Are you using social media marketing yet?
On a daily basis I take notice of how people’s use of the Internet is changing the world and how everyday users are allowing the web to infiltrate new areas of their lives. The technology around the web has evolved very quickly over the past few years and users are now heavily reliant on the web for everyday tasks and communication. Social media is not a new term in relation to this rate of change and adoption and it’s already so powerful for users and for businesses.
Social media is not a fad. it’s a fundamental shift in the way that we communicate.
Businesses wanting success from social media marketing need to learn how this medium works and carefully think through ways of utilising this technology properly. Too many businesses are clamouring desperately to use social media just because “everyone is using it”. This leads to social media networks being littered with literally thousands of accounts that are effectively junk. Throughout all this mess however there are some amazing campaigns that are resulting in certain brands gaining huge success from social media. Before we get into what makes a successful social media campaign let’s get some facts straight.
Nielsen published stats showing that “three of the world’s most popular brands online are social-media related (Facebook, YouTube and Wikipedia) and the world now spends over 110 billion minutes on social networks and blog sites. This equates to 22 percent of all time online or one in every four and half minutes. For the first time ever, social network or blog sites are visited by three quarters of global consumers who go online, after the numbers of people visiting these sites increased by 24% over last year. The average visitor spends 66% more time on these sites than a year ago, almost 6 hours in April 2010 versus 3 hours, 31 minutes last year.” Nielsen, June, 2010
That’s HUGE! Facebook has announced 400mm users, Feb 5, 2010. LinkedIn now has 60mm users. As at 22nd Feb 2010, we were seeing 50 million tweets per day – that’s an average of 600 tweets per second. YouTube is the second biggest search engine in the world and over 15 Hours of video are uploaded every minute.
People are engaged in social media and whilst it’s important that we follow it’s evolution, it’s not going to disappear. The questions is not whether or not you need to use social media but how are you going to use it to effectively communicate with your customers and market.
What’s and API and how is that changing the world?
Mashable recentyly wrote how Social media services like Twitter, Facebook, and Google (Google) have been fundamental in the growth of promoting the sharing of information and fostering innovation. While these companies have created some incredible tools, their greatest innovation may actually be opening up their products to outside developers and networks through the use of the API.
The API, or application programming interface, is a way for one application or website to access the information help by another website or alternatively push information in dynamically to another application. This effectively allows outside parties to build a product or app off of an existing service. TweetDeck (TweetDeck) for Twitter, MySpace applications, and Facebook Connect are a few examples of the use of social APIs today. At some point in the recent past, social APIs were developed and given by these companies and it ultimately changed the way we share information. These API are now evolving and what people builind in the future is yet to be defined. There are a few of the great innovations being built off social APIs today but that’s another discussion.