Social Media Marketing Resources

CONTENT TYPE: Chart | TOPIC: Social Media Marketing

Small business owners are still lukewarm about social media: 53% say they use social media for business, but only 12% say social marketing is a must for their business, according to a survey from Hiscox. Social media adoption varies by company size, however.

CONTENT TYPE: Chart | TOPIC: Social Media Marketing

LinkedIn is now the second most popular social networking site in the US: Traffic to the professional networking website increased 63% year over year as of June 2011, inching past MySpace for the first time, according to data from comScore Media Metrix.

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Marketing budgets are on the rise again: 57% of senior-level marketers say they are increasing their overall marketing spend in 2011; among them, most (26%) plan to increase budgets between 1% and 5%, according to the CMO Council's State of Marketing Report.

CONTENT TYPE: Chart | TOPIC: Social Media Marketing

Ad rates on the nation's most popular social network are climbing: Median cost-per-clicks (CPCs) on Facebook grew 22% in the second quarter of 2011 over the previous quarter, according to report by Efficient Frontier and Context Optional. Meanwhile, search spending increased 8% in the second quarter over 2Q10 levels.

CONTENT TYPE: Chart | TOPIC: Social Media Marketing

More online consumers are using Facebook on a regular basis to find information about their favorite retail brands, whereas fewer consumers are turning to blogs, forums, and consumer review sites than they were a year ago, according to a new survey from Compete. Twitter is less popular than Facebook for finding retail information, but Twitter feeds are more successful than Facebook pages at influencing purchase decisions among users.

CONTENT TYPE: Chart | TOPIC: Social Media Marketing

Venture capital (VC) funding of social media companies reached $2.23 billion in the second quarter of 2011, roughly 3.5 times the $643 million raised by social media companies one year earlier, according to a report by Wedbush Securities. Group-buying companies received the largest outlays during the quarter, led by LivingSocial, 55tuan, and Coupons.com.

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With lead acquisition the top goal of today’s B2B companies, marketers are prioritizing investments in social media and digital content marketing in 2011, according to a survey from Focus. Meanwhile, client understanding and customer retention are top goals for B2C brands with marketers emphasizing social media, digital content, and email as a means to achieve their goals.

CONTENT TYPE: Chart | TOPIC: Social Media Marketing

More brands are using social networking to win new business: 43% of US companies say they are successfully using social networks to find new customers, up 8 percentage points from the 35% that reported doing so a year earlier, according to a survey from Regus.

CONTENT TYPE: Chart | TOPIC: Social Media Marketing

Facebook, the fourth largest Web property in the US, attracted some 157.2 million visitors in May 2011, an all-time high and a gain of 3.2 million visitors over the previous month, according to data from comScore Media Metrix.

CONTENT TYPE: Chart | TOPIC: Social Media Marketing

"iParents," or parents who own iPhones, are more active than other parents on Facebook and are more likely to use the site to help with day-to-day parenting—such as learning about their kids' social relationships—according to a study by Retrevo.

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Daily-deal offers may be an effective way to attract new customers and re-engage inactive ones, according to a new study by Foresee Results: Among surveyed consumers who had redeemed a daily-deal offer in the previous 90 days, nearly one-third (31%) said they were new customers and more than one-quarter (27%) said they were infrequent customers.

CONTENT TYPE: Chart | TOPIC: Social Media Marketing

Over the past two years, the number of people using social networking sites has nearly doubled, while the population of social networking users has shifted to older audience segments, according to a report by Pew Research. Now constituting a near majority of the US population (47%), people who use social sites are more politically engaged than other adults and are more likely to trust others.

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As mobile adoption grows rapidly in the US, so does mobile content consumption, which recorded double-digit year-over-year (YOY) growth across all major categories as of March 2011 with social networking the standout category, increasing 45.7% to nearly 64 million users, according to data from comScore MobileLens.

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When searching for local business information, consumers consult between two and three (2.2) media sources on average with Yellow Pages (Internet and print) and search engines among the most popular, surpassing other media sources such as store circulars, promotional emails, and social networks, according to a study by the Local Search Association.

CONTENT TYPE: Chart | TOPIC: Social Media Marketing

Each day, Twitter users post more than 100,000 questions* to followers on the microblogging site, according to a study by inboxQ. Nearly six in ten of such users say they would welcome answers from companies, provided the quality of answers was as good as or better than those from followers.