Ten top stats for July

Jul 31, 2010 by Dirk Singer

So as I’m determined to get back into the blogging swing of things, I’ll start off with something easy – ten social media stats from the past month.

Some of these are from my blog, while some of them are from the Rabbit feed, our weekly look at online stats and trends over at Rabbit (sign up here to get it by email.)

1 – Only 1% of Americans check into a location based network more than once a month (Forrester).  That’s the subject of a fairly long post I have scheduled for Sunday night / Monday morning!

2 -Social media is female dominated.  According to Comscore, globally, 75.8% of women online access social networks, compared to 69.7% of men.   In addition, women spend 30% more time online than men.

3 – Globally, social networks now account for one in every four and a half minutes online (Nielsen).

4 - An example of social media marketing impacting the bottom line. Domino’s Pizza saw a 29% growth in profits to £17.5 million, giving a lot of the credit to its social media marketing activity – for example the link-up with Foursquare in offering special deals when people check into restaurants online.

In its financial results Dominos says that it “led the way with social media initiatives such as affiliate marketing, our superfan programmes and the development of a link-up with Foursquare, the location-based social media site”.

5 – Videos recommended on Twitter are viewed for an average of 2.07 minutes, compared with 1.5 minutes when recommended on Facebook. (from Tube Mogul)

6 – Social media did have an affect on the May UK general election, but among 18-24 year olds.  97% of 18-24 year olds used Facebook during the election compared to 89% for the web, 81% for TV and 59% for newspapers.

Similarly the electoral commission had a success with aboutmyvote.co.uk, which had 1.8million visits, 40% of them from 18-24 year olds (The Guardian).

7 – Twitter came into its own during the World Cup, showing the power of live TV + social media.   Twitter says on its blog that the final Spain – Netherlands match “represented the largest period of sustained activity for an event in Twitter’s history”  The record of tweets per second was also broken during the Japan / Denmark match (at 3283).

8 – According to the OECD, from 2007-2009, the US saw a decline of 30% in the newspaper publishing while the UK saw decline of 21%.   No OECD country registered an increase.

9 – Social media makes people 10x more likely to buy.  According to Sage Pay, on average 7% of visitors to an online store will make a purchase.   However, if directed to the retailer via social media, the % of visitors who will go to the transaction section goes up to 71%.

10 – And again…social media up sales.   PR Week reported on a Skywrite survey showing that 75% of women were likely to follow up social media recommendations, compared to 50% of men.   However it’s men who are then more likely to actually buy – 31% vs 17%.