Social Media: What is All the Fuss About? Stage 2

Stage Two: Research Social Media Platforms

Firstly, it’s worth setting the scene – according to OFCOM (August 2011), it took social media just four years to achieve 50% penetration of the UK population (in comparison, mobile phones took fifteen years to achieve this level of penetration).

It is easy to make assumptions, when it comes to social media usage. However, if you have a bit of time to do some research, it’s amazing how easy it is to access information that can be used for marketing planning. To speed up your decision making process, here are some key statistics:

Facebook

Econsultancy research has found that Facebook accounts for 47.86% of all social networking traffic in the UK. There are more than 30m Facebook users in this country, reaching nearly half of the population (49.9%).

From a business perspective, in the last year Facebook has increased its downstream to online retail sites by 12%. On top of this, 33% of social network users agree that they trust what they read on sites such as Facebook.

Most people are surprised to learn that there is a fairly even split between the age and gender of users (source: Facebook Insights):

Men                                      48.66%

Women                                51.34%

Age Demographics:

13 – 17 years old               13%

18 – 24 years old               24.5%

25 – 34 years old               25.5%

35 – 44 years old               17.5%

45+ years old                     19.5%

According to ComScore (Feb 2013), the median age of a UK Facebook user is 37.5 years.

Interestingly, to continue our ‘Laura Ashley’ theme, they have a Facebook Fan Page which has over 61,000 ‘Likes’ (https://www.facebook.com/lauraashleyofficial).

YouTube

The second largest UK social media site is the Google-owned video sharing platform, YouTube. This website accounts for 24.84% of traffic to social network sites (source: Experian Hitwise, March 2013).

According to Google’s official blog, YouTube users upload more than 48 hours of video every minute and they have 3 billion views a day (50% more than last year). Although watching videos is mainly seen as an entertainment activity, don’t underestimate the business benefits this platform can bring. Video can help improve your search rankings (SEO) and increase ecommerce conversion rates. Two examples of this can be found on Econsultancy’s website - equestrian sports supplier Ariat said that visits where a product video had been viewed showed a conversation rate 160% higher than visits without video views and U.S. shoe e-tailer Zappos found that sales increased by between 6% and 30% for items that included video product demonstrations.

Although these are both B2C companies, the biggest B2B success story from the use of video is Blendtec (the ‘will it blend?’ campaign). The company uploaded home-made product demonstration videos in 2006 and increased blender sales by 700% between 2006 – 2008.

YouTube’s user demographics can be found on ‘YouTube Insights for Audience’ and the majority of UK users are male (72.7%), aged 18-24 years old (40%).

Twitter

Although Twitter has 10m UK users, it only accounts for 1.63% of traffic to a social networking site (source: Econsultancy and Experian Hitwise). Like Facebook, the demographic spilt tends to be fairly even – 49% are Male and 51% are Female. Twitter users tend to be more well off than the rest of the population and use smartphone and tablet devices regularly (source: Ipsos Mori, July 2012). Age demographics are as follows:

15 – 24 years old               16%

25 – 34 years old               16%

35 – 44 years old               17%

45 – 54 years old               17%

55+ years old                     34%

There are mixed reviews regarding sales conversion rates linked to Twitter activity. It seems to be a very good brand raising tool (and useful for positioning individuals as experts) but not everyone is convinced of its direct sales benefits. A number of small fashion consumer brands have seen a direct increase in sales when product photos and discounts have been promoted via the micro-blogging network and in the B2B arena Dell claimed that $6.5m of its sales were generated via Twitter.

According to a U.S. survey of small business owners, conducted by the Wall Street Journal and Vistage International, the social media networking site with the most potential is LinkedIn – gaining 41% of all votes. One user - Ken Lopez who runs a legal consulting firm - has used LinkedIn to increase traffic to his website more than ten-fold in a year. He's using Twitter, but he explained to the Wall Street Journal that there's a big difference between the ROI he receives from Twitter and LinkedIn. "We will tweet 10-plus times a day, and we will put roughly the same number of posts on LinkedIn per day, yet we get dramatically different results."

Other Networks

Although we do not have the space to cover every social media platform available, the other key sites to note are: LinkedIn, Google+ and Pinterest. They all have very different audience demographics, which can easily be found via online research. It’s also worth finding business case studies for each of these channels.

Social Media: What is all the Fuss About? Stages 3 & 4

This article has been written by Tanya Hemphill, Senior Lecturer and Programme Leader in Public Relations, based at the Warrington School of Management (University of Chester) @WSofManagement.