Twitter is the preferred tool of marketers, closely followed by Facebook, a survey by online business magazine, SocialMediaExaminer.com has found.
The 2010 Social Media Marketing Industry Report, which canvassed opinion from almost 2,000 marketers, indicated that 88% of marketers use Twittter, while 87% use Facebook.
In third place was the online professional networking platform, LinkedIn, with 78% usage while 70% used blogs. Online video sites such as YouTube had the next-highest usage rate, at 46%.
An earlier version of this survey, released in 2009, found that blogs were in second place at 79%, and Facebook in fourth place at 77%. This would suggest that Facebook is growing in popularity for marketing and PR purposes. Another interesting finding was that men were significantly more likely than women to use YouTube or other video marketing tools. More »
Starbucks’ 6.5 million Facebook fans are worth the equivalent of a $23.4 million annual media spend, according to calculations by social media specialists Vitrue, reported in Adweek.
The firm has worked out that, on average, a fan base of 1 million translates to at least $3.6 million in equivalent media over a year, or $3.6 per fan.
Vitrue arrived at its $3.6 million figure by working off a $5 CPM, meaning a brand’s 1 million fans generate about $300,000 in media value each month.
Vitrue analysed Facebook data from its clients’ 41 million fans and found that most fans yielded an extra impression. That means a marketer posting twice a day can expect about 60 million impressions per month through the news feed. More »
Stella Artois has launched a Facebookcentred campaign to promote its 4% brand in the build up to the Cannes Film Festival in May.
The idea, developed by advertising agency Mother, is based on the premise that a famous french film director, Jacques d’Azur has gone missing, presumed dead and his estate has made an appeal to the public to find his heir.
The really clever social media bit is when you sign up to the competition through Facebook, your profile picture becomes integrated in a film taking place in his solicitor’s office about the possible beneficiary of the estate – very cool.
The winner of the competition takes Jacques’s place as a VIP at the Cannes Film Festival.
The campaign is supported with a Twitter page and a FlickR photostream of Jacques’s life.
The preposterously glamorous life of Jacques More »
In the Twitter rankings, Lib Dems remain third with 9,307 followers behind Labour with 11,073 who are again some way behind the Tories with 21,324.
In iphone application terms, Lib Dems have yet to launch an election app, though they do have a euro manifesto version. The two other main parties launched apps earlier this month, though UKIP were ahead of both with their February launch.
The Tories have also launched a secure Blackberry app for canvassing candidates which allows them to check into a central database and tread a consistent party line.
The smartphone known as a crackberry for its addictive qualities is more of a crack-the-whip-berry in this case it seems!
B2B marketers intend to increase spend on social media by 43% in 2010, while overall marketing budgets remain static, a survey by US research firm Outsell has reported.
However, when asked which social media sites carried the most influence for B2B marketers, surprisingly, Facebook was considered effective by the most respondents – 51%, followed by LinkedIn – 45% and Twitter – 35%.
As eMarketer points out, this is at odds with Hubspot’s survey of lead generation amongst North American B2B marketers where 45% considered LinkedIn most effective with Facebook at 33%.
The contradiction perhaps reveals a gap between understanding that social networking is important and knowing how to implement a social media strategy in the B2B market. I’m with Hubspot, LinkedIn is definitely the better route for B2B marketers at this point, combined with Twitter.
Facebook overtook Google as the most visited site in the US last week.
Figures for week ending 13th March, released by Hitwise shows Facebook visits accounted for 7.07 percent of all websites, compared to 7.03 percent for Google.
Facebook has temporarily spiked ahead of Google before, on Christmas Eve and Christmas Day 2009 but Hitwise charts show that Facebook, with more than 400 million members, may now surge ahead of Google permanently.
Membership growth is one factor, the rapid rise in social gaming another, with games like Mafia Wars generating nearly 10 million Facebook fans.
Facebook’s marketshare of visits has grown 185% in a year, compared to Google’s 9% rise in the same period.
Shoe brands VANS and Converse along with Starbucks and Skittles were the four fastest growing Facebook brands this week, according to Inside Facebook, a blog that monitors fan pages.
While VANS and Converse may be benefiting from the consolidation of old Facebook fan pages into one main page, Skittles appears to be growing due to a voucher offer which allows registered fans to buy two packets of Skittles for the price of one (BOGOF).
Outside of consumer brands, the top twenty is dominated by pop stars, footballers and social media games. From a British perspective, good to see hit TV programme House, starring Hugh Laurie make an appearance at number 20 with a gain of 65,800 fans following its return to TV screens last week.
The overall rankings for brands’ fans on Facebook looks like this, Starbucks (6.1m) Coca-Cola (5.1m) Skittles (3.9m) Nutella (3.6m) Pringles (3m).
According to estimates from blog Inside Facebook, revenue for the pre -eminent social network is expected to exceed $1bn in 2010.
Revenues have typically doubled each year, according to the research carried out amongst industry experts, from $150m in 2007, to $300m in 2008 and so on, with advertising revenue from fan pages believed to be the main driver.
2009 is seen as an important transitionary year for the site which grew to more than 350m monthly active users, from 150m at the beginning of the year. Of those, 100m were in the US and another 100m were in Europe – the two markets where brand advertising brings in the most money.
Brand advertising is estimated at $225m for 2010 and Inside Facebook predicts this stream could eventually grow to $20bn, taking share away from more established sites like Yahoo and MySpace. More »
Twitter has announced its number of daily status updates or tweets has now passed 50 million, closing in on Facebook’s claimed 60 million.
Announced on its blog, Twitter describes the exponential growth of the service since it began:
“Folks were tweeting 5,000 times a day in 2007. By 2008, that number was 300,000, and by 2009 it had grown to 2.5 million per day. Tweets grew 1,400% last year to 35 million per day. Today, we are seeing 50 million tweets per day—that’s an average of 600 tweets per second.”
According to a report by RJ Metrics last month, while Twitter is adding accounts at the rate of 6.2 million per month, only 17 percent of these are active each month.
First Pepsi drop their Super Bowl TV ad slot for the first time in 23 years, preferring to create dialogue through a new website www.RefreshEverything.com, now Volvo has launched the first video of its new S60 model on its Facebook pageonly, ahead of it’s official debut at the Geneva Car show in March. Here it is:
Twitter is the preferred tool of marketers, closely followed by Facebook, a survey by online business magazine, SocialMediaExaminer.com has found.
Stella Artois has launched a 
The 
B2B marketers intend to increase spend on social media by 43% in 2010, while overall marketing budgets remain static, a survey by US research firm Outsell has reported.
Facebook overtook Google as the most visited site in the US last week.
Shoe brands VANS and Converse along with Starbucks and Skittles were the four fastest growing Facebook brands this week, according to Inside Facebook, a blog that monitors fan pages.
According to estimates from blog 
Twitter has announced its number of daily status updates or tweets has now passed 50 million, closing in on Facebook’s claimed 60 million.