The end of search is a theme that’s been talked about a lot in the past – as long ago as in Feb 2008, Ben Kunz of Media Associates produced a series of graphs from Google Trends showing that search volumes were significantly down for a range of what you might call staple terms – music, furniture, office supplies etc.

Some of it is wishful thinking as many of us wish for the age of Google to start drawing to a close (whether the age of Facebook is any better is of course a different matter altogether).

And the latest Nielsen search stats from the US show that Google is as dominant as ever, controlling almost 2/3 (64.2%) of the search market – a share that’s hardly changed since last year, despite all the new bells and whistles that Microsoft’s Bing (on 13.6%) has been rolling out.

It’s the second table from the Nielsen post however that makes for more interesting reading. Over the past year, search activity is down 16% – 17% in the case of Google. Yahoo! (-30%) performed particularly badly, though despite it’s still small share Bing (+28%) has done well. So all those extra features are paying off after all.

OK, so with almost nine million searches being conducted in the US in July, search is certainly not dead. But a drop of close to a fifth year on year is still significant, and one explanation has to be that people get more and more of what they need and want via social media. There is that research from earlier in the year after all about Facebook now driving more traffic to major news and entertainment portals than Google.

At the very least it reinforces what Comscore found last year – that search and social media campaigns now need to work very much in tandem, with a paid search campaign supported by social activity being 2.23x more effective than if conducted on its own.

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An earlier post was all about the (UK) Ofcom Communications Market Report and the way in which TV and social media campaigns can work in tandem.

Deloitte has now looked into this as well, releasing a report to coincide with the upcoming Edinburgh Television Festival.   Deloitte commissioned research among 4000+ adults, and found that, as much as people like myself talk about ‘social TV’, only 7% of those polled had become fans of their favourite programmes.

At the same time, the generational shift that Ofcom found in its research, also comes into play here.   Among 18-24 year olds, 46% liked their favourite shows on Facebook.

Also, Deloitte’s research is about actively liking a programme, there is of course a stage before that of people simply tweeting about live TV while its taking place, or exchanging Facebook / IM messages about it.

TV ads skipped by 86%

Another reason why combining online +TV could become more attractive for brands could come down to 86% of viewers with PVRs skipping ads. This is the result of a second Deloitte study conducted to coincide with the Edinburgh TV Festival.

In fact, it’s younger viewers, the very ones likely to be online, who are more receptive to advertising messages.   Deloitte found that while a third of over 55s said that no form of advertising impacted them, only 13% of under 25s felt the same.

Image – ccharmon

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A common answer to ‘why Twitter, it’s not a mass market tool?’, is ‘because the people who do use it matter.’ The influence over numbers argument.

That’s backed up by an ExactTarget study, reproduced in emarketer. US Twitter users in April 2010 were far more likely than general Internet users to post to forums (75% vs 25%), blog (72% vs 14%), comment on blogs (70% vs 23%) and post ratings / reviews (61% vs 20%).

In other words, the 14 million odd people who regularly go on Twitter (as opposed to the 95 million that have signed up), are already active in social media, know how to make things happen and to create noise – good or bad – online, and take conversations elsewhere, be that to blogs, forums, other social networks, or even the mainstream media.

As Morgan Stewart of ExactTarget puts it, “What happens on Twitter doesn’t stay on Twitter. While the number of active Twitter users is less than Facebook or email, the concentration of highly engaged and influential content creators is unrivaled—it’s become the gathering place for content creators whose influence spills over into every other corner of the internet.”

ExactTarget also asked Twitter users why they followed brands. The biggest reason was for informational purposes, with updates on future brands (38%) and keeping informed about the company (32%) being the main reasons.

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While there are questions about the ability of Facebook to grow in future, Comscore has found that Twitter use has more than doubled over the past year.   Comscore’s stats (via Marketing Charts) also confirm the on-going trend of Twitter becoming less of an a US dominated, or even anglophone network.

While Twitter growth in North America was a respectable 22% from June 2009 to June 2010, in Europe it was 106%, in Asia Pacific 243% and Latin America 305%.  Overall, North American unique visitors counted for 27% of the 92.8 million unique visitors.

Though we’re not exactly comparing like with like, it is still useful to look at the Sysomos research from January, which showed the US accounting for 50% of Twitter’s user base.

Surprisingly, the countries with the highest % of Twitter penetration as a proportion of each country’s Internet population are Indonesia (20.8%), Brazil (20.5%) and Venezuela (19%).    Comscore says that Venezuela’s Twitter enthusiasm can directly be traced to Hugo Chavez setting up an account.  By comparison, Twitter penetration in the US was 11.9%, while in the UK  it was 10.9%
Mobiles drive Twitter use
Comscore says that Twitter’s growth in the US, UK, France, Spain and Italy is driven by Smartphone users.

This chimes in with an article posted up on GigaOm on Friday, showing that at weekends in particular, Twitter use from mobiles jumps – showing that people are still using the network when away from their desks and integrating into their online lives.

In his article Om Malilk talks about a study done by New York based SocialFlow, which looked at one (client) Twitter account with 500k followers.  On Saturdays, the % of clicks from mobile devices hits a peak at 41%.

Of course, 93 million global unique users, does not mean the same as 93 million regular users.  There is still the research from RJ Metrics showing that 83% of Twitter accounts are dormant every month, and that a base of committed users (often active in other social media / media channels) make up for the majority of activity.

Though the growth rates are certainly impressive, there’s as yet no new evidence that Twitter’s churn rates have significantly improved, with the service hitting real mainstream web adoption.

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That’s a question Hitwise’s Robin Goad asked earlier this week when he showed that – in the UK – Facebook was now getting one in six page views, or 16.73% of the total.   That puts it in front of Google UK (8.22%), ebay (5.39%) and YouTube (2.64%).

Robin makes his observation by pointing out that Facebook’s UK growth rate is starting to slow.   Just like in the US, where last month, Facebook user rates among 18-44 year olds dropped (but grew among over 45s), Facebook saw a slight dip in its UK page view share last month, which could of course be seasonal due to colleges and Universities breaking up for the year.

Facebook does of course have 500 million worldwide users, hence the question of whether it can realistically grow much more.   And of course, it raises the other question of whether it will really ever be replaced (the same question constantly asked of Google in search)?

An interesting piece over on Flowtown says no, giving various reasons from the fact that a lot of people genuinely use it to manage their online lives, the applications market, and the fact that brands and businesses gravitate to it now almost as a default.

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Hubspot has a useful graphic that makes sense when you think about it, but is still useful when someone comes to you asking for a Facebook page with 10,000 fans by next month.   The most popular Facebook pages according to Hubspot, involve movies, TV shows, popular books, bands and so on.

And at the bottom of the scale we have Govt pages, musicians (I guess unknown ones?), local businesses and Govt public services.

In fact, Inside Facebook says that entertainment sites are now driving a larger proportion of traffic to the social network, helped along by Facebook’s ‘like’ button that it unveiled the other month (and that I’ve finally got around to installing myself).

Inside Facebook quotes Compete stats that show that the whole boycott Facebook campaign over privacy issues was something of a non-starter, and probably a discussion point only among the minority of us that read the social media and tech press – in the US at least, Facebook gained 2.1 million new visitors in May.

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Perhaps not the most surprising result when you think about it: Comscore has found that on Facebook the visitors who spent the most time on the site also spent the most money online, with the top 20% of users shelling out $67 in Q1.

A few more results from the study (via emarketer): Unlike on Facebook, the most prolific users of Twitter are not the biggest spenders, perhaps a consequence of Twitter’s power users seeing the network as more of an information and news exchange.   However at the same time, Twitter users did spend more online overall than Facebook users.

Also, users of Facebook and Twitter spent more on the Web than Internet consumers in general.   People who spent no time on Facebook spent $27 online in Q1, $40 less than those heavy users Comscore talked about.

So in summary, yet another study that shows that people spending time talking about your brand on social media translates into extra £, $ or € when they start spending.

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A statistic from a Harris Poll in the US (via Marketing Charts) – 50% of the under 35s who use social media say they are influenced ‘a great deal’ or ‘a fair amount’ by reviews on social media.

This compares to 45% of under 35s who are influenced by mainstream newspaper and magazine reviews and only 17% that are influenced by celebrity endorsements (41% are influenced by blogs).   Good news for marketers everywhere – get rid of the expensive celebrity endorsements and focus on social engagement campaigns?

Even among American consumers aged 55+, over a third (37%) pay attention to what people on Facebook or Twitter are saying, a surprisingly high number.

As an aside I took a look at Internet penetration as a whole among older age groups.   Here, in the UK, according to Ofcom, 60% of 55-64 year olds have household Internet access, but only 33% of people aged 65+.

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If you started work in the early/mid 90s like myself, you’ll remember a time when going home meant just that – someone had to physically ring you on your home phone to get you to do something and the chances of you having a laptop with you were fairly slim.

Not anymore, as anyone who owns a smartphone / laptop combination will know.   And data published in emarketer (from a TNS / InterCall study) show that in the US 3/10 workers felt the need to be connected to work 24/7 – in particular men in their 30s.

A prime culprit according to the study is in fact social media and ‘always on technologies’ in smartphones.

An earlier IDC study in the states found that 57% of US workers now use social media for business purposes at least once a week.   Meanwhile 34% actually chose a consumer network such as Facebook or Twitter over a business one, due to familiarity and low cost.   The main thing that they do?  Something familiar to everyone on Twitter, asking questions and acquiring knowledge from a wider peer group.

At the same time there are doubts about how productive this is.  While 52.3% of workers surveyed by the American Society for Training and Development did say they learned more in less time, only 37% actually thought they got more work done.

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Time Magazine has come out with a list of bad inventions, which includes both the location based network Foursquare and the (very successful) Facebook game Farmville.

Foursquare finds itself on a list that includes Betamax, Asbestos and Agent Orange, with Time Magazine calling it “Just another tool tapping into a generation of narcissism, with which you can earn badges for checking into your local Starbucks more than anyone else.”

In fact, Foursquare is arguably a prime example of a network where the hype far outstrips the actual usage.   Mashable says Foursquare is nearing one million check ins a day.   Sounds impressive, but compare that to Twitter where the number of tweets a day was around the 53 million mark in late March according to Sysomos.

Is Foursquare a colossal waste of time?  Certainly, it seems to attract even more criticism than Twitter did in the early days.  This post by my former colleague at Cow PR, Mark Perkins is a fairly typical reaction to it.

And from personal experience, when I went to see Flight of the Conchords at the Hammersmith Apollo the other month, a measly five people had checked in (the venue has a capacity of 3600+), from an audience you’d imagine would be much more likely than the average to be smartphone users.

3-4 ways Foursquare can be more than a gimmick
The thing is, Foursquare can be useful, it’s just that most people don’t realise how.   Really there are three concrete ways it becomes a utility as opposed to a gimmick:

1 – There are circumstances when you are in a large group of people, where it’s good to see where they all are.   At the March SXSW geek fest in Austin, it was useful to find out who was attending what talk or seminar in quite a large area around the conference centre.   A lot of people I know specifically used Foursquare to let others know what they were up to.

2 – It can work well as a location based guide in self contained communities.   Harvard University’s Foursquare deal where both students and visitors can use it to navigate the campus is interesting – it serves a real purpose

3 – Retail promotions can work.  In his post Mark jokes about people whose ambition is to be ‘Sheriff of Nandos‘ in Uxbridge (Nandos = a Portuguese themed fast food chicken chain / Uxbridge = an anonymous outer London suburb).   Yep, being Mayor of Nandos in Uxbridge would be pretty sad…unless Nandos made it worth your while of course.

So, I’m one of those suckers spending £20 ($30) or so a week in Starbucks.    If I got 50p or £1 off each time I went in for being Mayor, would I do it?  Sure I would, over the year it would add up to quite a tidy sum.

It’s also a way for smaller retailers, or groups of retailers, to promote themselves.   Our local coffee shop, opposite the DLKW (and Rabbit) offices, Bou Tea, has a free pastry before 10am promo.  And I could completely see a scenario where somewhere like Spitalfields or Greenwich market in London launches a badge where you get some kind of freebie for checking into X locations.

Then there is a fourth benefit:  As a brand is that Foursquare can help with SEO, at least temporarily.

In the first three months before we’d established any real online footprint at Rabbit, our Foursquare location was on the first page of Google when you searched for us.   And back when we were still working with Cow PR in January, we immediately created a Foursquare location for the ‘pop up’ Heinz Cafe.   In the week when it was open and people were searching for it, that location was one of the first things they saw.  Without it, it would have been invisible online during those crucial first 1-2 days.

In fact ‘what’s the point’ is a question that’s asked more so outside the US.   Laurence Borel has an interesting post where she reports back from a recent visit to the US.   Checking in, says Laurence, is completely different over there to over here.     On Facebook and Twitter, as well as Foursquare, Laurence observes that business are far ahead of us in making social media check-ins both useful and interesting.   It remains to be seen how long we’re going to be playing catch-up…

Flickr Image Credit – Marshall Astor

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