An occasional hurdle you face in social media marketing is the ‘Facebook only’ approach.

Depending on their level of social media knowledge and their need to show the big number internally, you’ll sometimes get a directive from a marketer to focus on Facebook at the expense of other networks.   After all, surely 900 million users can’t be wrong.

In fact, a study by Virtue showed that adopting several social networks in tandem with Facebook is the route to increasing Facebook engagement – depending on which networks you use by more than 50%.

The above chart speaks for itself.   When using Facebook only, brands had an average of five likes per 1000 fans, or an engagement rate of 0.5%.    When also using Twitter and Google+, that engagement rate  went up to 0.77%.

And what about Pinterest?   Brands that integrated Pinterest into their Facebook pages saw upwards of 60% in Facebook engagement rates.

Why is that?  Using multiple social touch-points gives you different options to share different content to different audiences.   Meanwhile, bringing in Pinterest and Instagram into your Facebook eco-system integrates both a highly engaged community and engaging visual content.

So to recap: A stat to remember and quote:  Using Twitter and Google+ in tandem with Facebook increases engagement by 50%.  Adding Pinterest to the mix makes that 60%.

(h/t @caff via Business Insider)

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The other week  I wrote a post with a run-down of stats, about why brands need to be ‘mobile first’ rather than ‘digital first’.  Following that stats came out showing that in the US, mobile users spent longer on Facebook than PC users.

Now data about mobile social networking in Europe has appeared from Comscore.  While the social media audience on PCs grew 8% to 171 million in the major EU states (UK, France, Germany, Italy, Spain) over the past year, the mobile audience grew 43% to 66.9 million.

Yes, that means the PC audience for social media is still 2.5x larger than the mobile audience, but the trend is only one way.   Moreover, if you look at individual social networks, the picture is different.  Twitter’s mobile audience grew 101% and LinkedIn’s 96%.

At the IAB UK Mobile Engage conference last week, Twitter actually stated that 80% of its UK user base now accessed the network via their phones.

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Recently, Read Write Web’s Richard McManus penned a series of articles around ‘The Visual Web’, “meaning that images and video are becoming an increasingly important part of what we consume online.”

I couldn’t agree more.  Speaking personally, Instagram started replacing Twitter as my social network of choice about a year ago.    More to the point, there is now a wealth of statistics to underpin what Richard is talking about.  This is specially when you consider that many of the biggest social media stories of the past year – Tumblr, Instagram, Pinterest and now the likes of Socialcam – are visual.

Here are just a few of those stats:

• Most US and UK consumers now carry a device around with them allowing them to take and share engaging photos and video.   According to Comscore, most UK mobile phones are now smartphones.   The other day, Nielsen came out with research saying the same for the US.

• And more and more of those smartphone owners are using those features.  In 2010, 52% of photos in the US were taken with ‘single purpose cameras’, while 17% were taken with smartphones.   In 2011, that ratio changed to 44% / 27%.   Similarly, here in the UK, almost a third of consumers say their smartphone is the camera they use most often 

• As a result, we’re heading towards a point perhaps 1-2 years down the line where smartphones will account for the majority of pictures taken.   Indeed, the iPhone has been the most popular camera on Flickr for a while now 

• So there’s a huge growth in people taking pictures with their smartphones.  There is too in people sharing them.  At Christmas Instagram had 15 million users.   In March it was 25 million.   Now it’s 50 million, and growing at five million a week

• When it comes to mobile video, Socialcam has 36 million users, while Viddy has 26 million and signing up one million a day

• Tumblr, a blogging platform that lends itself more to images and less to 1000 word missives, is now the world’s largest blogging platform with 20 billion blog posts, 50 billion blogs and more than 120 million users.  Indeed, Tumblr will soon overtake the generic ‘blog’ as a term in Google searches

• Visual social networks are not only getting sign-ups, those signing up hang around.   Though I suspect the numbers have changed since then, at SXSW Instagram boss Kevin Systrom said 67% of users had logged in the previous day.

• Similarly, the latest emarketer figures show that worldwide, Tumblr and Pinterest users spent 89 minutes a month on their networks, compared to 21 minutes for Twitter users and 17 minutes for LinkedIn users.   Yes, Facebook dwarfs all of them with an average of 405 minutes a month / user, but I suspect some of that is due to people having Facebook on in the background during the day

• And speaking of Pinterest, it now sends more referral traffic to sites than Twitter despite being only 7% as big.     There is a debate about whether those referrals translate into sales, but I agree with the argument that it all depends what your Pinterest boards refer them too (i.e. whether they buy or not is really up to you).

So what should you do as a brand? Shift your social media strategy from being word to being image led – or at least change the mix between the two.   Related to that, develop a visual social media strategy.   Register your profiles on various visual social networks and figure out how you want to illustrate your brand.   Because if you don’t, millions of consumers will do so anyway.

Image – Sounds of the Sun

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In the wake of Facebook’s $1billion Instagram buy earlier in the month, one comparison that did the rounds is that Instagram will be to Facebook like YouTube is to Google.  A stand-alone (ish) network, that is the clear leader in what it does (so for YouTube online video, for Instagram mobile photography).

However, while YouTube may be the 800lb gorilla of video sharing, a few networks have managed to carve out their own roles – on positioning as opposed to numbers.   Vimeo for example, is a fraction the size of YouTube, but a lot of creative industry professionals prefer it for the interface, the community and the quality of content.

Though I don’t think anyone is going to catch Instagram on numbers for now, I similarly believe there is an opportunity for a ‘Vimeo’ to sit alongside Instagram’s ‘YouTube.’   Not everyone has been thrilled by Instagram turning from a 15 million user network at Christmas to a 50 million user one today, for example Apple marketing boss Phil Schiller quit the service citing the changing “signal to noise ratio.” 

So who will benefit?  There are easily a dozen Instagram like networks in existence, and it’s too early for the community to coalesce around one.    From the initial chatter, I believe four possible candidates are Via.me (which welcomes Instagram users with a banner on their site) Streamzoo, EyeEm and Tadaa.

Tadaa – growing by word of mouth

Tadaa is one I’ve seen a number of my own Instagram friends move to, and having played around with it for the past fortnight, I thought it worth doing an overview of it.   This is especially since Tadaa by and large hasn’t been included in the ‘Instagram alternatives‘ type articles published since the Facebook deal.

However, from what I can see 1st hand, Tadaa is a network that has been growing almost totally by word of mouth, without the oxygen of free publicity and I was keen to get some insights from Tadaa founder Niko Schoppmeier

The network and app

Tadaa is run by a team of five from Hamburg, meaning there is a parallel with the early Instagram that for a while also only had five staff.  Right now it is an Apple only app.   Again I had echoes from the early Instagram:  Niko told me Android was a possibility, but they wanted to do it right.

In fact, it looks like an iPad app will see the light of day 1st, something Instagram never got around to.

The basics of the network are similar to Instagram.  You put a photo through third party or the in-app filters, you upload it, you geo-tag it (optional), you share to Facebook and Twitter (again, if you want), and you add a comment.    You then follow other users, see their posts in your stream and have the opportunity to like and comment on their images.

However, there are also a lot of differences.  For starters, the navigation is unlike Instagram’s and (from comments I’ve heard) it isn’t to everyone’s taste.   Secondly, you can’t ‘@’ someone in Tadaa or use hashtags.   Both these are under review and Niko told me hashtags is possibly the number one user request.

On the plus side though, you can repost images and also reply to a post with your own image.     Also the in-app filters are infinitely superior to Instagram’s, tying in with Tadaa’s premium positioning (see below).

Finally, Tadaa has something called ‘Tadaa dollars’, basically a score that measures your likes and influence (like Klout, I personally tend to ignore it).

The numbers

Not surprisingly, Tadaa wouldn’t give away any numbers.  Niko did however mention that the network had seen two recent peak periods.   One, in early March when they released version 4 of the app and got a lot of good press in their native Germany.

Here Nikko let slip that they got 150k new members     The second wave, and this was global and much bigger, came post Facebook / Instagram.   At the time, Tadaa also put up a note saying its servers had briefly been down due to the stampede of sign-ups.

The one impressive number however comes around engagement.  Apparently 20% of users post more than 10 images a day.   Compare that to Twitter, where only 25% of users are even moderately engaged.

What’s the vision, and what is the potential for brands?

When I put the Vimeo analogy to Niko Schoppmeier, he agreed.   Time and time again he emphasised Tadaa’s role as a high-quality network for iphoneography enthusiasts as well as semi-professional photographers.

That I think makes Tadaa interesting for brands if the aim is to generate high level content and to tap into a community of super-engaged users.   Any competition or promotion does however need to factor in the point that standards on Tadaa are high.

Finally, the ‘reply’ function on Tadaa is useful, especially given the lack of hash-tags for the moment.  This means people enter a competition or challenge by replying to a master image.

Tadaa’s future success – the community is key

Niko correctly pointed out that Instagram might also have had five staff members at one point, but that this was only half the story, with the other part being how a community grew up around the network.

That’s something I’ve noticed within Tadaa and it is something that will be key to its success.   The numbers are still relatively small, but as I’ve mentioned, they are engaged.    There are also embryonic user groups and accounts starting up, for example the lndtadaa group now runs a challenge every week.   These groups will potentially serve as the glue that keeps the most committed users there.

As a result, though it’s not made as much noise in the tech press as other Instagram competitors, Tadaa is an interesting player in this space, and one to watch.

(I’m dirktherabbit on Tadaa as well as Instagram, find me there!)

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Over the past few years there have been a range of studies showing that once they are online, citizens of countries such as Indonesia, Argentina, Russia, Brazil and the Philippines are more likely than their Western counter-parts to be active in social media.

For example:

• The countries with the highest Facebook penetration as a % of the Internet population are The Philippines, Israel, Turkey, Chile and Argentina

• The most active Instagram fans (members of the IGers groups of super-users) are in the Philippines, Brazil and Turkey

• Who spends the most time on social media?   Once again, it is users in Israel, Russia, Argentina, The Philippines and Turkey

• And though the Netherlands and Japan lead in Twitter use; Indonesia, Venezuela, Argentina, Turkey and The Philippines are also in the top ten list

The latest Ipsos / Reuters study very much chimes in with these findings.   It tells us that an average of 62% of people in the 24 countries surveyed (a mix of G20 and others like Saudi Arabia) that use the Internet also use social media, with Indonesia (83%), Argentina (76%), Russia (75%), Sweden (72%) and South Africa (73%) leading the way.

Both the UK (65%) and US (61%) are mid table, ahead of France (50%), which is near the bottom of the list.

What is the take-out for brands?

First of all, when doing business in emerging markets, social media should be on the agenda.   Yes, proportionally the Internet population is smaller, but these are also likely to be the consumers with some degree of spending power.

Secondly, the stats about the time spent on social channels suggests that social media users in emerging markets are more likely to have an active, as opposed to a passive role

And, related to that, they are also likely to represent users with a reasonable English language proficiency and a willingness to explore sites internationally.   Hence ‘influencers’ from these territories may also be making an appearance on your blog or Facebook page in the US or UK, especially if a global brand is involved.

(Image – Indonesia, the country with the highest social media penetration as a % of the Internet population.   Via Rulhaf)

Over at AdAge, Comscore VP Andrew Lipsman discusses  a study by the Ehren-Bass Institute that showed that only  1% of Facebook fans actually engage with brands they follow on Facebook.

Essentially, the research said that 1.3% of Facebook fans like, post, comment, tag or share content from brands they follow.   In response, Andrew makes a parallel between measuring Facebook content by likes and measuring display ads by clicks, saying that by only looking at the 0.1% who clicked on the ad you ignore the 99.9% that saw it.

Secondly Andrew says that even a low incidence of likes can have a large impact citing previous research that showed “Starbucks fans and friends of fans spent 8% more and purchased 11% more frequently in-store than non-fans who were also Starbucks buyers.”  Note the emphasis on friends of fans as well as fans.

I’d raise another issue with the 1%  brand engagement figure.

The Ehren-Bass study involved the 200 largest brands on Facebook -  the Starbucks and Cokes of this world where a lot of the likes are purely incidental and quickly forgotten about.   There is in fact evidence that the larger your page, the less engaged your fans.

A PageLever study last year showed that the larger the Facebook page, the fewer the % that even *sees* items in your newsfeed

PageLever found that daily unique newsfeed impressions were 9.38 per 100 fans for pages that have between 1000-10,000 fans.    Once you go up to pages with a million fans though, daily unique newsfeed impressions drops to 2.79 per 100 fans.

Visibli came up with a similar study last year.   It  found that for brands and media organisations, pages with more fans received proportionally fewer likes per post (not the case though if you are an artist).  Engagement went down as likes went up

The other week Diageo marketer Philip Gladman said if you don’t have a million Facebook fans you should stick your budget in TV.   Leaving aside for the moment the issue of how far that TV money will even take you  the question should be why a million, and what are they going to do for you?

Arguably as some of the studies I mentioned have shown, working your way up to the big number may not always be the best tactic.   There may even be a case for keeping it small by breaking your communities down by product or interest group to get a series of smaller, but more committed groups.

Top image – Find your search

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According to a marketing magazine report, Diageo’s white spirits marketing director Philip Gladman thinks that if you are not going to get a million Facebook fans you should take your budget and “stick it in TV.”

It’s a reminder for those of us who work in the digital / social space that we’re sometimes still fighting the battles of 3-4 years ago.  And though he’s since slightly qualified his remark in a response (posted via the journalist who wrote the original piece, Gemma Charles), the fact remains that this sort of thing does still have some currency.

As a result, its worth replying to the sentiment if not the individual, with five points showing that a strategy solely revolving around the Television may not be the best use of money:

1 – Scheduled, live TV has relatively low attention levels compared to other types of media.   By comparison, computer activity commands high attention, with surfing the Internet on mobiles and social networking being somewhere in between.

In fact, only listening to music on a music centre or listening to the radio has a lower attention rate than standard, scheduled Television

2 – Indeed, in the UK over a third (36%) of us no longer watch live TV.    Out of those, 42% use a PVR like Sky+ or Virgin Media/Tivo.   I wouldn’t think too many of them waste the opportunity to fast forward through the ads

3 – When asked last year, what their most essential form of media is, all UK adults still put TV top.  But compared to 2009, TV was chosen by less than half.    And the picture was even more pronounced for younger consumers.  For the first time, adults aged 16-24 put using a mobile phone (28%) and using the internet (26%) ahead of watching television (23%)

4 – When they are watching TV, the chances are they are on the Internet at the same time.   The whole ‘second screen’ and ‘social TV’ concept is fairly well known, and in the UK, 74% of consumers with a broadband connection surf the Internet while the TV is on

5 – Though the rate of decline is nowhere near that of newspapers – and won’t be – the TV audience is slowly getting smaller and older.   A US study showed that from 2006-2001, CBS’s average viewer age rose from 53 to 56.   ABC’s went up from 47.4 to 52.3, NBC’s from 48.5 to 50.1, while Fox’s went from 41.5 to a still relatively sprightly 45.4

Of course the real answer is that it should never be either / or.   Almost no one who works in digital marketing is so blinkered as to imagine that digital should live in a silo.

TV does still command tens of millions of eye-balls.   But those eye-balls are getting older, the way they watch TV is changing, and very often they are doing something else.   Cue the perfect opportunity for social and TV to work together.

Image – Bamcat

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Research out by Pew shows that when it comes to the major US hard news story of 2012, the Presidential election, voters prefer tried and tested news sources.

Only one in twenty (6%) Americans hears about the campaign from Facebook, and while 20% get election news from online news apps or websites, 36% get it from cable TV.Similarly, 41% of Twitter users ‘regularly’ or ‘sometimes’ get election news on Twitter, compared to 40% who never do.

Two observations about this study:

Pew headlines it by saying “Twitter, Facebook play very modest roles.”

I would add the words “so far.”   Pew’s research also shows that younger age groups who are most likely to get news from social media, have so far been turned off by the campaign

Secondly, we’ve yet to have the set piece events of the election, the live Presidential debates.   The recent US Superbowl showed how social media and live TV now goes hand in hand with 10,000 tweets a second being sent in the closing minutes.

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Here’s a chart that neatly shows how social media is driving a sizeable chunk of traffic towards news sites.

According to Comscore  at least 10% of visits to the top European newspaper websites are preceded by a visit to Facebook.

Previous stats have shown that Turkey in particular is a core Facebook territory, and so it’s no surprise that Facebook accounted for almost a fifth of visits to Milliyet.

However, in the UK both the Guardian and Mail, the UK’s (and two of the world’s) biggest online newspapers, had around 13% of traffic coming from the social media giant.  Significantly the Guardian saw the traffic it was getting from Facebook more than double from 4.6% in November 2010 to 12.8% in November 2011.

Overall, Comscore says that 50% of European Internet users visit online newspapers.

At the end of last year, the UK’s telecoms and media regulator Ofcom found that 51% of 18-24 year olds and 37% of 25-34 year olds use social channels for breaking news.

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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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