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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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.

Related articles

• Almost 1 in 2 Europeans Visit Newspaper Sites (stateofsearch.com)
• Women, younger users now use social media for ‘breaking news’ (liesdamnedliesstatistics.com)
• Show me the sales. How does social media impact the bottom line? (liesdamnedliesstatistics.com)
• It’s a Facebook World (wir-sprechen-online.com)
• The UK’s Guardian newspaper notches 4m Facebook app installations in 2 months (thenextweb.com)
• Guardian’s Facebook app installed by more than 4 million users (guardian.co.uk)

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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Almost every agency in this space, ourselves included, is often asked to prove a direct link between social media and sales / conversions.

Indeed though awareness for the need for social media marketing campaigns is without a doubt higher than 3-4 years ago, questions about measurement and tangible benefits remain the same.

I’ll come back to whether the ‘show me the sales’ question is useful to ask on its own.   But the fact is there is research out that shows social media does impact the bottom line.   I’ve distilled some of these into ten key points, included in the presentation below.

They are as follows:

1 – 83% of consumers globally are likely to visit a website are likely to visit a website recommended by a friend on Facebook, and more than half say comments posted on retailers’ Facebook and Twitter pages, whether positive or negative, also influence their opinions (2011 Global Consumer Shopping Habits Survey – Channel Advisor)

2 – Consumer opinions posted online (70%) are more trusted than information on TV (62%), newspapers (61%) and online banner ads (33%) (Nielsen)

3 – In Europe over 50 percent of respondents aged 16 – 64 with access to the Internet, use social networks to assist with shopping decisions and of those that would be likely to follow a retailer on a social network, 35 percent stated they use social media platforms to read reviews or rank products and services (IBM)

4 – “Customers who engage with companies over social media spend 20 percent to 40 percent more money with those companies than other customers.” (Bain & Co)

5 – A study in South Korea (a mature social media market) found that social impacts sales among moderate and heavy users.  Recommendations shared among moderate social media users increased brand sales by 5%.

However, heavy social media users also listen to negative chatter.  Brands talked about negatively experienced a 14% sales drop among this grow (Harvard Business School)

6 – The heaviest Facebook users are also the biggest spenders online - the top 20% of users spend $67 per quarter, compared to $27 for non Facebook users (Comscore)

7 – According to a Kantar Media study in the US, 35% of social media users say Twitter has influenced their purchasing decisions (Twitter links also result in more clicks than Facebook)

8 – Even concentrating on smaller social networks can be commercially beneficial.  Radio Shack in the US found that customers checking into their stores on Foursquare spend 3.5x more than those that don’t

9 – Super fans and advocates on your social channels are 50% more likely to create content that influences a purchase (ComBlu)

10 -  The picture is the same if you look at individual industries.   In the ‘quick serve industry’, consumers exposed to social media have a 7x greater likelihood of ‘higher spend’ (WPP / Ogilvy)

Meanwhile, 60% of consumers say they factor other travellers’ online reviews into their plans when booking a vacation / holiday (eyefortravel / Simpliflying)

Is that the right question to ask?

That’s a selection of evidence that provides a direct link between the tweet or Facebook post and the cash register or online check-out.   But, as I said earlier, that may not be the right question to ask in isolation.

Yes, social media needs to provide a return on investment just like any marketing spend.   But the danger is seeing social media as the brand marketing equivalent of a slot machine – put the coin in and get an instant return.

By and large social campaigns don’t (and shouldn’t) work like that for a number of reasons:

1 – Social works best in tandem with other marketing disciplines.   The WPP study mentioned above shows that social campaigns are particularly effective when integrated in the overall marketing mix.   Similarly there is evidence that combining search and social marketing campaigns are particularly effective

2 – Social media has a key role to play in protecting a brand’s reputation.   There is plenty of evidence of what can happen if you don’t see and respond to negative comments.   Indeed, one bad tweet or post can cost you 30 customers (Convergys)

49% of people would be much less likely to buy from a brand which had a page where customer questions went unanswered (Conversocial)

Related to that, a large % of consumers now feel empowered to blast out about companies online (EURO RSCG)

3 – Rather than look at how social media directly drives sales, it is more fruitful to look at how social media can support the whole sales and conversion cycle.

This infographic from Get Satisfaction is a favourite.   This illustrates how social media comes into play all the way from the information gathering stage to converting new customers into fans who will talk up your products and services online

4 – Finally rather than ‘how does social media impact sales’, I actually prefer the question ‘how does social media impact behaviour’, which is much more powerful.

To take one high profile example, there has been a direct link between men taking part in the annual ‘Movember’ campaign and social media activity

(Above image, Martin Deutsch / Featured post image – 401k)

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The other day econsultancy released the findings of a SITEL-commissioned  (UK) study showing that 15% of 16-24 year olds prefer to use social media for customer services above any other channel.   Overall, across all age groups, 6% prefer to use social media, and 4% have actually complained on Twitter.

Not that impressive, right?

Actually that headline stat from the study  needs to be read in terms of both the wider context, and in tandem with other findings from the survey.  These show that the Internet as a whole is now the preferred route to finding solutions to problems with products, services or brands.

1/3 of consumers have used forums to find solutions

In particular:

• 57% of consumers across all age groups will search for a solution to a problem online first
• 33% have used forum or chat-based websites to find answers – in the UK, moneysavingexpert is one that tends to come up fairly frequently
• 19% use a ‘question based’ site like Quora or Yahoo! Answers, a number I found surprisingly high

So what should the conclusions be?  I would highlight a number of things:

1 – Only 4% may have complained on Twitter, but remember that is across all industry sectors.   If you take certain sectors such as financial services, electronics and travel the % is almost much, much higher.

Indeed, in June Jaan Albrecht of Star Alliance said that 30% of customer feedback received by the 27 member airlines comes via social media

2 – The stats about forums and question sites does show that any customer response programme online needs to embrace a lot more than Twitter and Facebook.  Monitoring needs to encompass all online touch-points where consumers can feed back, interact and ask questions

3 – The % of those that complain via social media is bound to increase.   In training sessions I do, I often talk of an (un) virtuous cycle – as consumers watch their peers circumventing the call centre or (worse) the written complaints procedure on Twitter, they will do the same.

At least anecdotally, one travel brand I trained earlier in the year told me that the tone of comments they had received on Twitter were much more insistent than previously – as far as consumer expectations are concerned, the bar is now higher

Image – Life is Art 

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Recently various figures have come out about the growth of Google+.  Just today The Guardian  reports on the network seeing 67 million visitors in November, with 2.7 million of those coming from the UK (the US is the biggest market with close to 15 million visitors).

Meanwhile, Hitwise is shouting about 49 million US visits (as opposed to visitors) in December . And when it comes to actual accounts, Ancestry.com’s founder Paul Allen has been keeping track of the service and estimated that there were 60+ million live as of Christmas.

Yet at the same time, for many of us with Google+ accounts these figures don’t seem to make a great deal of sense.  I suspect I am not untypical in that I’ve created a profile, but after an initial burst of enthusiasm don’t use it very much.  There seems to be a disconnect between raw visitor numbers and engagement and I wanted to see if I could dig into this a little bit more.

• First of all the numbers.  Remember that these figures are monthly and includes someone who might only access the site once.   They don’t measure actual activity.

• 14.7 million US visitors sounds impressive, but a post by Sysomos says that this is actually only a 10% growth since late Sept

• Similarly in November, the LA Times reported on the fact that, despite there being some impressive growth spurts, traffic actually dropped in 11 out of 21 weeks, with fluctuations of 10-20% from one week to the next

• Finally, the Hitwise number for December mentioned above sounds huge.   However, Digital Trends highlights a figure that I think is key.   For the week of 17 December, Hitwise tracked nine million visits.   By comparison, in September, Google+ was managing 15 million visits a week with a much lower user base

Why do articles such as the one in today’s Guardian keep on presenting the big numbers without digging deeper into what those numbers actually mean? I think the article on the Sysomos website has got it right – “people really, really want Google+ to succeed.”

There’s been a lot of talk about the next Facebook, and Google+ has been held up as the most likely candidate.

Google+ isn’t the next Facebook.  It could be the next Twitter

My own view is that Google+ is not a failure in the waiting.   It also isn’t the next Facebook.   Facebook is more dominant in social media than Google is in search.  With Facebook having a 95% share of social media time in the US it just won’t happen – for now.

In fact a better parallel isn’t between Google+ and Facebook, but between Google+ and Twitter.  Sure, the networks are very different but there are a lot of similarities in the growing pains and user profiles of both. There was a time, around 2008/2009 when people also ‘really, really’ wanted Twitter to succeed. Then in 2009 / 2010 the first questions about engagement on Twitter started to appear.

At the time some people compared it to the virtual world Second Life (which attracted an enormous amount of hype in 2007, without the user numbers ever justifying it) .   I predict that in 2012 we’ll see similar stats rolled out about Google+, showing that most accounts are barely active or dormant.

Fast forward to today, and Twitter’s user base is impressive, yet even back in March, the evidence was that a relatively small number of ‘elite’ users – 20k people – were responsible for 50% of activity  Behind a large number of casual users there is a very committed, small but influential ‘core’.

I suspect the same holds true for Google+ And so despite only having 1/3 of Twitter’s numbers (and a much smaller proportion of time), Twitter has consistently punched above its weight in terms of influence.

Case in point – in 2011 it was Twitter and not Facebook that dominated the mainstream news agenda.

Image – Sean MacEntee

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Stats of the month – January

To kick off the New Year, here’s the second in my series of presentations about ten stats of the (previous) month.     Each slide has an embedded link for further information, and I’ve also included the text and link for each slide below:

 1 – Social networking has become the world’s most popular online activity

It accounts for 20% of Internet time and social networking sites now reach 82% of the world’s online population (Comscore)

In fact, there are now more Facebook users than Buddhists! (Rune Leth Andersen)

2 – At the same time, social media may be reaching saturation point in many markets

“Social is running out of hours.  Social is also running out of people” - George Colony, Forrester

Forrester says social media only slightly less popular than shopping and childcare

3 – As a result, the growth area for social remains emerging markets

According to Pew Research, out of 20 countries surveyed, the top three for the % of the total population on social media were Israel (53%), USA (50%) and the UK (50%)

However, if you look at the % of the Internet population on social media, the top three are Indonesia (86%), Russia (84%) and Egypt (82%)

4 – Facebook may have the numbers, but Twitter shapes the news agenda

Twitter was the most cited social network in the media in 2011, beating Facebook in 10/12 months – including Sept when Facebook’s new features were launched (Highbeam Research)

5 – The Internet is now Britain’s 2nd biggest news source

According to Oliver & Ohlbaum, 75% use the TV for news, 68% the Internet, 54% newspapers and 33% mobile

6 – Social media continues to chip away at traditional media use

In the UK, 18% read a printed national newspaper less due to social media use.  In Australia the figure is 21% and in the US it is 15% (Ofcom)

7 – Younger and female users of social media use it as a prime news source

51% of 18-24 year olds in the UK, 53% in the US, 61% in France and 61% in Italy use social channels for breaking news (Ofcom)

8- Social TV continues to rise in importance

More proof that social media and TV can effectively work hand in hand:

38% of Internet consumers have used a social network to recommend a TV programme and 29% often discuss what they are watching on TV in real-time online (Motorola)

9 – Apple dominates the mobile web

61% of European non PC Internet traffic comes from Apple ‘iDevices’, while in the US 92% of mobile purchases were made via iPhones and iPads (Comscore / RichRelevance)

10 – Instagram on track to becoming the world’s biggest mobile social network

Overtaking Foursquare (SocialFresh)

The December stats of the month can be found here

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Despite commanding 95% of social networking time in the US it is Twitter which shaped the news agenda in 2011.

According to Highbeam Research (via Inside Facebook), Twitter received around 50% of mentions about social media in the (traditional) media, compared to 45% odd for Facebook

Except for February and April, Twitter was ahead every month, including September when Facebook launched Timeline and other features.

Why does this matter? Despite dwarfing every other social network and having a (now) celebrity founder in Mark Zuckerberg, the news media was more interested in the role Twitter had to play in society.   Which brings to mind the old arguments that many like myself used to make about the need to look beyond Twitter’s numbers to influence.

At 100 million regular (according to Twitter) users , Twitter’s user base is of course now substantial.   Twitter’s lead in the news agenda would have been down to everything from the Arab Spring, which has resulted in Arabic becoming the fastest growing language on Twitter , to here in the UK celebrity led scandals, which resulted in Twitter appearing on the front page of the nation’s tabloid newspapers

Photo – L.e.e  

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US research house Pew has come out with a global study breaking down the use of mobile / cell phones, the Internet and social networking across a range of developed and developing markets.

The latter includes Indonesia, but curiously not Brazil – with both being cited in previous research as having super-engaged social media populations.

Pew has created the above chart showing what % of the *overall* population (i.e. including those that don’t have the Internet) uses social media.   Israel leads with 53%, while one in two of the US population has a presence on social sites.

That table can however be turned around as follows, to show what proportion of the country’s Internet population is on social media.   Once you do that, the results are a little different:

A few observations, first of all, Indonesia coming at the top of the table is consistent with other findings, for example this one showing the country having the 2nd largest Facebook user base in the world.

Secondly both Russia and Egypt’s status in the top three confirms the role social media has had in circumventing traditional media in the protests faced in each country.  Indeed, only recently Twitter was named as the fastest growing language on Twitter.

Overall though, Pew’s research is now one of a number of studies demonstrating that once they get online, Internet users in emerging markets are much more active socially than their Western counterparts.

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UK communications and media regulator OFCOM has come out with another mammoth piece of research, this time the international communications market report, covering the UK, US, Australia, France, Italy and Germany.

Some (mainly about Britain being a national of online shopaholics ) of it has already been covered in the mainstream press, so I’ve tried to dig out ten findings that didn’t get so much of an airing.   These include ones that look at how social media has replaced traditional media as a news source

1 – Ofcom’s research confirms Forrester’s earlier claims that social media is reaching saturation point.  78% of American, 75% of Australian and 70% of UK Internet users have set up social media profiles.

2 – Not surprisingly, Facebook is the social site most are familiar with.   In the US, 89% of social media users are on Facebook, with Twitter a distant 2nd on 24%.    In the UK, the figures are 83% and 22%.   Surprisingly in the UK Friends Reunited (remember them?)  still gets a strong showing

3 – As you would expect, younger social media users visit those sites more frequently than older users.    In the UK, 68%, in the US 69% and in Australia 61% of 18-24 year old social media users go online 2+ times a day.   This compares to 26% of 45-64 year olds in the UK, 28% in the US and 29% in Australia who access social media.

4 – Does social media use reduce traditional media use?   For a minority it does.   In the UK 14% and in the US 10% claim to now watch less TV because of online social use.  However, 18% of British social media users and 21% of Australian social media users say they read print newspapers less.

Those stats can be read in a number of different ways.  There is no doubt that print circulations are in terminal decline, the UK nationals losing the equivalent of Glasgow in sales over the past year.

At the same time, there is evidence that integrating social media into TV programming and promotions has a small boost for overall ratings.

5 – In the various markets surveyed by Ofcom, between 1/5 and 1/3 of social media users don’t change their privacy settings.   In the UK, the % that leave them be is 30%, in Australia it is 28% and in the US 26%

6 – Ofcom’s research again proves that social media is more female than male dominated.      In the UK 49% of female and 32% of male social media users regularly update their profiles.   In the US, the figures are 51% and 37% and in Australia 42% and 31%

7 – Male and female behaviour is also different on social channels.   Across all markets, women are more likely to use social media “to see what other people are saying and doing.”    In the UK, 63% of women and 51% of men use social media in this way, while in the US the figures are 71% women and 57% men.

8 – Just as social media may have caused some users to leave traditional media, more and more now use it as a primary news source.

In the UK, 51% of 18-24 year olds and 37% of 25-34 year olds use social channels for breaking news.    Again, women are different than men.   While 43% of British women on social media find out about breaking news on these sites, for UK men the % is 37%.

9 – OFCOM’s research debunks the myth that social media use cuts you off from the real world.     A third of British (34%) and Australian (32%) 18-24 year olds now engage more in their community.   In Italy and Germany, over 4/10 younger social media users are more active.

10 – Most social media users distrustful of what they see:   Finally a finding that is slightly at odds with an earlier OFCOM stat about trust in social media, more users are distrustful as opposed to trustful about what they see on social sites.

However, there is not surprisingly a lot of variation by age here, with the under 45s being twice as likely to trust what they see on social channels compared to the over 55s.

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