Earlier this year, SmartBrief and Summus Limited asked the readers of various SmartBrief newsletters to complete a survey about their businesses’ use of social media. We heard back from about 6,500 readers and compiled their answers into a report: “The State of Social Media for Business.”
We heard from readers in a variety of industries and across a range of company sizes — and the comparisons among those groups are really interesting. But my favorite section looked at the differences in social-media use between companies that have been using social media for a few months and the companies that have been at this for several years.
Compared with companies that have been using social media for less than six months, companies that have been using social media for more than three years are more likely to:
- Say they have a fully developed or well-developed social-media strategy (65.7% of veterans compared with 13% of rookies)
- Measure the return on investment of their social-media efforts (36.1% of veterans compared with 9.6% of rookies)
- Say they would not be able to operate without a strong presence in social media (27.9% of veterans compared with 3.6% of rookies)
What are those three-year-plus veterans doing differently? (read more…)
Research and development seems like a foreign concept to many of us. Small businesses, nonprofits and countless others often consider the very ideas of focus groups, surveying and researching customers to be outside their typically tight scope.
The problem is, these businesses can benefit most from the type of insight that market research provides. Where should you allocate your budget? What products or services are most important to your customers? Until recently, small businesses had to roll the dice and hope their decisions yielded results.
Suzette Gardner, director of Internet communications and publications at the National Sleep Foundation, found herself in the “small budget, big needs” predicament many nonprofits struggle with. At the OMS DC Summit, Suzette provided attendees with an inside look at her team’s efforts — explaining how her organization took advantage of the scope and low cost of social media to better understand and prioritize the needs and demands of her customers. (read more…)
Past studies have shown Twitter users are pretty good at predicting the performance of movies, but now a Carnegie Mellon University study suggests the network could someday be used to glean information about public opinion on all sorts of subjects.
As we note in the lead story of today’s SmartBrief on Social Media, Twitter isn’t without limitations as a polling mechanism, yet data based on tweets seem to track well with traditional polling over the long term. It will be interesting to see how these data are used as the methodology for surveying Twitter becomes more refined.
Would you trust public-opinion figures that were based on tweets? Do you see Twitter becoming a viable alternative to traditional opinion polling?
Image credit, Daisy Daisy, via Shutterstock (read more…)
The rich are unlikely to follow your company on Twitter. According to a study by Unity Marketing, 6% of affluent users use social tools to look for coupons or go shopping, while 7% were interested in using social networks to research purchases or seek out special offers.
The study goes on to say that while at least half of affluent users view company social-media accounts, just a quarter will follow them.
So why do companies such as Cartier, Dolce & Gabbana and Lexus bother with social media?
A few possibilities:
- Feeding the brand’s aspirational quality. If you’ve got thousands of people who can’t afford your product raving about how great you are, it increases your brand’s value as a status symbol for the handful who can afford it.
Just 25% of consumers say they trust their friends to give them good information about a company, according to a survey by Edelman, compared with 45% in 2008. The same survey shows consumers are more likely to trust CEOs, academics, government officials, industry analysts and nongovernmental organizations than they were a year ago — with all of those sources being cited as more trustworthy than peers.
Social marketing is build on the idea that people trust their friends more than they trust official voices — does this survey mean we no longer care what our peers have to say?
Edelman CEO Richard Edelman says consumers are spooked by the recession and that’s made them less trusting. Edelman says consumers need to hear something from up to five different sources before they believe it. I think the answer may have more to do with quality than quantity.
I’m “friends” with an ex-girlfriend’s best friend’s little sister on Facebook. (read more…)
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