Social Media Marketing Resources

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The Web's most influential teens are more likely than other teens to actively participate in social media and digital activities, such as updating their social networking status and sending text messages, but they are also more likely to spend time influencing their peers and socializing offline, according to a survey from myYearbook and Ketchum.

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Though most active users of social networking sites say they visit those sites primarily to stay connected with friends and family, many also want to engage with brands: 65% of such frequent social networking users say they are a fan of at least one brand on Facebook and 31% follow a brand on Twitter, according to a survey from Invoke Solutions.

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When stocking up on back-to-school items, consumers love Target and Old Navy—and are more passionate about those brands than they are about any other major US retailer, according to the NetBase Brand Passion Index, which measures the intensity of consumer passion for brands among users of online communities.

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Even though a Twitter user may have a large following, his or her influence on Twitter is more strongly associated with engagement rather than numbers of followers or retweets, according to new research from the Hewlett-Packard Social Computing Lab.

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Email and an organization's intranet are the most important communication tools for organizations to engage employees and foster productivity, but a growing number of employers now use social media to distribute company news to their employees, according to a study from the International Association of Business Communicators (IABC) Research Foundation and Buck Consultants (an independent subsidiary of Xerox).

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What happens on Twitter doesn't just stay there: Active Twitter users—those who use Twitter on a daily basis—are three times more likely than other online consumers to produce a wide range of influential online content (blog posts, articles, and product reviews) that affect a brand's reputation, according to a survey from ExactTarget and CoTweet.

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Smartphones have become an integral part of Twitter and Facebook use: 33% of smartphone owners who use Twitter say they read tweets primarily via their smartphone, and 33% of such consumers send tweets primarily via their mobile device, according to a survey from Compete.

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Social networking sites reach a higher percentage of women than men worldwide, and across leading social sites, such as Facebook, women are more engaged—consuming more pages and spending more time—according to a new study from comScore. On average, women spend 30% more time on social networking sites than men; moreover, 75.8% of online women visited a social networking site in May 2010, compared with 69.7% of men.

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Though many brands now use Twitter to drive sales, improve customer service, and enhance brand loyalty, Twitter is a consumer-dominated medium: 91% of tweets are by consumers and only 8% are by marketers, according to a study by 360i. Brands are moreover rarely a topic of conversation: Only 12% of consumer tweets mention one.

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Like many aspects of mobile marketing, location-based social networks (LBSNs) offer interactive marketers the promise of connecting consumers with places and points of sale. Most marketers, however, should wait to adopt the nascent channel until larger industry players, such as Facebook and Yahoo, offer location-based services at a sufficiently large scale, according to a study by Forrester.

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To help drive viewers to online content, a just-launched platform uses linguistics technology and search marketing best-practices to integrate social media with search engine optimization (SEO). Search engine marketing and design firm Zog Media launched the platform, dubbed Project Redline, in partnership with social media press release builder PitchEngine.

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Though Facebook is the dominant social media platform, consumer satisfaction with the industry giant is low—with users citing concerns over privacy, security, technology, and advertising—whereas satisfaction with nonprofit Wikipedia is more favorable, according to a survey from ForeSee Results for the American Customer Satisfaction Index (ACSI).

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Though the adoption of sophisticated mobile devices continues to climb, the integration of mobile marketing into email and online programs is still low: Less than one-third of marketers say mobile-optimized experiences are relevant to their email audiences, but nearly two-thirds say they are integrating social technologies into their email efforts, according to a survey from eROI.

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More than 90% of consumers who are a fan of, or "like," at least one brand on Facebook also receive at least one permission-based marketing email per day, and roughly 75% of consumers who follow at least one brand on Twitter subscribe to at least one brand's email marketing, according to a study by ExactTarget.

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Despite the residual signs of the economic recession in 2010, marketers have some reason to be optimistic: 53% of marketing professionals say their salaries have increased in 2010 from a year earlier, according to the annual salary survey from the American Marketing Association (AMA) and Aquent.

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Most online teens (90%) use at least one social networking site—with Facebook still their top social destination—but nearly one-fifth (19%) of teens who have created a Facebook profile say they no longer visit the social site or are using it less, according to a survey from Roiworld.

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The manufacturing sector is showing early signs of recovery: 70% of industrial-sector marketers expect their sales to increase in 2010 over 2009 levels and 31% plan to increase their marketing budgets—with much of those dollars earmarked for online channels, such as video, social media, and search, according to a survey from GlobalSpec.

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The employment outlook for marketing and advertising is showing signs of improvement: 91% of marketing and advertising executives say they are confident in their firms' growth prospects for the third quarter of 2010, and 18% say they plan to increase staffing levels, up 5 percentage points from the 13% who said so in the previous quarter, according to The Creative Group Hiring Index for Marketing and Advertising Professionals.