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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Nielsen has a table out distilling the results of Global Trust in Advertising survey.   Worldwide, 50%+ of us trust the following kinds of brand recommendations:

Personal recommendations from someone you know (90%), consumer opinions online (70%), editorial content (58%), branded websites (58%) and emails you’ve signed up for (50%).

All other forms of advertising have trust ratings of less than 50%, including TV ads (47%), TV product placement (40%), social media ads (36%) and sms mobile advertising (29%)

A few observations:

Straight forward PR via editorial endorsements in newspapers certainly matter, but it’s interesting to see that information posted on a brand’s own website is just as believable for consumers.   Of course, a newspaper or magazine still carries the extra weight of third party endorsement

Seven out of ten of us trust consumer opinions posted online.   That’s opinions very often from strangers and note the wording – opinions not reviews

Trust in standard above the line advertising is now below 50%.  In the past two years, trust in TV advertising has dropped by 24% and trust in newspaper ads by 25%

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Here’s some research from Microsoft and Carnegie Mellon University that again shows the level of trust we place on the opinions of social media contacts – people we may in many cases have never met in real life. (via Poynter.org)

What’s the most believable source on Twitter?

A retweet from someone you trust (4.08/5) followed by a tweet from someone with ‘verified author expertise’ in the subject (4.04/5).  In addition to showing the power of peer recommendations, that also demonstrates how false information can spread quickly online.

Interestingly, the list of top ten trust factors includes the Twitter verification mark.  Getting that blue tick does seem to raise the credibility of your Twitter account.

At the same time, tweets from twitter followers inspire the least credibility concerns, with ones found via search having the highest.

Meanwhile a study published in searchengineland (via Simply Zesty) says that 72% trust online reviews as much as they do recommendations from friends.

In all, 58% say positive customer reviews would make them trust a business more, 25% say they have no impact and 17% pay no attention to them.

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The conclusion of a SXSW panel from this afternoon was yes, but the overall message was that it really works best when it comes to deepening viewer engagement – especially given that TV is now a social (media) experience, regardless of whether you use those channels as a programmer or not.

The panel featured Colin Helms of MTV , David Jones of Shazam , Ellen Stone of Bravo , Text 100′s Tara O’Donnell and I think the most engaging of the four, Susie Fogelson of the Food Network.   MTV’s Colin Helms did cite the Nielsen study from last year showing a 9% increase in buzz equating to a 1% increase in ratings, while Bravo’s Ellen Stone said that though she didn’t have any scientific evidence, she was 100% convinced that social media was driving viewers to her shows.

The overall theme though was that social media is a useful tool in keeping a community interested and engaged.

Clearly – this needs to be done through serving up content you won’t get through simply watching the show (the idea of talent sending behind the scenes twit-pics was cited as an example).   Social media was also mentioned as a way of keeping fans hooked in the gaps between series, when they might forget, with their attentions being diverted elsewhere.

Two particularly useful case-studies however came from Susie Fogelson of the Food Network, both including useful metrics.

Susie first of all mentioned the ‘Calling all Cooks‘  programme the channel ran during US Thanksgiving, which she calls the equivalent of their Super Bowl.  Essentially they had major chefs in the kitchen to be viewers “butterball helpline”, where questions could be sent in via social media.  During a two hour live slot, the channel increased its Facebook fans by 20,000, had 15 million social media impressions, and was the subject of five trending topics.

The second Food Network case study involved The Great Food Truck Race, which Susie called “Food trucks meet the apprentice.”   Every week one city and truck would host a free lunch for 100 people and the Food Channel Twitter ID (@FoodNetwork) would tweet out the final location.   People then had to show up for the truck, with the first 100 getting free lunch.

A fairly simple idea, but it connected the dots between the show, the channel’s social media channels, an experiential event in the real world, and finally PR / press coverage that the channel managed to get around it.   The latter in turn made a wider audience aware of the programme and will have driven new viewers to it.

The result?  In addition to press coverage, the channel achieved 100k more likes in six weeks and 70k more Twitter followers.

Photo – from the great food truck race, the food network

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How many brands would be brave enough to cut half of their social media followers, losing the ones who hadn’t engaged with them for months?  That’s exactly what is happening with many core Instagram users at the moment.

One of the many things that fascinates me about Instagram is the way a unique sub-culture and series of communities have grown up around the network in a relatively short (18 months) period of time (see an article I wrote for The Wall on the subject).

Most recently, there has been a trend among core Instagramers to do something interesting around their follower numbers.   Instead of looking at the vanity metric of a large follower total, many are actually shedding followers.   I’m one of those that did this.  I used a 3rd party tool to lose 300+ followers, bringing me down from the psychologically important 1000 follower milestone, back down to 700.

Before moving onto why that is, it is worth outlining a group of services that now exist giving you intelligence on your Instagram account.

Statigram
Statigram is not only one of the main free web services (along with Webstagram and Ink361) that allow you to view Instagram images online, it also (as the name implies) provides basic metrics around your account.

This includes best time to post per day, most successful filters (assuming you actually use IG filters and not 3rd party apps), a like and comment average, and a list of your most engaged followers.   Useful info if you are running a company Instagram account, as well as a personal one.

Statigram has also started to run ads supporting Instagram competitions, we noticed Ford Fiesta using it to bring their campaign to the attention of Instagramers.

InstaPop
This iPhone application will tell you the minimum number of likes and comments you will probably need to get on the popular page / tab on Instagram.  It compares the least popular image on the popular page with your most recent post in terms of likes, comments and the amount of time the post has been live.

InstaFrManager
This is an iPhone app that looks at your posts over the last 40 days and gives you a league table of your most engaged and least engaged followers based on comments and likes.   A lot of Instagramers have been using it to get rid of dormant or ‘ghost’ followers.   However, more recently they’ve been turning their attention to a tool that does the job automatically, namely:

IGexorcist (igexorcist.com)
IGexorcist is a free web-based tool that gets rid of inactive followers.   Give it access to your account and it then shows you how many followers haven’t liked or commented on any of your images for the past 60, 90, 120 and 180 days.   You can then completely purge the total, bringing your follower number down.

On my part, it told me I had 307 inactive followers over 180 days and 368 over 60 days.   As an aside that told me that most IG users in my circles are active, and (given the fact that the 60 and 180 day totals weren’t vastly different) that if you stick with Instagram for a month or so, you are likely to keep going.

IGexorcist is popular because it automates the process of blocking and then unblocking a follower.

Why does it go through these two steps?  Because the block / unblock route is the only real way to let a follower loose.   And most committed Instagramers don’t do the first part of that and just block because of a belief that Instagram still counts a blocked follower as a follower when deciding who gets onto the popular page.

Which brings us onto the concept of ghost followers and ‘popping.’   Many Instagram biographies now include the words ‘no ghost followers.’

A ghost follower is someone who never interacts with you.  That might be someone who has left Instagram.   Or it may be, much like you still see on Twitter, Instagram users who follow huge numbers of other users en masse with the aim of in turn acquiring a big follower number.

Popping is Instagram speak for getting on the popular page.   Doing so generally depends on having a large number of likes and comments in a very short (less than 15 mins) period of time, hence groups exist to deliberately members “pop.”   In addition to having a concentrated number of likes for each post, most Instagramers believe that a smaller follower total gives you an advantage.

As a result,  there is no benefit in having an artificially large follower number that is exactly that – just a number.

Though most brands now do understand the importance of a committed follower, the philosophy of the big number is still alive and well.   By contrast, its interesting to see a group of core users of a social network embrace the concept of (as the IGexorcist site puts it) people over numbers.

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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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