Who Is Using What In Social Media?

Some interesting findings from a recent Pew Research survey.  Five key revelations:

1. Facebook remains that most preferred site although its growth has slowed quite dramtically.
2.  Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest and LinkedIn saw significant increases over the past year in the proportion of online adults who now use their sites
3. Men now use Twitter more than women.  The reverse was true in 2013.
4. More women (77%) than Men (66%) use Facebook
5. While LinkedIn is showing strong growth more than 60% use it infrequently

Related articles

• Pew: Facebook User Growth Slowed As Others Gained, But Still Has Most Engaged Users
• Pinterest Passes Twitter in Popularity

In A Buying Mood - Pinterest Vs Facebook

If you are selling something and planning to use social media to do so, does Facebook or Pinterest offer the best chance of delivering what you want?

New research from Bizrate Insights has found that 69% of consumers who have visited Pinterest discovered something they then purchased or wanted to purchase.  This compares to only 40% for Facebook.

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Even more compelling was the finding that 70% of consumers use Pinterest to get inspired about things to buy and 67% use this social media platform to keep track of things they like.

You may use Facebook more to maintain friendships, but Pinterest is clearly out in front when it comes to selling. Both are sites which online consumers use to connect with people who have similar styles and interests. Pinterest though is more often used as a destination for shopping inspiration, tracking, and product discovery.

It also seems that brand building is better on Pinterest than on Facebook.  Bizrate reports that:

"A greater percent (55%) of Pinterest users have engaged with retailers and brands via Pinterest, compared to the percent of Facebook users that engage retailers or brands on Facebook (48%).  But how customers engage differs for each of the two platforms.  Pinterest users are more likely to be “Creators”: adding and sharing retailer/brand related content, while Facebook users are more likely to be “Participators”: interacting with promotional activities developed by retailers and brands."

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The reach of Facebook still blitzes Pinterest but awareness of the latter is trending upwards rapidly.  36% of online consumers had heard of Pinterest in March but by August this figure had risen to 46%.

The reports data from September 2012 showed that 63% of online consumers had a Facebook account and only 15% had a Pinterest account.  Facebook is not sitting twiddling its thumbs when it comes to luring purchasers. They are testing a new feature, "collections", that lets users create wish lists of products by clicking on "want" or "collect" buttons.

PCWorld believes that the want button, if adopted permanently, could drive a lot of traffic to brands on Facebook and encourage impulse purchases.  They could be correct in this assumption and if it does it will have some serious implications for Pinterest.

But Pinterest is on the right growth projectory with a recent ComScore study putting it in the top 50 most-visited Web sites in the US for the first time, with 25 million unique visitors in the month. Ranked at 50th it still has  along way to catch Facebook which is ranked 4th in the same survey.

Related articles

• Pinterest drives more than window shopping
• Pinterest stats: does it really drive more sales than Facebook?

Advertising Placement In Asia And Elsewhere?

Wanting to take online advertising in Asia or elsewhere?  Not sure if social media or online versions of newspapers are your best choice? This interactive chart may give you some pointers.

Simply highlight one of the demographic or maximum impressions buttons and you can judge which platforms or media you will be able to use to best advantage.


All statistics are taken from Google's AdPlanner.

Visualising with Vizify

We live in a visual world as the recent and rapid success of Pinterest has demonstrated. Now three Geeks (their term, not mine) have come up with something after a coffee-fueled frenzy that has all the juice of a good interactive infographic.

Zuckerberg's Law states that the amount of online data about an individual doubles each year so they gathered their own data and tried to make sense of it all. They found the data disjointed and overwhelming: career history here, tweets there, check-in data everywhere.  Boring and incoherent is not a good look!

Enter Vizify, a network  acknowledging the fact  that you are more than the sum of your parts. Vizify creates one definitive, multidimensional, graphical biography.

Overview Screen

Twitter visualisation with sliding time scale

While it is early days and the network is by invitation only, getting an invite proved really easy.  The result of my 'dabbling' can be see here.

The other thing that impressed me about Vizify was its simplicity.  It is a simple matter to change the privacy settings, drag and drop content, colour your world or add new services

Easy to use editing panel

So if like me you like the idea of an interactive infographic for prospective employers and clients that presents your online biography in an exciting way, then Vizify is for you.

And while we are talking about new social media tools try out Skylines, which organises the world’s real-time photos. The platform indexes over 5 million photos a day sent through services Twitter, Instagram, Twitpic, Yfrog and Lockerz.

Skyline - real-time images as they happen

Related articles

• Put your business card online with Vizify
• Does Vizify Help or Hinder your Personal Brand?

Open Sesame

This magical phrase from the story Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves may well  resonate for budding email marketers.

The place of email in the online marketing mix remains a contested topic but it most definitely has it place.  The seemingly depressing statistic is the opening rate for such communications and this can be off-putting until one realises that you measly 25% is consistent with the industry standard you represent.

Take this recently released 2012 Silverpop Email Marketing Metrics Benchmark Study, for example.

The chart shows nonprofit emails have an average unique opening rates of just 21.2%.  It so happens that I have an interest in this particular figure as since 1998 I have been publishing a museum news site and send out weekly emails to subscribers.  While my opening rate is usually above 23% the aim is to get results that are in the upper quartile.  Being average is not good enough.

More important still is the Click Through Rate.  The simple act of opening an email is no guarantee of capturing a reader's interest. The better news is that while email opening rates are falling the CTR is increasing.

It is therefore essential to be using a good email marketing programme that has a robust set of statistical reports built in.  There are several in this category but one of the simplest to use (and the most friendly) is MailChimp.

One of the latest trends that is yielding very good results are email programmes that combine the functionality of social media platforms.  CheetahMail for example, has added Pinterest functionality to some of their email campaigns so that consumers can link products listed in a promotional email directly to their Pinterest pin boards. The result - 11% higher opening rates.

In the case of a furniture design enterprise the results of using this approach also showed:

• A 2.8% increase in click-to-open rates
• A 15%+ increase in Pinterest followers within the first week of deployment
• A 33% increase in pin board activity

Related articles

• Some experts say email marketing is dead: true or false?
• Survey Reveals Changing Role of Email Marketing
• E-mail Open Rates Declining, Click-Through Rates Rising [Study]

Why LinkedIn And Pinterest Should Be Part Of Your Mix

While Pinterest's rise has been meteoric, LinkedIn has been the 'slow burner'. Both have their place in the marketing mix. I have noted that Pinterest has become increasingly effective in driving referral traffic to a corporate site and LinkedIn has a similar effect, especially when the posts have been made to targeted interest groups that content directly relates to.

In the first month of this year there were147 million users on LinkedIn and Pinterest reached the 10 million unique active users mark. LinkedIn has the highest penetration rates in the USA, the Gulf States and the Netherlands. Pinterest currently has 13. 6 million users according to AppData.

Higher referral traffic, better quality leads and ultimately increased sales result from using both of these platforms. (Awareness).

Interest in Pinterest has slackened slightly in the past year as this chart from Google Trends search results demonstrates.

By comparison, LinkedIn's search trends have remained fairly constant expect for a huge spike in June, no doubt related to the security breach that network experienced.

For the past couple of months LinkedIn  has been running a beta test for new targeting options and fifty brands have been taking part.

Companies will now be able to direct  posts to target  groups of followers with status updates based on company size, industry, function, seniority, employee tenure and geography. So for example, if your product or service is related to farming you can now segment by agriculture, the country profile and level of corporate seniority to get to the right decision maker.

Mike Grishaver of LinkedIn says that in a recent study they discovered that 67% of their members follow a company to gain industry insights, 61% for company news, while 49% are attracted by the peer community. LinkedIn's aim is to enable more relevant conversations between companies and followers.




Awareness recently produced a white paper 'Beyond The Big Three - 5 Killer Strategies to Dominate LinkedIn and Pinterest".  Here are their seven tips for increasing social reach using Pinterest:

1. Create pinboards and populate the boards with your own pins and by repinning from other users.•  Create topic-specific boards that resonate with your target audience to encourage following ofyour brand’s profile. Focus board topics on the lifestyle, history, causes, and interests relatedto your customers.•  When creating boards, use keywords developed for SEO to refine your boards and integrateyour Pinterest brand profile with your marketing initiatives.
2. Publicize your Pinterest account on all other social platforms.
3. Embed Pinterest buttons or widgets on your company website.
4. Register your profile in Pinterest directories to grow your followership:• WePin.org is a directory based on specific interests.• Repinly lists stats about Pinterest users and the most popular pinners / boards based on topic.
5. Consider connecting your Pinterest account with your brand’s Twitter profile to effectively use hashtags.Note: Carefully consider connecting with Facebook - the hashtags on Pinterest are only appropriate for Twitter and may clutter your Facebook timeline.
6. Once you've built a following, encourage users to create their own pins and repin items from your boards and your website. This will ensure that your boards are shared with your followers’ followers, increasing your brand reach on the platform.
7. Post consistently to retain and grow your social reach.

Related articles

• Everybody needs both Pinterest and LinkedIn

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• Why Google+ and Pinterest Matter to Nonprofits

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• Buying Power Of Pinterest Users 2nd Only To LinkedIn, Says ComScore [CHARTS]

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Why Pinning Is In Your Best Interest

Source: Experian

Those of us who are early adopters of Pinterest will have noticed a dramatic rise in activity from this social media channel in recent months.  As the above chart from a recent Experian study shows, Pinterest has clearly captured the interest of global users and no doubt the developers GooglePlus are looking at this surge with some envy.

Pinterest has leapfrogged Google Plus and is now the third most popular social networking site behind Facebook and Twitter. There were 11.7 million visitors to the site in January of 2012.

It is in the top ten websites for Hitwise's Social Networking and Forums category and from January to February of this year its growth grew a whopping 50%.  Not a bad result for a platform that only started in March of 2010.

As Experian points out, this growth is part of a much wider societal trend. "Users are increasingly more comfortable with recommendations from friends or other users when they come through social personalisation".

The shift in social media is away from just linking with friends and more towards common interests.  This means that brands and retailers need to carfeully consider what boards they will deploy and what products or images they will pin.

Choosing a category that can be associated with your company's products and service, but is not necessarily produced by the company can be challenging but is not insurmountable. A provider of IT services and solutions might might choose to pin 'Gadgets as in the example here. Gadgets are one of the more shareable items on Pinterest.

The second thing to remember is that any image you choose to pin or share needs to be of quality and immediate visual appeal. Close-ups rather than distant images, good colour rendition and optimisation should all be considered when selecting.

If you pin 'quality' you will be associated with it and vice versa. And be positive in your comments section, making sure that you use the edit function for each image once you have pinned it to link back to where you want the viewer to go. Always credit your image sources.

When using Pinterest for marketing purposes it should also be remembered that:

• Women use it to a far greater degree than men (68.2% of users are women - other studies put this figure as high as 80%). 
• 50% of users have children
• Home décor, crafts, fashion and food dominate the pin boards
• Users spend far longer on Pinterest than they do on most other social platforms  - 15.8 minutes, compared to Facebook (12.1 minutes) and Twitter (3.3. minutes).  Only YouTube captures interest longer (16.8 minutes)
• 25-34 is the dominant age demographic for Pinterest users
• 28% of users could be termed well off, with incomes over $US100,000.
• Sharing by re-pinning is by far the greatest activity rather than using a browser pin marklet.

Stats source: Modea

Remember that while Pinterest is a fast mover it still has a long, long way to go to make any headway against Facebook which will shortly reach 1 billion users and has 26.4% of all referral traffic (Pinterest, Google Plus and Twitter are all below 4%).

Finally here are some recent findings from Dan Zarella of Hubspot based on a data set of 11,000 pins. These can provide some guidance when you are aiming for maximum reach on Pinterest:

• Descriptions about 200 characters long are most re-pinnable
• Pins about food are very pinnable

  

• Aim to write "likable" content rather than "commentable" content for repins
• Taller images are more repinnable

Dan Zarella - Hubspot

Hubspot

 Related articles

• Experian: Pinterest is third most-visited social site
• Pinterest climbs to third most popular social network

A Marketer's Guide To Pinterest

Source: MDG Advertising

Pinning To Twitter

If you have plunged into pinning on Pinterest then you will not doubt be considering how you can spread Pinterest content seamlessly to your Twitter account.

This is not as difficult as it might first sound.  Fortuitously a minor tweaking of the URL address of a Pinterest board is all that is required.  Each has its own web address (URL) and these end with a forward slash ( / )

Each Board has its own distinctive URL.

Step One: Change this URL address into that of an RSS feed simply by removing the forward slash ( / ) and replacing it with .rss

Step Two: Copy this new URL address and check it by pasting it into the address bar of an IE browser.

The RSS Feed will look something like this

Note: If you want to promote your entire Pinterest activity rather than an individual board then misplay add the prefix feed.rss after the URL e.g.  https://pinterest.com/digitalc/feed.rss

Step Three:  Now use this new URL address to set up an automatic RSS feed into your twitter account.  There are two free options that you might care to use -  Hootsuite or Twitterfeed. My personal preference is Twitterfeed, as Hootsuite is restricted to just two RSS feeds in their free account option.

Note: Sign into the twitter account that you want the RSS feed to appear in before opening either Twitterfeed or Hootsuite; use a new window for either of these two platforms.

Step Four: Here is the Twitterfeed process after you have logged in.

Name your feed and add the RSS- test it then go to Step 2

So now you have created a cross between a 'Pin' and a 'Tweet' -  a 'Peet' perhaps?

Related articles

• From Mashable- How to Track Your Website's Content on Pinterest