Despite well documented examples of brands maintaining Twitter feeds, and using them to respond to customers, customer service is by and large not the biggest motivation behind brands setting up social media profiles.

This is according to social media monitoring service Alterian (via MarketingProfs) which found that fairly standard marketing objectives lay behind branded social media efforts.

“Acquiring new customers”…or rather plain old sales was the number one objective for 30.1%, followed by awareness raising (26.5%), and using it as a communications channel for existing customers (24%).   However customer services as such was the main social media objective for only 1.2% of marketers surveyed.

It’s worth noting that respondents (who were based in the US) were asked to give one answer, so this isn’t the same as saying that said marketers don’t consider customer services via social media to be important.   Still – the fact that many brands still see everything through an advertising prism, and often get it wrong as a result, can be seen in the fact that sales was the most popular answer.

At the same time another US survey has come out, this time via publisher Colloquy and the Direct Marketer Association.   This one found that among marketers who do see social media as a customer services channel, the average social media spend was $88k compared to $53k who were motivated by brand awareness and $50k by those who wanted sales.

Not withstanding the fact that this second survey was done by email and involved respondents filling out 17 questions, you do have to ask…is that it?! $50k (£33k) spend to use social media as a way to get new customers?   Unfortunately that stat confirms that marketers taking the social media sales route are sometimes also the ones who understand the least about the area.

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One of the key points from the (UK) Ofcom Communications Market Report was, unsurprisingly, the extent to which the media habits of 18-24 year olds differed from other age groups.   However, the stats also showed that 55-64 year olds were becoming much more willing to embrace new media, with the new generational divide occurring at 65 or so.   That’s now backed up by a Pew Report from the US about older adults and social media.

In summary Pew Research says that almost half (47%) of 50-64 year olds use social networks use social networks, while a quarter (26%) of the over 65s do so – this compares to 86% of the under 30s.    In other words the social media age barrier has steadily been moving from people in their 30s two years ago, to people in their 40s in 2008/9, to Web users in their 50s now.

When it comes to daily social network use, 20% of 50-64 year olds do so, along with 13% of the over 65%.

Pew says that older Internet surfers are still more comfortable with what you might call traditional past times such as emailing or reading the news.   And 20% of 50-64 year olds who use social media every day is still very much a minority.  But – it’s worth noting that a year ago, that figure was only 10%, so the number of habitual 50 something social media users has doubled in the twelve months.

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Here’s a stat from the KellerFay Group in the US about where word of mouth marketing conversations take place.   And it turns out 90% don’t take place on the Internet.  Oh nos! Time to get back to having promo staff doing stunts and giving away freebies on street corners.

The PR Squared blog says that this should serve as a wake-up call that online approaches are only ever an “ADDITIVE, not a REPLACEMENT for their “traditional” approaches.”

Though I know PR Squared certainly doesn’t fall into this camp, for social media sceptics this will be a bit of a “see! see! told you so!” argument.  It reminds me of a former colleague who used to dismiss social media marketing with “it’s all smoke and mirrors” and “you still need a good idea.”

Er…well yes, yes and yes.  Online marketing campaigns should very much work in tandem with other marketing disciplines, see a previous post on the need to combine TV and online for one example. Surely that should be self evident?

Naturally we talk about brands all the time (60x a week according to KellerFay) , and tend to do so in our normal day to day lives when not glued to a computer screens.  Similarly, most “new” news is still broken by what’s considered to be traditional media – check out this stat from Pew Research earlier in the year.

Where online channels do however come into their own is in amplifying and rapidly spreading messages.

For example, Twitter stories can become front page newspaper ones in as little as four hours.   And a separate study by Harris shows that Americans under 35 trust social media recommendations over newspaper ones….and far above celebrity ones.   Finally, people who are most active on Twitter are also the ones who are most likely to post ratings and reviews, comment on news and upload articles to share.

(via Lauren Fernandez)

Image – Kit Cowan

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More stats from the 377 page (UK) Ofcom Communications Markets Report, in particular ones that reinforce the fact that TV-led campaigns or properties are very often more effective when combined with online.     Three findings in particular (with graphs)

1 – Live, scheduled TV carries a low attention threshold. Compared to other forms of media, consumers are least likely to give live TV and radio their undivided attention.     Social media and print have medium attention scores, while games and downloaded video content rank best when it comes to consumer focus (hence the wisdom of spending money on in-game promotions).

2 – We’re now more likely to ‘media stack.’ 20% of media time is now simultaneous – very often involving TV + the Internet and mobile phones.  Among the under 25s that proportion rises to 29%.  16-24 year olds managed to fit just over nine and a half hours’ worth of media into a little  over six and a half hours of actual time.

3 – The most popular YouTube channels are variations of mainstream media properties. It’s a myth that we want to spend our time on YouTube watching home made ‘world’s funniest animal’ type videos.   Instead, much as we do on TV, we want to see content with high production values, involving recognisable names.

Where’s the proof that TV + online work in tandem works?  Here are three random examples:

1 – PHD and Medialets developed a True Blood iPhone ad to support the last series.   Though we can question whether HBO’s 38% increase in viewers was down to the mobile campaign, the best click-through rate of 8.73% that the campaign achieved was way beyond the usual display ad rate of 0.02%.

2 – Speaking of click-throughs, Coke achieved one of 6%, when it ran a Promoted Tweets / Twitter World Cup campaign.   Running a World Cup promo while people were tweeting about matches made sense – Twitter saw a clear spike in activity, including a record for the number of tweets per second during the recent tournament.

3 – One of my favourite examples is this one:  US broadcaster Oxygen piloted a “real time viewing party” called Oxygen Live around one of its hit shows – Bad Girls Club.   This pulled in comments and conversations from several networks such as Twitter into an online hub while the show was airing.

Oxygen Live kicked off 30 mins before each show started, meaning that it was trending on Twitter 5 mins before each episode and there was a consistent increase in viewers over the hour.   In fact in the US West Coast when they *didn’t* run Oxygen Live, ratings were up 9% among women aged 18-49.   Once Oxygen Live launched that ratings then saw a much bigger increase, up to 57%.

And as far as a successful example of integrating TV advertising and an online campaign goes….Old Spice anyone?

As a final point, it’s worth noting that two of the new social networks that have created a buzz over the past few weeks, Miso and Glue, have a model that’s directly related to people checking into entertainment events and TV programmes, as opposed to locations.

We’ve got a more detailed summary of the Ofcom report in the latest (agency) Rabbit feed, the html version is here.

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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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The other week Twitter reported that the record for the number of tweets per second was broken, when there were 3283 during the Japan / Denmark match at the World Cup.

Surprisingly, even though Twitter says on its blog that the final Spain – Netherlands match “represented the largest period of sustained activity for an event in Twitter’s history”, the actual number of tweets per second for Spain’s winning goal was lower at 3051.

However, the World Cup again shows that while Foursquare is still in danger of being a Second Life style phenomenon that is popular and fizzes out, Twitter has found several real and useful roles.

One is that so-called influencers who are able to take conversations elsewhere over-index on it.   Another is that it comes into its own during live TV events – such as the World Cup – where the shared social experience adds to what you are watching on the box.

Twitter has produced a number of interesting infographics.   The wordle image below is the final Spain goal in tweets and in different languages:

And finally, an image showing how Twitter use grew during the competition itself (click on image for larger size):

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South African blogger Herman Manson has posted an article on Memeburn (‘the South African Mashable’), questioning whether that by breaking news, Twitter will also break journalism.

There are plenty of examples of tweets being reported as fact without them being checked.   For example, the (UK) Daily Mail reported that the iPhone4 was being recalled after a Steve Jobs Twitter account – a fake one – sent out a message about it.

Similarly in South Africa, Manson looks at what happened after ex police commissioner Jackie Selebi was found guilty of corruption.

If you scanned Twitter immediately after the trial you would have thought that Selebi was guilty of both corruption and obstructing justice.    But actually Selebi was only guilty of the 1st charge.    The problem was that in the haste to get the 1st tweet out, a journalist got it wrong and with the tweets and retweets, this then became the story.

Manson points to an econsultancy piece by Jake Hird where he published an infographic showing how news breaks and spreads post Twitter.     As Jake’s graphic shows, Twitter very often precedes news outlets in spreading news, which means a lot of editors end up playing catch-up.

Urging journalists to add social media and Twitter into their codes of conduct, Manson says: “With Twitter able to deliver news quickly and to a potentially huge audience due to its viral nature, already-pressured newsrooms are under increasing pressure to get content out, and to get it out fast.”

And when they get it wrong based on a series of tweets, the damage is done – in the Jackie Selebi case, a correction was tweeted out, but by then, the original Twitter version had become gospel.

(The full memeburn article)

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On average Twitter sees 750 tweets per second being sent out says the Blog Herald.   By comparison, a Twitter record was broken twice in succession last week, first during the NBA basketball finals in the States, and second during the Japan / Denmark match in the World Cup.

The Los Angeles Lakers / Boston Celtics game saw 3085 tweets per second being posted…but that record was quickly broken during the Japan vs Denmark 1st round World Cup match to see who would qualify for the 2nd round (Japan) when 3282 tweets per second were sent out.

Two observations around those stats:

1 – It’s another sign of live TV becoming a shared social experience via networks such as Twitter.   Even though they might be watching a World Cup match on their own, people are tapping into a wider network of friends online, exchanging comments with them.   The rise of social TV has been seen around everything from political debates to reality TV show finals (such as X-Factor here in the UK)

2 – Twitter has traditionally been seen as a US based network, but the fact that Japan / Denmark beat the record set in the NBA Finals shows that might be changing.   When Sysomos published its table of % of Twitter users by country in January (the US was on 50.88%), neither Denmark or Japan featured in the top five – Japan was no 10 at 1.22% of the total.

And on that note, with the UK having 7.2% of users and Germany 2.49%, it will be interesting to see if there’s a new record on Sunday during the Germany / England 2nd round game.

Below, the Sysomos chart of Twitter users by country, from January.  It’s not unreasonable to assume that the US total has dropped below 50% since then:

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Canadian research firm Sysomos has come out with some interesting, if not that surprising, research about Twitter A-listers and their followers.

That research can be summed up like this:  Celebs might have hundreds of thousands or even 1+ million followers, but that’s very often made up of people who specifically joined Twitter to follow said celeb and have done nothing since.  Hence they are not engaged on Twitter and may in fact be part of the 83% who according to RJ Metrics don’t log into their accounts every month.

That also ties into the recent research that 50% of under 35s re influenced by friends. on social media, but only 17% by celebs

By contrast, people who follow the so-called social media “gurus” are engaged and influential in their own right.   And in the middle, we have people who follow media Twitter accounts.   They are Twitter consumers.  And while they don’t live and breath it, neither have they just checked in to see Ashton Kutcher and checked out again.

The following three tables pretty much say it all:

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