How They Plan to Spend their Money?

I read on eMarketing that 60% of the social marketing dollars next year will go toward staff salaries for activities such as blogging, content development and monitoring of social channels. Another two-fifths will be spent on outside help from agencies, consultancies and service providers.

We believe that content must be produced in-house so hiring your staff  is important. But brands need external help from social media experts to build an effective social media presence, to review and implement the best practices and to help them stay ahead of the curve. The outside help budget would be bigger for brands who want to get custom applications for Facebook, the iPhone or the Blackberry. Rules often changes; so you must account for that in your budget and deadlines. For example, running a contest on Facebook is subject to an approval process since November 2009.

Most Popular Social Media Objectives

With the splurge on email marketing to their in-house list that was evident this holiday, I am surprised that we do not see the in-house list or building a community of fans as a strategic marketing objective.

Industries that will Increase the Most their Social Media Marketing Budget

As you can see, retailer and e-commerce brands will increase the most their social media marketing budget followed by the publishing/media industry. I am surprised that the travel/leisure industry is not on the top 3.

+ via eMarketer

• ComScore Media Metrix’s year-end report: Women’s community was the most visited and fastest growing Internet category, tied with politics. The number of unique visits to women’s community sites jumped 35% to almost 70 million from 52 million. This is quite an achievement considering the US Presidential race.
• InsideFacebook: Two days ago (in September 2008), a new survey shows that women outnumber men on Facebook in every age group.

The most current Facebook statistics look like this

What it interesting is that reality is still holding. It has been true month after month. Women are truly embracing social media. The only social networking site where there is more men than women is LinkedIn.

Anderson Analytics’ Social Network Sites A&U Profiler Survey

The first conclusion that is interesting for a marketing viewpoint or if you wish to have your own social network application is to look at how men and women use SNS. You can read from the press release on that particular SNS study the following:

While male and female SNS users engage in similar activities online, the survey found that males are more likely to share information about their hobbies, interesting articles or work-related topics. Female users in general are more likely to share photos, information about what they are currently doing or posts about their pets.

Social network sites vary in popularity based on ages. From that you can see that the older generations use mostly Facebook and Twitter. The Generation X and the WII generation are the most active on Twitter. Overall, Facebook is the most popular site, followed by My Space, Twitter and LinkedIn. Plus, Facebook members were the most loyal among regular users.

Anderson Analytics published the results of an interesting survey in mid-July 2009 about SNS habits and user profiles. The survey reached 5000 users in the United States. The average ages are not too far apart. The survey found that MySpace has the youngest user group (29 yrs old), while LinkedIn’s audience is the oldest (36 yrs old). Facebook users have on average 34 years old while the average age on Twitter is 33.

It came to no surprises that people in different age groups use social networking sites (SNS) for the different reasons. We see that survey after survey. After all, generation gap and different lifestyles play a role in how people uses SNS.

MORE:
+ New Social Media Study: Facebook Trumps Other Social Media as Most Valuable; Majority of Users Can’t Do Without Popular Site on Tom H. C. Anderson
+ How the Old, the Young and Everyone in Between Uses Social Networks on eMarketer

+ If you are not convinced of the popularity of social media, have a look at more than 20 mind-blowing social media statistics. The 250 million Facebook users have a high level of participation. More than 120 million Facebook users log on to Facebook at least once a day and more than 30 million users update their statuses at least once a day. 50% of all Twitter updates are published using mobile and Web-based tools. Twitter is my social media when I am on the go.

+ Mitch Joel of Six Pixels of Separation shared how some brands use Twitter to listen, discover problems and act on it without posting a single tweet. Twitter is a wonderful tool for customer service research. Even if the high level management is not ready at your company to actively interact in social media, it does not mean that you should do nothing. Remember that just monitoring what people say about your brand is useless if you do not act on based on the information you gathered. Read How Big Business Is On Twitter Without Being “On Twitter”.