Tag Archives: social media strategy

Survey Results: Social Media Budgets and Strategy 2011-2012

I decided to run this SocialNetConomy Survey on Social Media adoption and social media budget to understand where do we stand with social media adoption and understanding. And, most of all, what social media budgets have been for 2011 and what they are going to be for 2012.

Since Social media today are the talk of the town, whether you talk about Facebook with your friends or if you do a check-in in a place to show you travel and you go to fancy places (too often forgetting that your LinkedIn peers may not be interested to know where you go for dinner), or if you talk about social media during your business meeting, I thought it was good to understand how companies consider it.

I had a feeling not all companies truly understand how big the impact of social media can be and what kind of opportunity they are missing if they stay out of it.

I am glad to finally share results for my short survey – it was a 10-question survey. This survey has been realized using a free service (you can see the original survey on surveymonkey), and social media (I recruited people only on Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter).

Thank You to all my Twitter peers that helped me with this survey- too many to mention!

A significant element of collecting responses has been the help I got from my twitter peers: I asked to ReTweet my survey to help me collect more responses, and thanks to all those who shared, retweeted and took the survey I am now able to share my results. I invite you to keep taking this survey, and sharing it. I will be happy to update this post if more responses come in.

Participants to this survey come from US, Canada, Latin America and EMEA. Not much from AP. Almost all industries are equally represented, including Government, Consulting, Manufacturing, Retail, Energy, Finance, Health and Pharma, and companies analyzed include both those operating globally and those operating in a single region, country or locally.

SocialNetConomy.com 2011-2012 Social Media Survey Results:

Q- Did you have a social media strategy and a dedicated budget in the past 12 months?

social media strategy and a dedicated budget in the past 12 months25% of surveyed companies said they did not have and they are currently planning any social media strategy. 12.5% said they did not have a social media strategy and they are not planning any.

Considering how I collected these answers, it’s interesting to notice that if they answered this survey, they got the link through a social network. Nevertheless, they do not consider this channel to be good for their brand exposure for some reason (inhibitors to Social Media adoption are part of this survey too). I believe this is pretty interesting.

Talking about budget, about 65% of respondents have a social media strategy (so they say), with more than half of them saying their budget is no more than $15,000. It’s interesting to notice that about 20% of respondents said their budget was over $15,000.

Q- If you have a social media strategy in place, please let us know which social networks are you currently using – up to August 2011

which social networks are you currently using - up to August 2011We discussed about this in my previous post: having a Facebook fan page does not mean having a social media strategy. It seems respondents are not always aware of this. In fact, not all social media are used the same way, and not all social media are used for their full potential (about half of those with a Facebook page use Facebook ads, not to mention LinkedIn PPCs are way less used – I suggest to follow the links to related posts to learn more about these PPCs). About half the interviewed companies use twitter and LinkedIn and have learned about the importance of a company blog.

Q. Please evaluate your current social media strategy

evaluate your current social media strategyThe next question was about the social media strategy effectiveness, which highlights something really important: While over 70% of respondents have a Facebook presence and half of them have Facebook ads, only 17% said this approach has revealed either “very effective” or “extremely effective”. The good news is there is a lot of room for improvements!

Ads on Facebook work better than Facebook pages (IMHO mainly because they are really well targeted), and company blogs, along with twitter and LinkedIn work very well too.

Bad performance for Groupon, LivingSocial and similar solutions, as well as for preliminary Google+ company pages.

A combination of all channels is surely highly recommended.

Q. How did you/ your company implement your Social Media strategy?

How did you/ your company implement your Social Media strategyI have over 10 years of experience in marketing and social media, and I believe (I have experienced) the right approach to social media would be to have it as part of both a business’ marketing strategy (you are telling something to your clients on their preferred channel!). and a customer service / channel with a direct contact with customers (they are now expecting it to be this way), for companies to listen to customers. What you write on social media stays and should be handled no less than a press release or TV ad: with care.

Given that I noticed a few companies don’t believe in social media, but they often do it because they have to, they don’t really pay attention to it, and they don’t care about who, what or when it’s done. So I asked who was taking care of social media to the surveyed companies. Results confirm there is a lack of cultural approach, but results are quite good. Some companies still give interns the ability to talk for their brands. Maybe the same companies have a strong “permission to quote” policy in place. I hope they’ll get the importance of social media soon. It’s not hard throwing out sentences on how good we are. The thing is, you must be quick, good, professional and nice to answer to those (who might be very influent with their peers) that are complaining about you or your products. It’s advertising, and some kind of reverse (or adverse!) advertising.

Another consideration: about half the companies are either using the marketing team or a digital team. Only half of them got it’s not a 1 person thing. Another possible answer was “Other”. I did not add it since it was about a 5% saying it was the owner doing it. Nobody answered with “everybody contributes, with a dedicated team (internal or external) to handle it strategically”. Which should be the right approach IMHO.

Q. Considering your past experience with social media, are you planning to increase your budget for social media in 2012?

are you planning to increase your budget for social media in 2012Survey results have highlighted a mixed feeling about social media, as demonstrated in the previous figures. I wanted to see if the situation was going to chance in the 2012 fiscal.

About 55% of companies are increasing their social media budget in 2012, and only between 2% and 3% are decreasing it. This is a very good sign, also given that this survey was running between August and October, and I have monitored it through the weeks and I can tell no crisis impact on this decision. This means only one simple thing: companies are getting it.

Q. Where are you placing your Social Media dollars in 2012?

Where are you placing your Social Media dollars in 2012With this question I wanted to understand “how much” companies are getting it. If they have learned what works, what does not, and how to improve their strategy.

And, of course, I wanted to know where their social media dollars were going to in 2012.

Again Facebook rules, but 10% of the surveyed companies are rather moving to other social networks and channels, more relevant for their business.

Answers to this question also provide some outlook for all those copanies developing Facebook pages, or editing videos, or for those agencies providing social media guidance and execution: 2012 will see their business flourish.

Again, no good news for Groupon and LivingSocial.

The last question of this short survey was about possible inhibitors to social media. I have noticed this is maybe the first time when a technology, used, developed and shared between consumers, get to the business world. usually with technology companies are the first large users, and then it becomes more common.

So why companies seem being so late to this (technology-based) date (on social media) with their clients?

Q. What have been/ are your company’s main inhibitors to social media adoption?

What have been/ are your company's main inhibitors to social media adoptionNo time for social media still tops the list of inhibitors (as found in many other surveys), and I keep wondering what should clients think of the fact that companies say they do not have time for their clients.

Interesting to notice that nobody selected “We had no issues”. So everybody had some kind of issues.

Other reasons such as lack of budget and lack of support from company execs are still among the main reasons.

In some circumstances companies admit lack of competences – as well as the fact that demonstrating ROI is pretty hard.

How do you compare with these results?

Related reading:

- More Than Facebook: The Time Is Right For Social Business – Forbes

- Social Media Marketing: social media is about BEING social, not about DOING social- SocialNetConomy

- Comparing Facebook, LinkedIn and Google PPC: Why Social PPC is best - SocialNetConomy

Social Media Marketing: social media is about BEING social, not about DOING social.

Social media and social media marketing are the talks of the town. Still, not all companies, including those who declare they have a social media strategy or a social media marketing strategy, got it completely right. Yet some great initiatives demonstrate some companies are getting it right.

I got inspired to write this blog post mainly thanks to a few articles (you’ll find links to those articles, as usual, at the bottom of this blog post) and thanks to an incredibly good initiative I got invited to participate into. But let’s go step by step.

While the majority of companies today get how important is to have a presence on social media, just a few of them got they need a social media strategy, fully integrated with both their marketing strategy and their company culture.

What does this mean?

I am sure you found a lot of numbers and figures before defining your social media budget and by now you know that also:

about half of the biggest companies’ websites have a link to their Facebook fan page on their homepage. So – you think- half of the biggest companies have a social media strategy, right?

Wrong.

This is the most common mistake. Not that different from the one I often do when I buy a new pair of shoes, forgetting that having them in my closet is not the same as wearing them- but the thing is, I cannot wear stilettos all the time.

So a Facebook page works exactly the same way: if you cannot be there all the time (or at least a good amount of time, enough to talk to your audience), it’s useless.

Why?

Because – not sure you heard-  about 800 million people are there too, which means surely the largest portion of your audience – regardless of your business bring B2B or B2C. And this means they may find it way more convenient to talk to you through your Facebook page than calling you on the phone (and wait for 5 minutes dialing even more numbers to go through your automated call center).

They will surely prefer to drop you a line on your Facebook page rather than sending you an email to an email address that sends them an automated reply from a noreply@companyname.com email address.

Especially if you proudly put your nice white F on a blue button to show how cool your company is- you also have a Facebook page.

And 27 fans, 3 pictures (your logos in low resolution being 2 of them) and 5 wall posts.

Each of them with one Like: yours.

And next to that Facebook button you likely have a Twitter button too, to witness your business is really social. You probably have that on your email signature and on your PPTs. Then you client clicks on it and reads “15 tweets sent, last tweet April 2009”. Nice.

And -still thinking you are really cool and social- you added your Twitter handle and a link to your Facebook all over the places.

So I follow you, I mention you, and I get you have not got the whole social media thing: I never got a reply, or a thank you for RT. ‘cause you do not monitor your mentions or your company mentions, and you have no idea who is tweeting about you, who is tweeting to you and how good comments tweeted about you are. You were told Twitter is like just having a Facebook status without the whole Facebook. (I recently got a #FF from someone that is not even following me on Twitter, and it was not a RT, of course. Can you believe that?)

The thing is, there is a huge difference between doing social (media) and being social.

Doing social (too bad) means mainly having a Facebook page or a Twitter handle, and a maybe also a LinkedIn group, private (to show how social you are).

Being social means: interact, listen, answer, accept critics, improve your business thanks to those critics, build trust, be reachable by your audience – for the first time they can talk to your brand. They could not talk to your brand when your commercials were on TV, or on magazines, or a banner the only way they could touch was with a click.

They have been waiting for decades for this chance to talk to your brand and they now deserve to be listened. Especially since they talk to each other all the time, and referrals are the new selling channel in the social media era.

A great example of social media marketing campaign that demonstrates a social media approach: Quality Hunters, by Finnair and Helsinki Airport.

I recently came across an incredibly good, social and clever initiative, that synthetizes many concepts I already wrote about in this post. Not sure you heard about it before, it’s a really cool initiative and it’s called “Quality Hunters”, now at its second year, which makes it “Quality Hunters 2”.

“Quality Hunters 2 is an initiative by Finnair and Helsinki Airport. Together they will hire 7 Quality Hunters to travel the world and seek out fresh ideas on quality and how to improve air travel and the airport experience. “ this is what their website says about this project.

First of all, what I liked the most is their approach is fully social and depicts a truly social company culture: they sent personalized messaged through LinkedIn (social), then they followed applicants and engaged in conversations on twitter, they invited everyone to spread the word about this initiative and of course- they do know this- they offer the most incredibly exciting job ever, if you love travels and writing: you get paid to travel the world, and write about your journeys.

I have to admit when I got their message via LinkedIn I thought it was a joke. It was too good to be true for someone like me who is passionate about travels and writing!

“Finnair and Helsinki airport strive to offer services tailored to fit people’s individual needs. This cannot be achieved without offering everyone a chance to have their say and engage in dialogue on what makes air travel just click” they continue on their website.

“Once the Quality Hunters have been selected, this site will also be their digital home: they will produce texts, photos and video of their adventures and their ideas on how to make air travel better.”

At Finnair and Helsinki, they were looking for 7 Quality Hunters, and got over 1,900 applications. Winners will be announced in the coming days. Applications for this season closed on October 6th.

This is just the most incredibly social initiative I have ever seen, so far. It’s not about winning an iPad, by inviting your friends to a new website, nor about exchanging follows on a Facebook or Twitter.It’s not one of those social actions purely aimed at spreading ads all over the places.

They show they listen, they show they understand the importance of referrals and feedback, and they understand that, combined, referrals and feedbacks are the most powerful weapon to win the marketing battle.

They understand quality is the most precious element of their product/service, combined with an excellent customer service, which is, in case you forgot, the ability of being responsive to customers enquiries, needs, comments, feedback, requests.

Where do you stand? Are you DOING social or are you BEING social?

Related reading:

Social Media is Marketers’ El Dorado: Hype or Reality?

I am sure you noticed that also: it seems that with this economy (check the recently published World Economic Report 2011 by Financial Times), while worldwide financial markets suggest to pursue a modern “gold rush”, it looks like companies are rather pursuing some kind of “social rush”. Never like in these months businesses are talking about social media, using them, investing in them, hiring people to manage them and launching new ones. And funny enough, social media are the most frequent news on the traditional press.

The debate is still open: some say social media are a tremendous business and an incredibly effective channel for marketing and invest more and more on them (revenues are expected to double for Facebook and go from $45M to $400M for Twitter) , hire people, web agencies, buy platforms and reinvent their business.

Some others consider social media just a waste of time, a hype on its way to a decline and proudly tell they are not on social networks and they don’t need to be there. Maybe they did not notice their audience is there. I wonder why struggle with sending marketing messages all over places where your clients may just walk by, instead of those where they spend their time.

I am currently running a Social Media survey (please take it here, it’s just 10 questions) and my results say it clearly: more than half the interviewed companies are planning to increase their marketing dollars on social media for 2012. Final results to be published soon on this blog.

So I am sure many still wonder: will social media last?

Breath and relief: according to a recently published study by InSites Consulting, with a population of over 7Billion and 2Billions today already connected to social networks, only half of them (about 1B) are already on social networks. So there is definitely room for an improvement!

Social media adoption is uneven across the globe: In Europe, people join on average 1,9 social networks. In USA it’s 2,1; Brazil 3,1 and India 3,9. Uneven is also the social media awareness: while Social Insites estimates that Facebook awareness is about 100% of total connected population, and about 75% used it (with over half connecting every day), Twitter is used by only 16% of those who are aware of it.

With Facebook being at around 750M and remembering about that other analysis I posted back in July about the social media adoption curve, drawing from the Rogers’ model on technology adoption, this is an additional confirmation of my thoughts: we are almost half the way on the social media technology adoption curve. And with 2B connected out of the 7B, the more time goes, the situation should not change that quickly.

So, to answer our question: are social media the new El Dorado? The short answer seems Yes.

Yes, because according to this study, people join more than 1 social network, with Asia driving the truck to up to 4 social networks per person (I wonder how much this may be influenced by languages). See this image to learn more:

Please don’t jump yet for your happyness: “No” could still be a possible answer. The study also reports – sorry Google+, bad news- that about 60% declare they don’t want any additional social network, and about 93% are either not planning to leave the SNs they are in, or not entering new ones.

Surely, results leave some room for all those startups launching new social networks in these months. And creative ideas or social networks around shared passions (shopping, travel, sports, food, business, etc) are still likely to attract members- you don’t need to abandon your favorite social network and join a new one. You can stay on both.

Nevertheless, with these numbers in mind, and the current penetration of existing social networks, the message is crystal clear: big existing social networks will get bigger; small social networks will get smaller. After all, it seems this rule applies to the entire economy in this global financial cycle.

You may had an idea of how big Facebook is willing to become if you remember Mark Zuckerberg’s speech at the f8 conference, where Facebook presented the latest news and future developments about the most crowded social networks. When talking about the apps and developers of Facebook apps, he said Facebook has been working with “over a thousand companies to develop new things on Facebook”.

To all those who are still quite sceptical about Social Media and Social Media marketing (according to the preliminary results from my survey, lack of support from execs is one of the top reasons for not having a social media strategy), I suggest they have a look at this image and see that not only their clients are on social media, their clients are also waiting for them and asking for something! Also those whose social media strategy equals to having banners placed on social networks or a facebook page with zero interaction should consider a proper social media strategy. Need help?

Lessons learned:

  • Social Media are today what IT has been in the past: not just a tool, but a nessessary component of every business strategy
  • Your clients are on social media. Why are you wasting your marketing budget somewhere else?
  • Your clients are on social media and are willing to talk to you.
  • Social media are the easiest and highest potenial for word of moouth: have your sales on social media and have them listen to your clients needs.
  • Different geographies have different social media penetration and potential. That potential also applies to your business.
  • Never underestimate the importance of the word “social” in social media / social networks.

Related posts and resources:

Social media around the world 2011

View more presentations from steven van belleghem

Customer centricity and social networks: why one cannot exclude the other.

As it may have happened to many of you in these days, I came across a video featuring Steve Jobs on stage during one of his speeches.

This one was from 1997, when Steve Jobs went back to Apple as CEO to re-launch the Apple computer business.  One of the guys in the audience asked him – not that politely- how he was planning to revamp a tech company if he did not understand about technology.


I believe Job’s statement was way bigger than how big Apple’s evolution has been since then. He said having a technology and then finding a way to sell it and make people use it it’s pointless. Having a technology that does what people want it’s what we need. Start with the customer and then have the technology department figure out how to deliver what customers want.

Steve Jobs- a genial mix of passion, usability and attention to detail (did you read that other story about the yellow tone of the second O in the Google brand not displaying correctly on the iPhone and Job’s call on a Sunday morning to discuss about that urgently? You can find it here)- got ahead of the usability for its products with that statement.

Customer centricity is what a lot of C-level  presentations have been talking about for over a decade in any industry.  A customer centric approach assists an organisation in building important relationships with internal and external customers. Wow- this is social network- We knew the recipe since over a decade!

Yet, today, while people on social networks keep showing they are desperately looking for a bigger interaction with brands, asking for that customer centricity that everybody used to talk about, only half the companies have implemented some kind of social networks strategy. Preliminary results from a survey I am currently running (take it here, it’s just 10 questions and I will share results on this blog) show that only less than 15% of companies with a Facebook page – which is by far the only social media strategy for a large majority of companies- got excellent results from it.  The reason is simple: they are not doing it right.

Social media are built to listen to customers first, and answer then.

Not sure you recall, but call centers (and the cheap Indian call centers) were the biggest talk of the town before the social networks became “the” news. The boom of call centers  was a clear signal that clients do want a direct contact with companies, regardless of where we are- B2B or B2C. B2C should learn from B2B how important this is today.

Why? Time has changed, information are more available and understandable by users, media diffusion has intensified the need for communicating two-ways. And companies cannot be deaf.

Not sure you noticed, but when social media started rising, call centers declined: there was a new way to let clients interact with brands.

Being customer centric means – with no exception- being easily reachable by clients. If traditional marketing channels were looking at providing the right message through the right channel (think about TV commercials), nowadays the keyword is still delivering these messages through the media where the audience is- but the audience has moved to social networks, and the rules have changed. Clients now have a keyboard and they write to you if they are not happy, they won’t just use their remote control and watch another TV channel.

And delivering a message through a network that is “social” means brands must be social too. I’ve seen so many companies using social networks like they used other 1-to-many channels in the past.

I have seen many companies keep placing banners on communities and using their Facebook page or heir twitter handle or their LinkedIn group like they used TV commercials in the past. They do no interact with their clients. Social media management is in marketing’s hands today- which is fine-, but it actually also requires an effort that is typical of customer service and sales (for their account management role). Social media management and a social media strategy cannot stay only in marketing’s hands. And most of all, it cannot be in the intern’s hands or with an agency – which will surely give your brand (along with its reputation) in an intern’s hands.

Think about what has recently happened to Versace with their Facebook page or to Chrysler with their Twitter handle, to name a couple: they had to sither shut down comments on Facebook or fire the media agency serving them, respectively. When I read these stories, I keep reminding a Latin sentence: scripta manent, verba volant, which means “what is written stays, words fly away”. This is why social media should be in experts’ hands and it should be part of a formal strategy.

We must remember we are constantly listened (read) by our audience, and also they are willing to talk back to us. They want to interact. This is what social networks are about: being social.  So social media marketing is not just marketing on a new channel  but it’s building a relation with clients, hat same relation that is usually built with meetings with clients, with sales calling them  and asking if everything is OK to keep the client “warm”.

And, of course, since numbers show the reason why people follow brands on social networks (see the 4Rs in the “related posts” section at the bottom of this post), companies should give them what they want. This is customer centricity. It’s not what we think they want. It’s what they ask for. And clients are surely not deaf!

Related posts:

Rushing for Google+ company pages? They will come in the next few months.

I am sure you all agree Google+ launch had a great marketing campaign: the invites only access to the new social network by the search giant was like lining up (queuing if you are in the UK) outside of the most famous disco full of VIPs.

Everyone wanted to get in, and someone started to sell invites to G+ on eBay!

Now, after Google announced the forthcoming pages for business, while some companies went crazy looking for Google+ experts, some other companies started their Google+ pages, ignoring that Google told them not to- and ignoring the fact that they were going to loose their page, along with its fans. I am sure you heard Google is closing down company pages and asking to put them under a person’s name.

There is only one little certain fact over here: while Google’s marketing was great during the launch of the beta version of G+, their marketing for business is way less clever. And they seem like they donìt really have a clear strategy and timing about their own product.

Shutting down a company page, changing the rules, letting someone stay in and leaving others out: this is not a great way to interact with customers that have likely used a lot of their marketing dollars over google adwords and that are willing to spend even more.

On the other side, also companies’ marketing is not too clever either: it seems companies are too busy trying to get in, and they don’t get that until Google gives them a green light (I am sure they are adding analytics to pages and adwords of course and great new tools), their company pages will just represent a waste of time and money. And they risk loosing fans too! And of course some “Google plus experts” are already out – as pointed out in this post.

If your company is in the process of deciding what to do and where to put your social marketing dollars in the next few months, Google suggests not to invest on them, basically. At least not yet, for the next few months.

In fact after this incredible mess – I can’t quite believe that a company that wants to position itself as the new Facebook makes all these mistakes – Christian Oestlien, Google’s group product manager, posted this on his profile (Google probably thinks such an important news should be shared this way) this announcement earlier today:

“A few weeks ago we mentioned we would be doing a test of business profiles and asked people interested to apply. Believe it or not we actually had tens of thousands of businesses, charities, and other organizations apply to take part from all over the world. Many of you have reached out to me personally through Google+, e-mail, chat, and even other Googlers. Thank you. Your response has been humbling.

With so many qualified candidates expressing intense interest in business profiles, we’ve been thinking hard about how to handle this process. Your enthusiasm obligates us to do more to get businesses involved in Google+ in the right way, and we have to do it faster. As a result, we have refocused a few priorities and we expect to have an initial version of businesses profiles up and running for EVERYONE in the next few months. There may be a tiny handful business profiles that will remain in the meantime solely for the purpose of testing how businesses interact with consumers.

In the meantime, we ask you not to create a business profile using regular profiles on Google+. The platform at the moment is not built for the business use case, and we want to help you build long-term relationships with your customers. Doing it right is worth the wait. We will continue to disable business profiles using regular profiles. We recommend you find a real person who is willing to represent your organization on Google+ using a real profile as him-or-herself. “

Lessons learned:

  1. Google’s marketing needs improvement
  2. Google’s customer service needs improvement
  3. Google needs to effectively communicate to their audience, possibly not through nice marketing artices published on select blogs/websites.
  4. Companies with a Google+ page will not be able to understand the effectiveness of their marketing efforts on Google+ till a final version of pages for business comes out, and their campaigns may fail if they insist with having a presence on G+
  5. Facebook may become stronger and take advantage of all these mistakes Google is doing.

Do you have a Google+ company page yet? What’s your take?

Related posts:

Facebook’s new users decline after the launch of Google+, while the two companies fight a new “War of the Roses”

It seems Google+ and Facebook have started some sort of “cold war”, with Google preventing a former employee (now with Facebook) to add more people to his circles, and Facebook blocking Google+ ads on its social network, while media and social media experts start showing their preference by publishing either too positive or too negative articles about G+.  Some independent forums also are not liking some form of censorship in G+.

Kathleen Turner and Michael Douglas in "The War of the Roses" (1989)

While the new “War of the Roses” goes on, I was wondering how Google plus is affecting – or may be affecting- current and forthcoming marketing efforts.

While some sources say that a good number of companies are in line waiting to build their company pages on Google+, I was thinking of those whose marketing dollars have been invested in Facebook already:

- Is there any risk companies should evaluate when deciding about their social media marketing dollars?

- Are there countries where Facebook-based marketing campaigns could be at risk?

- are there countries whose Facebook campaigns are “safer” and not impacted by a migration of fans to G+?

In order to answer these questions, I started comparing some figures about Facebook users growth by Country, and compared the last two weeks of June (before G+ was launched) with the first two weeks of July (when G+ was launched).

Analysis by SocialNetConomy, 2011

Interesting enough, in the past two weeks, while Google got 10 million new registered users since its launch, Facebook’s new users grew less than the previous 2 weeks. As shown in the picture above (SocialNetConomy, 2011), out of the 213 Countries where Facebook is present, new users registrations declined by some 3.4 million during the past two weeks.

Which Countries got the biggest decline?

The figure below represents the top 20 countries in Facebook (those with the majority of users, regardless of the Internet penetration in that Country). Top 20 countries decline, in terms of new Facebook registrations as a total, is slightly over 2 million.

Analysis by SocialNetConomy, 2011

Some countries slowed down more than others – and there is some confirmation in the recently launchedunofficial Google+ statistics website.

Analysis by SocialNetConomy, 2011

Data show a vast majority of countries experienced a slowdown – between 0.2 % and 1.3% of their overall Facebook users base for the top 20 countries. The table shows the difference between the number of new users registered in the June 15-June 30 (2011) timeframe, minus the number of new Facebook users registered in the the past two weeks (July 1- 15, 2011, after G+ launched).

The table shows the top 10 “declining countries” (additional data are available on request).

Suggestions to marketers investing on Facebook:

We are still at the beginning of G+ vs Facebook, but surely something more to consider on the marketers’ plate is how to keep people engaged on the platform they invested on. This could also be a good reason for Facebook to get closer to those brands whose pages may be keeping their fans on Facebook and that may keep Facebook growing. It could be a win-win if thhey manage to get closer to each other and become more “social”.

Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and Google+: who is using social media and what to expect from social media marketing in the future

There’s no day you open a news website or a printed newspaper and you do not find any article about social media or social networks. And increasingly, there are no talks with friends where you don’t mention the word “Facebook”, whether it’s about an event, a birthday or a photo album or some other gossip about your friends.

So, while the big giants of the web (unless you spent the past couple of weeks in a cave you should know I am talking about Facebook and Google) place their army on the two main buttons of your mouse, I started investigating how big is the social media effect on the business side of our life and what we should expect in the future.

Surely, when scrolling down the virtual wall of my Facebook friendsfeed, I can tell there is a huge Facebook penetration  in the business world (at least considering how active my friends are on commenting pictures and updating their status during their working hours). After all, if one every 6 minutes is spent on Facebook (according to ComScore’s research), some of those minutes must come from your office time. I heard someone bought an iPhone to stay on Facebook during office hours, after their company blocked access to it.

But, seriously: how big is Facebook penetration in today’s business? We all know big brands and large companies have a massive social media presence. But how many companies are really adopting social media as part of their strategy?

I found an interesting study on adoption of social links and plugins by the world’s 10000 largest websites. It provides a clear proof point we are just half way through the way that brings business close to their customers.

Less than 50% of the top 10000 websites have links to either of the two major social networks (Facebook and Twitter) on their front pages.

This gives us an interesting view of where we actually stand, what Social Media really is, and gives us room to understand what we should expect in the forthcoming months.

I believe we should take some little assumptions before moving ahead and get to the point:

  • Social media are about a new technology-based channel, and this is exactly how we should consider it.Social Media are not about a new marketing strategy.
  • While IT has become part of every company strategy, since it affects all units of a company, it seems social media (yet being substantially a “technology”), has not become part of the company strategy, though it’s about the company brand, and not just the number of fans on a facebook page. At least, this is true for about half the companies, it seems.
  • We need to consider Social Media’s users lifecycle like other technologies (please note the graph below has been authored in the 60’s by Everett Rogers) and we should keep in mind this is about SOCIAL, not only about media:

Rogers' bell curve

According to Rogers, who analyzed the technology adoption for farm practices, the adopters categories can be summarized as:

-          innovators – had larger farms, were more educated, more prosperous and more risk-oriented

-          early adopters – younger, more educated, tended to be community leaders

-          early majority – more conservative but open to new ideas, active in community and influence to neighbours

-          late majority – older, less educated, fairly conservative and less socially active

-          laggards – very conservative, had small farms and capital, oldest and least educated

We should of course consider those “less educated” companies in terms of being less educated in social networks.

We just miss another piece of information to understand what the possible future scenario can be: how old are today’s social media users? I found a nice infographic and took the numbers I needed from this analysis:

Keeping in mind what we just saw about the Rogers’ bell curve, the fact that LinkedIn users are usually older than Facebook and Twitter users, is another factor to keep in mind, and here is why:

-          traditionally, when talking about marketing, B2C marketing has been the one of the “early adopters”. Data confirm this theory for social media adoption by business brands: B2C companies are those topping the ist of most followed pages on Facebook and handles on twitter.

-         Interactions in the B2B business are those who likely happen in the senior executive level of companies: they are those taking decisions, they are those likely more “aged”, and they are those who we may likely consider being in the “late majority” and “laggards” portion of the “Rogers’ bell curve”, and they seem also those who have a higher presence on LinkedIn (the business network), which, in fact, has older users than the two most used social networks Twitter and Facebook.

Future scenarios for business: What shall we expect in the future of social media?

-          Social media marketing is all about building and increasing brand reputation while dealing directly with clients. To listen to them mainly, and to tell them also. This means increasingly, companies will centralize their brand strategies and integrate it with the company (marketing) strategy- which means social media strategy will call marketers and IT departments to talk more and more, like IT talks with company execs today.

-          B2B marketing will increasingly adopt the social media channel, and will likely develop a bigger presence on major social networks, including LinkedIn. This also means those companies operating in the B2B business will have to learn how to develop a “brand” strategy. The good news is B2B already knows how important is to “listen”.

-          LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter users will have a more similar average age.

-          Google+ and its pages for business will have a relevant impact on the social media marketing games and they have the huge potential of attracting those markets whose presence is not yet that high in social media.

Facebook fan pages vs (forthcoming) Google+ pages for business: lessons learned and tips

While waiting for Google+ business pages (and not only) to be officially open (after they let some brands get in, then blocked them, then re-opened again), I thought it was good to have a look at what happened with Facebook’s most famous fan pages.Especially since we all know this “social networks battle” is not just about social networks.

Also, after Facebook announced that some brands will have a dedicated offering to their fans, based on fans’ Klout scores, I thought it was good to have a look at klout scores too. I actually found something very interesting.

I started my analysis by finding the top 10 brands in a specific sector (I focused my attention on food and beverage) and started with gathering information about their Facebook fans, their twitter followers and their Klout score, since it seems these are the most used reference “numbers”. Interesting enough, while some Facebook fan pages gather over 10M fans, the relevance of their twitter followers and their Klout score seems totally not correlated.

After investigating on how they moved their social media steps, I found every brand has its own strategy and, while some of them have a complete integration between mobile apps, twitter and Facebook page (like, for example Starbucks does), some others stay definitely more simple.

But for a couple of them, the story on how their Facebook presence was created is really awesome: the Coca-Cola Facebook page was, in fact, created by 2 Coca-Cola fans from Los Angeles, who just went viral and got to page having over 3M fans in 2009. At that time, in 2009, they were contacted by Coca-Cola, who asked them to keep taking care of their page. And today, Coca-Cola ranks first in the top 10 brands on Facebook. Surely Coca-Cola had a very intelligent use of RFID – and not in their supply chain!- and a good partnership with Facebook. In fact, their Coca-Cola village 2010 experiment helped them gathering more fans. And Coca-Cola was the first to experiment RFID-enabled Likes for their page.

Definitely a great example of using the page for actually listening to the fans and spotting the best technology to get more visibility. They are also very active on their twitter, though their activity seems pretty much interacting directly with their followers. Good to have them feeling close to the brand.

Another fan page-  amongst the top 10 – created by a fan is the Nutella Facebook page. And interesting enough, the Nutella page is one of the most simple pages too! (I love the world map on the Facebook Info page, done with bread and Nutella, by the way).

So if your brand finds that you have a good number of fans on an unofficial page, think twice before asking Facebook to close that page (which is in your rights), especially if fans are well engaged and if the creators of that page give your brand a good reputation. Also, you may actually be saving some good $$.

Another interesting thing I found about the top ten pages, as anticipated at the beginning of this post, is that not all have a twitter presence (having worked mainly in Italy and only for a few months in the US, I am not really surprised the 2 products, both owned by an Italian brand, don’t also use twitter): I am referring to Ferrero Rocher and Nutella.

That’s not all. I found something even more interesting from this analysis. I am sure you all would think those pages with the majority of online interactions, integration of apps and twitter and with the most effective marketing on social media would translate – if not in an immediate revenue- at least in more visits on your corporate website, where maybe your talks can be more direct and more focusing on increasing your revenues. Wrong! Those pages with less interactions and links are those actually getting more traffic on their website  – at least according to compete – which tells you how your competitors are performing online. Data show website traffic trends for Ferrero (owner of both Nutella and Ferrero Rocher) and Coca-Cola for the past 12 months or so.

Ferrero’s website traffic increase seems more evident than Coca-Cola’s

What shall then brands do on Google+ to have winning strategies?

Surely, keep building brand reputation, increasing your clients and fans experience, letting them really interacting with the brand. Maybe suggesting contests and making your business page your hub for all your country-based marketing initiatives- If you are doing this on G+, you may likely be able to use google maps to point your audience to dedicated events (taking inspiration from the food trucks of famous New York restaurants), or use Circles to create dedicated messaging on upcoming events, promotions, and roadshows, or even use hangouts and let your fans use their own creativity to keep the ball rolling.

Facebook fan pages vs Google+ business pages:

Another good point to keep in mind is the different words used by the two companies to call their “branded” pages. Facebook, which is somehow more of a “vox populi” creation, and as Zuckerberg has pointed out, it’s all about leaving people a chance to create that 95% they want to add to what they give them, as reported in this article.Business pages on Facebook are called fan pages, and this sounds so nice and customer centric.

Google+ calls these pages “pages for business”.

Whatever you will do on G+, don’t forget to listen to what they have to tell you first. They may give you the right input to start your campaign.

How Do You Measure Your Social Media ROI?

Do you have a social media manager in your company? How do you measure the effectiveness of your social media efforts? Do you ask for a social media ROI?

I remember I read somewhere a marketing person answering the question “what’s the ROI of social media” with another question: “What’s the ROI of your phone?”
The problem is companies are used to measure their wellness with numbers (some use profits, some others use revenues only, some others use bookings, some use any of the 3… depending of what is more convenient to share to the board). So now execs want numbers out of social media too. Do clicks matter? Do Facebook fan pages matter? what is a good number? 100? 1000?
And of course marketers do their best to keep their bosses happy.

Surprisingly, more business are offering a quick marketing recipe these days: buy twitter followers and Facebook fans. In the era of social networks, where the word “social” is key and where companies have an incredible opportunity to listen to their audience and learn from what their clients have to say, there is still a shortcut for lazy marketers who just care aboout delivering numbers and not results.

I went across a tweet today, taking me to a page where I could buy a good number of twitter followers for a very small budget.It’s like going viral for just a few bucks.

And after browsing some online forums and discussion groups around this topic, I also found there are a few markeers willing to use such resources to keep their executives happy. After all, their target was to reach a certain number of twitter followers by a certain date.

Not only, you can also buy Facebook fans, and for much less! This would make your boss (or your stakeholders, or your clients) even happier!

Are these solutions really delivering what you are looking for? Are you using social media to generate traffic, to show you are very popular, or because you care about your business and about your clients?

Brand reputation is built on credibility, not celebrity. If your marketing department is cheating on your brand reputation, maybe they are not the right people for your business.

The great value of social media is to bring your brand so close to your customers that they can touch it, and can finally let you know what they think about your company, what really works in your product and what doesn’t. What is your differentiating factor making your business so good. Or how you could improve your product to become a market leader.

While traditional marketing has been built to bring your voice out and let others know you, here’s the magic of today’s marketing efforts – or at least this is what your company’s social media strategy should be focusing on: you bring you’re customers’ voice inside your board meeting.

When you buy Facebook fans, this won’t tell you which is the segment (in terms of age, sex and location) that better represents your clients. When you buy Facebook fans, they are not fans. It’s like paying people to clap their hands at the opera theatre. It’s not getting a deserved applause or a standing ovation.

How can you measure your social media marketing effectiveness then, if not on clicks, fans and followers? You can measure it by the feedback your marketing department is able to gather and bring to your table.

But the point is: while the social media marketing role is now “to listen”, will company execs be able to listen to their marketing and update the company’s product portfolio following their customers’ comments?