There is a wealth of research showing that social media users in emerging markets are proportionally more active  than their Western counterparts.    For example, Indonesia, Russia and Egypt all have 80%+ of their internet populations on social media.   Meanwhile, Israeli and Russian social media users spend twice as much time on those channels than people in the UK and US.

A latest stat released by Instagramers, a global Instagram community with 240 local chapters celebrating its 1st birthday today, shows the same holds true on the photo-sharing network.     The three most active Instagramer communities measured in photos tagged and uploaded are the Philippines, Brazil and Turkey.

No, this doesn’t look at actual user numbers but it certainly measures engagement.   Others groups in the top ten are actually sub-sets of the main country groups, such as Igersistanbul (57k photos) and Igersaopaolo (36k tagged images).   A dynamic list can be found on Statigram (one of several web based services for viewing Instagram posts).

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Recently, there has been a trend of brands being encouraged to think of themselves as media outlets in their own right.     For example, earlier in the month AdAge published a feature “All brands are publishers”

Many brands and organisations seem to agree.   In these recessionary times, content marketing is one area where money is being spent and its worth looking at a range of research that has been released over the past month to support that fact:

• Slideshare and Columnfive media released an infographic on the power of content marketing (snippet above).  This includes the statistic that marketers are spending a quarter of their budgets on content marketing and 71% of b2b companies are doing more content marketing than last year

• According to IDG, content marketing, which IDG defines as “white papers, case studies, videos, custom websites, video and white papers”, is one of tech marketers top five spending priorities for 2011

• These stats are echoed by the (US) Content Marketing Institute and MarketingProfs.   Nine out of ten b2b marketers are using content marketing, which includes article posting (79%), social media (excluding blogs) (74%), blogs (65%), emailed newsletters (63%), and case studies (58%)

• Another US study, this time from the Custom Content Council (which obviously has a vested interest in the results), shows that 72% of marketers think branded content is more effective than advertising in a magazine, 62% say it is more effective than advertising and 69% say it is ‘superior’ to direct mail and PR

If money is being funnelled into content creation, what are the perceived benefits?    The Content Marketing Institute says it is brand awareness (69%), customer acquisition (68%) and lead generation (67%).

Added to that is of course the effect that a content campaign can have on your search results and traffic.   I’ve written before about the case study of tech company Centerbeam, which created a newsroom and got it listed on Google News, resulting in a 152% increase in landing traffic .

Of course, creating content is the easy bit.

Creating content that is both interesting to your target audience and avoids ramming brand messages down their throats is trickier, and examples such as these 15 best practice corporate blogs featured in Mashable last year, are worth a look for any marketer operating in this area.

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• 42 Content Marketing Commandments | Content Marketing Institute (affiliatestartingline.com)
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Stats of the Month

Last week, I went to Leicester with fellow Rabbits Bridey Lipscombe and Cat Turner  to give a presentation to De Montfort University marketing students.  The full presentation (which includes a blurb about Rabbit) is up on the Rabbit Issuu page.

As part of that though, I presented a series of ten consumer and media trends that set the scene for why social media marketing exists as a discipline.   I’ve included them in a separate presentation.   The trends in the presentation are:

• Over the past year the UK’s (daily) national newspapers have lost the equivalent of the population of Glasgow in sales

• Trust in social media is now higher than trust in print media

• Consumers not only get more of their news online, online news carries higher attention spans

• ‘Media stacking’ combined with low attention rates for live TV and radio, means a lot of ads are now ignored

• When it comes to sourcing product info online, consumers trust other consumers

• Super-fans and advocates are more likely to create content that influences a purchase

• Customers engaging with companies on social media spend 20%+ more

• Women and mothers in particular are social media power users

• In-store mobile browsing means customers are checking their smartphones, not the point of sale material

• The standard for replying to online customer comments is now as low as ten minutes

Hope the stats and presentation are useful, each slide has a link to the appropriate post with more info.

In fact, separate research from analytics firm Crowd Science does show that liking a brand Facebook page is the exception and not the norm.   ‘Only’ 9% of Facebook users have liked a brand page.  And not surprisingly, the older the user, the less likely they are to give up a like.

Of course, a pool of 1/10 Facebook users is still significant given the ’1-9-90′ school of thought that you need to target the 9% of people who actively comment and share.

So how do you get that 9% to actually like your page.   The most effective routes are also the obvious ones.   Crowd Science’s infographic shows that many Facebook users simply want to show support for a brand, while good and interesting content works well too.

As a result, placing prompts for visitors to like your Facebook page on other social properties / your website makes sense.   As does a widget or preview bar displaying the type of content they might expect to see.

Related articles

• Crowd Science’s Facebook Study: People Most Often Click Like to Show Support and Enjoyment (insidefacebook.com)
• Less than 20% of Facebook content is Liked (infographic) (zdnet.com)
• 58% of Facebook Users Expect Exclusive Content From Business Pages [Data] (hubspot.com)

It shows “social moms” (i.e. mothers who use social networks) are more likely to shop, post and comment.   And mothers that blog are – as you’d expect – more active still.

Scarborough Research shows  that (in the US) blogging mothers are 51% more likely than average to visit a newspaper website.   Meanwhile in the past month, 90% visited a social media site (actually – that stat could easily be turned around:  10% of mommy bloggers *aren’t* on social media).

As far back as 2008 TNS showed that in the UK, housewives spend 47% of their free time online, more than even the Chinese (who as a whole spend 44% of leisure time on the Internet).

Meanwhile, Mothers are also more likely to engage in so-called in-store mobile browsing, with 68% going online via their phones while in store.  In other words they will be having conversations online or checking out information, while walking down the aisles of your shop – while ignoring the £25 billion worth of POS material that has been put there for them to see.

Related articles

• When it comes to product reviews, social media users trust each other (liesdamnedliesstatistics.com)
• Social Media Adoption and Fortune 500 Companies – Have They Reached their Peak? (socialtimes.com)
• 80% Research Products on Web, Most use Social Media Tools for Peer Opinions before Buying (prweb.com)
• A guide to social media influence (liesdamnedliesstatistics.com)
• Marketers And Advertisers: Women Are Driving The Purchasing Bus, Get Used To It (stargroup1.com)

Over at Rabbit, we publish a monthly series of social media guides.  This time around, I’ve put together an overview of the different social media influence systems that try and tell brands how “important” someone is on social channels – it is embedded above.

These scores are not just academic or good for a bout of social media navel-gazing, they now serve practical purposes.

Case in point, Klout scores are built into the two main social media team management systems hootsuite and cotweet.   If you call out a brand, chances are the person at the other end will now be looking at how influential Klout deems you to be.

As the report implies, I am not a big fan of Klout – and that’s not because I lost 14 points in the recent Kloutapocalypse!

Kred however does seem to hold a lot of promise: The transparency in calculating scores (as opposed to Klout’s secret sauce approach) and the different influence scores for different communities are welcome innovations.

(To view, go into full screen mode above.  It is also available to download from our Issuu page - issuu.com/therabbitagency)

Related articles

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• What is Klout worth to you? (nevillehobson.com)
• 17 Alternatives to Klout (Source: Read Write Web) (huguesrey.wordpress.com)
• Klout’s New Metrics Upsetting Bloggers (blogher.com)
• The Measured Life: What’s Your Klout Score? (sportsgeek.com.au)
• How To Manage Your Online Influence (link-assistant.com)

This time from Nielsen, which shows that among consumers using social media, consumer ratings and reviews come top as the preferred source of product information.

The Nielsen blog post doesn’t specify where the study took place, but assuming it was carried out in the US, social media users = just over half of the population (allowing for 3/4 Internet penetration and 3/4 Facebook use among the Internet population)

Less well received?   A company’s Twitter ID at 7%.  I interpret that in two ways.   First of all, corporate social media accounts aren’t trusted to deliver unbiased product information, but ones run by ordinary consumers are.

Secondly, you may not look to a social media feed for product information, but you will turn to it for news and / or complaints.

Finally, the Nielsen study again confirms female dominance in the social media realm with women on social networks more likely to talk to their friends about brands than men (81% vs 72%)

Related articles

• The State Of Social Media 2011: Social Is The New Normal (fastcompany.com)
• The Nielsen Social Media Report and What It Means to Customer Service (customerthink.com)

Then according to metrics firm Experian, in the UK at least 14 minutes would be spent on social media, ahead of entertainment (9 mins) and shopping (5 mins).

No surprise when it comes to who takes the lion’s share of social media time.   Facebook accounts for half of all UK social networking visits and an average visit time of 22 mins (I wonder how much of that is a visit time, and how much is having Facebook open on your computer).

Related articles

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The good news if you are someone like me earning their living in this industry?  They “are as excited about social media today as ever before.”   The bad news:   A quarter intend to spend less than 35,000 euros this year (US 48k, GBP 30k)

Forrester’s Nate Elliott says it comes down to a mixture of resourcing and the inability to prove ROI.

Measuring social media is actually pretty easy.  However, as I’ve heard said many times before, it is tracking the right things that is difficult.   On that note check out this SEOMOZ article on social media KPIs, one of the best I’ve read

There is a third problem though, one that revolves around the perception that social media campaigns are free.   They are not.   Some investment, at the very least in monitoring what people are saying about you, needs to be made.

So how much does a social media campaign cost?   It depends on a whole range of factors, but this piece where various (US) social media practitioners took hypothetical ad budgets and scoped out what they would do with it is useful (thanks @shannonpaul for reminding me about the link!).

It shows you how can indeed build a year long programme for the price of a few magazine ads…but not for 35,000 euros.

(photo from loop oh via creative commons)

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In the ever excellent Wall Blog, Gordon MacMillan has commented on a Telegraph piece by Alexis Dormandy of Lovethis.com.   In his Telegraph article, Alexis pointed the finger at generation X marketers for the fact that a lot of businesses are still struggling with social media.

The crux of Alexis’s point is that most marketers of my class learned their craft in the pre social media age, and hence certain skills sets have passed them by.   Maybe so, says Gordon, but at the end of the day what really counts is still having a great idea – citing the Old Spice campaign as an example.

I understand the accusations of age-ism in the comments underneath the article, though I don’t agree that Alexis Dormandy was being ageist.   I also appreciate the dangers of generalising.

Yet, I think there is an element of truth in Alexis’ argument.  And he isn’t the only one who thinks this way, the same point was articulated by none other than Simon Clift, the former chief marketing officer of Unilever, of course one of the largest companies in the world.

Speaking to the FT last year, Clift spoke of a ‘lost generation’ of marketers aged between 30 and 45 – “if you are 25 or 20, you know this stuff….if you are 50 you see your kids do it.   Most of our brands are managed by people who have had to learn it.”

Some have indeed taught themselves the necessary skills.   I can think of a whole range of generation X-ers on the agency side whose social media knowledge and ability is first class (just a few UK examples – here, here, here and here)

But others haven’t.  Certainly 2-3 years ago when social media marketing and management was beginning to evolve, it didn’t in every instance go down well when a 20 something talked social media to someone 15 years their senior.   Things have hopefully changed, but I think the knowledge gap is still partially there.

So to come back to it all needing a good creative.   Yes it does need that.   But as I argued in a post last year it also comes down to understanding measurement, understanding the speed at which things happen online, and knowing the etiquette of different social channels.

Old Spice did work because it was a great idea.   It also worked because Iain Tait, ex Poke London, who moved to W&K, knew how to bring the campaign online.

Gordon MacMillan says that a good agency can compensate for the social media knowledge gap, in the same way that a media buying agency can provide media skills.   Being in an agency myself, clearly I agree, but media buying and planning is not like social media, which are direct communications channels.

As a result, I’d argue that one of the jobs of any agency handling social media on behalf of a client is to help the key members of a marketing and management team skill up and get to grips with online social tools.

The result should be that social media isn’t seen tactically as a channel, but rather something that is embedded into the way a marketing department and an organisation as a whole works.

Image – Russell Davies

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