wish you good luck with your commute to a higher trafficked website.

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