Top ten countries on Facebook, with growth figures, to March 31st 2010, from Nick Burcher’s blog and UK Facebook demographics from Inside Facebook
The Icelandic government has called for all 320,000 of its citizens to use Facebook at 2pm GMT today to promote their country in an emergency move to try and repair damage the ash cloud has had on their main industry – tourism.
“It’s a worldwide campaign to let the rest of the world know that Iceland isn’t completely covered in ash,” Icelandic tourist board director of marketing Jon Gunnar Borgthorsson said.
“The eruption has indeed had very little effect here in Iceland, it’s only about three to five per cent of the country that’s been affected by it,” he said, adding “the volcanoes are all far from urban areas, and anyways, we are well prepared for eruptions.”
A Facebook page ‘Inspired by Iceland’ has been created along with a Twitter account, a Vimeo video upload page and a dedicated website. With fours hours to go to launch, Facebook fans stand at 10,847 and Twitter followers at 466.
Iceland’s government said in April it would provide 300 million kronur (£1.6 million), in aid to the country’s tourism industry, which was bracing for mass cancellations due to the ongoing volcano eruption.
Iceland’s move is the most dramatic example to date of tourist boards using social media to promote tourism, following last years Best job in the world from Queensland and Philadelphia’s announcement of a Foursquare promotion this month.
Source: heraldsun.com.au
Jimmy Choo has pioneered a location based social media campaign around London, using Foursquare, Twitter & Facebook to promote their new trainers.
The concept, developed by FreshNetworks, is that you can follow a pink bag of Jimmy Choo shoes around a variety of smart locations in London, and if you manage to intercept them, they’ll give you a pair of trainers free.
While Foursquare is relatively unknown in the UK compared to the US, the resolutely upmarket locations are also posted on Twitter & Facebook and have ranged from Harvey Nichols and Sloane Square to the inside of a Bentley.
The ‘CatchAChoo’ campaign currently has 408 Facebook friends, 825 Twitter followers and around 585 Foursquare friends. No doubt the most marketing benefit is to be had from publicity about the campaign itself, which has been reported over the last couple of days. More »
The use of LinkedIn for B2B sales prospecting has increased by 47.8% since last year, according to US research from OneSource, reported in Emarketer.
Around 20 percent of those polled were also increasing their use of blogs, Facebook and Twitter for prospecting purposes, though the overall majority still do not use social media for prospecting.
The most popular approach for gaining qualified leads remains outbound prospecting, which was rated 3.7 out of five for effectiveness, followed by the company website (2.9), inbound calls (2.6), email campaigns (2.6), shows & events (2.5), social networking (2.1) , direct mail (2.1) and webinars (1.8).
In January Hubspot research showed that 45% of US companies who have used LinkedIn for marketing had acquired a customer through the site. Company blogs were considered effective for 43% of respondents, while Twitter for 38% and Facebook for 33%.
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 Facebook centred 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 »
The Liberal Democrats have overtaken The Labour Party on Facebook with 7,103 fans compared to Labour’s 7,055, though both parties are some way behind The Conservatives Party which has 23,553 fans.
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).
This week’s fastest risers chart below. More »
