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71 Percent Say They Can’t Live Without Facebook

From MEDIAPOST:

Could you survive without your social networks? Perhaps underestimating their own ability to adapt — or pick up a telephone — just 29% of Facebook and LinkedIn users say they could “probably do without” the popular networks, according to a new study by Anderson Analytics.

Apparently a somewhat less vital recourse, 35% of the 5,000 U.S. social media users surveyed in May said they could do without MySpace, while a more modest 43% thought life still worth living without Twitter.

Under 35, people rely on social networks for “fun” and contacting friends, while older consumers increasingly view them as indispensable for staying in touch with family and close friends.

Correspondingly, the majority — 75% — said Facebook was their most valuable network, followed by 65% who cited MySpace. Only 30% said the business centric LinkedIn was their most valuable network, followed by the 12% who gave it up to Twitter.

New Twitter Stats

Sysomos Inc., one of the world’s leading social media analytics companies, conducted an extensive study to document Twitter’s growth and how people are using it. After analyzing information disclosed on 11.5 million Twitters accounts, we discovered that:

• 72.5% of all users joining during the first five months of 2009.
• 85.3% of all Twitter users post less than one update/day
• 21% of users have never posted a Tweet
• 93.6% of users have less than 100 followers, while 92.4% follow less than 100 people.
• 5% of Twitter users account for 75% of all activity
• New York has the most Twitters users, followed by Los Angeles, Toronto, San Francisco and Boston; while Detroit was the fast-growing city over the first five months of 2009
• More than 50% of all updates are published using tools, mobile and Web-based, other than Twitter.com. TweetDeck is the most popular non-Twitter.com tool with 19.7% market share.
• There are more women on Twitter (53%) than men (47%)
• Of the people who identify themselves as marketers, 15% follow more than 2,000 people. This compares with 0.29% of overall Twitter users who follow more than 2,000 people.

“We wanted to take an extensive snapshot of Twitter that goes far beyond anything done to document Twitter’s use, growth and demographics,” said Nick Koudas, Sysomos’ co-founder and chief executive. “While Twitter’s growth has been well documented, we wanted to put the spotlight on how people use Twitter, as well as identify many of the key trends in their backgrounds, demographics and activity. Our study, based on the most comprehensive dataset of Twitter users, provides a wealth of information for anyone interested in getting in-depth details about Twitter.”

Marketing ROI & Measurements Study Shows Advantages for Companies with Financial, Analytics, Measurement, and Operations Support

CEOs and CFOs are making greater demands than last year for marketers to show a potential return on investment (ROI) as part of securing budget, according to 65% of the 601 marketers surveyed in the Lenskold Group / MarketSphere 2009 Marketing ROI & Measurements Study.

Current economic conditions are putting pressures on marketers to better understand their marketing effectiveness as 8 in 10 marketers (79%) report that the need to measure, analyze, and report marketing effectiveness is greater in 2009. However, budget pressures are evident with 6 out of 10 (59%) indicating that this higher demand for measuring marketing effectiveness is not budgeted for the necessary measurement efforts and the other 2 out of 10 indicating they are appropriately budgeted.

The full 35-page report with detailed findings and Lenskold Group recommendations is available at www.lenskold.com/2009mROIstudy.

More Social Media Monitoring and Measurement Tools

Excerpted from Jon Bishop’s excellent post, “Keeping Conversations on Your Radar,” which includes links to several interesting social media monitoring and measurement tools.

Social Media

SocialMention.com allows you to easily track what people are saying about you, your company, a new product, or any topic across the web’s social media landscape in real-time. Social Mention monitors 80+ social media properties directly including: Twitter, Facebook, FriendFeed, YouTube, Digg, Google etc.

KeoTag.com searches some of the most popular social media sites for tags that match your search term.

BackType is a “conversational search engine”. They index conversations scattered across the web to make following comments on a post or article a lot easier to manage.

CoComment is a service for managing, powering and researching conversations online. When using coComment, you can keep track of your comments across any site, share them with friends, and get notified when you get a response.

YackTrack lets you search for comments on your content from various sources or other blogs that talk about your content.

Blog Flux is a service that watches comments/follow-ups on Blog posts, Digg submissions, Flickr galleries, and many other types of content. When ever there is an update, i.e a new follow-up, Commentful notifies you instantly.

Trackur is an online reputation monitoring tool designed to assist you in tracking what is said about you on the internet.

Twitter

Twitter Search helps you filter all the real-time information coursing through the Twittersphere.

Backtweets finds all Tweets linking back to an article or blog post. Site does a good job of archiving older tweets where tweetmeme only shows more recent tweets.

Twitrratr helps you distinguish negative from positive tweets surrounding a brand, product, person or topic.

Tweetmeme is similar to Backtweets except it only shows tweets that link to a post from the last 7 days.

Facebook

Facebook Lexicon lets you compare up to five different words or two-word phrases and see how many people talked about that term on Facebook each day.

Discussion Boards and Forums

BoardReader was developed to address the shortcomings of current search engine technology to accurately find and display information contained on the Web’s forums and message boards.

BoardTracker is a search engine that only displays information from their extensive database of forum threads.

Blogs

Blog Search is a Google search technology focused on blogs. You can do a lot of the normal advanced Google search commands to get optimal results.

BlogPulse is a blog search engine that also analyzes and reports on daily activity in the blogosphere

Trendpedia finds the articles online that talk about your topics. It organizes the articles in a trendline that shows the popularity of the topic over time up to three months ago up to today.

A Little Something Extra

I’ve been using the free version of FiltrBoxG2 which has been amazing. It’s very slick and easy to use. I highly recommend checking it out, you’ve got nothing to lose.

Jonathan Bishop is an Internet Marketing Specialist at Magicomm, LLC in Amesbury, MA.  He specializes in Web 2.0 technologies.

8 Twitter Analytics Tools

Here are 8 Twitter analytics tools suggested by Social Media Today:

1. Twitalyzer: a unique tool to evaluate the activity of any Twitter user and report on relative influence, signal-to-noise ratio, generosity, velocity, clout, and other useful measures of success in social media.

2. MicroPlaza: a way to discover relevant and interesting items from the people we follow on Twitter. MicroPlaza delivers the filtered links from our Twitter timelines. It’s a discovery engine and a personal newswire.

3. Twist: a way to see trends of keywords or product names, based what Twitter users are tweeting about. See frequency of a keyword or product name being mentioned over a period a week or a month and display them on a graph.

4. Twitturly:  tracks the URLs flying around the Twitterverse and provides a quick, real-time view of what people are talking about on Twitter. Each time someone tweets a URL to their followers on Twitter, Twitturly takes note of it and applies it as a vote for that URL. The more votes a URL has in the last 24 hours, the higher it ranks on Twitturly’s Top100.

5. TweetStats: shows tweeting behavior of Twitter users. It consolidates and collates Twitter activity data and present them in colorful graphs.

6. TwitterFriends: explore the hidden network of Twitter contacts that are really relevant for you, see who among your Twitter friends are online at any moment, read stats about your own Twitter account and identify the Twitterers posting the most links.

7. Quickrate / Thummit: harvests the rich content of the Twittersphere to synthesize opinions on hot topics of the day (recent movies, buzzing memes).

8. TweetEffect: enter your twitter name and analyze your 200 latest updates and flag those up that made people follow or leave you.

Tracking Twitter

Tracking Twitter is a tool created by Electric Artists that lists major brands using Twitter in various business categories, including: brands, media, television, celebrities, and electric artists. For additional information on brands using Twitter, visit the Tracking Twitter blog.

Web Analytics Tools Should Measure Social Media

Albert Gouyet, VP of Marketing, Quantivo, writes in Direct Marketing News, “Most Web analytics tools today were designed for Web 1.0 — a world where visitor behavior did not change in a flash.  As such, they rely on inflexible segmentation definitions, predictive models that take long to build and roll out and narrow analytics capabilities that fail to provide in-depth insight into behaviors.  In the modern Web, to get reaction time within the window of opportunity dictated by these fast-paced changes, a new approach is required. The solution starts with recognizing that behavioral analysis is fundamentally different from standard Web analytics.”

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In-House Analytics Skills: Not a Luxury

According to the Serengeti Agency, for digital marketers, analytics is like breathing.  Nothing else in the body functions in the absence of breathing.   No matter how hard you try, breathing cannot be outsourced.   This is true regardless of whether digital marketing is accomplished by an in-house team or outsourced to an agency.

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Do Social Media Marketers Dream Of Monitoring Tools?

Anna Banks at Organic offers an informative post on social media monitoring tools. Her dream list of features includes:

1. Easy self-service set up of topics and queries.
2. Efficient filtering of topics.
3. Delivery of results in real-time.
4. Sentiment analysis.
5. Trending Data.
6. Comparison to competitive information.
7. Identification of conversation “themes” around a topic.
8. Identification of Influencers or “influential posts.”
9. Demographic Information.
10. Respond to and track engagement.

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