Social Marketing

Marketers are working to measure social media investments in different ways, in the hopes that budgets will rise in this still-growing space.

Social media not only connects consumers with each other, but also with just about every place they go and everything they watch and buy. Nielsen’s new Social Media Report looks at trends and consumption patterns across social media platforms in the U.S. and other major markets, exploring the rising influence of social media on consumer behavior. View presentation here.

Barkley released findings from a study of Millennials, “American Millennials: Deciphering the Enigma Generation.”

Taken together, 28% of U.S. adults do at least one of these activities either on a computer or using their mobile phones—and many users do several of them. These figures come from a new national survey by the Pew Research Center’s Internet & American Life Project and represent Project’s most expansive study of location services to date. DOWNLOAD Report HERE.

As Twitter evolves its advertising platform, with the latest development being Promoted Tweets to followers, there is concern as to how consumers will react to seeing ads from brands in their Twitter feeds.

SocialCode announced results from a new Facebook advertising research study. The research examined over four million data points across over 50 clients from a wide variety of industries to get a better understanding of how age and gender affect click-through rates (CTR) and ‘Like’ rates on Facebook.

Older social media users have grown more likely to follow brands on social media sites as they’ve gained more experience interacting on them, but younger adults still outnumber them in this activity. Millennials’ enthusiasm for making friends with brands, though, may not be too far above average.

Paying for mentions in social media, or social media sponsorships, has become a more popular marketing tactic. By late 2009, it had attracted the attention of the US Federal Trade Commission, which released regulations requiring bloggers and certain other online publishers to disclose when they receive cash, free products or other compensation for a product or brand mention. But marketers are still interested in this form of outreach.

Bizo unveiled the results of an online survey of leading in-house and agency marketers. The results from more than 520 strategic marketers reveal that they are getting ready for the busiest season of the year and while they are betting big on new initiatives in social, some are also doubling down on old favorites like display. View interactive presentation

The number of Facebook users in the US will increase 13.4% this year, eMarketer estimates, after 38.6% growth in 2010 and a whopping 90.3% rise the year before. The rate of adult Twitter user adoption has similarly begun to plateau, dropping from 293.1% growth in 2009 to 26.3% this year and still slowing. In many developing countries, these and other networks are seeing their audience growth taper off as most new users come from other countries such as the BRIC nations and Indonesia.

Play, work, learning and consumption have converged in the spaces and practices of new social and mobile technologies. Millennials, Gen-Xs and Boomers—seemingly everyone has a Facebook presence. The more adventurous (or geeky) have also taken up Twitter, YouTube, Foursquare or Screener, with over 500 million active users on Facebook1 engaged in gathering an unimaginable number of friends. Smartphones and tablets are nearly ubiquitous. Friends, information, contacts, products and opportunities are but a few keystrokes away. Smart mobile technologies, now pervasive, are quite visible actors in all facets of social life, bringing new practices and experiences to consumers’ shopping, cooking and dining activities. If social media and smart technologies are seemly everywhere, why do companies and marketers so often miss the mark in building successful consumer relationships via these widely adopted tools and practices? DOWNLOAD Report Here.