BoxStuff

How content is being spread online

A good snapshot included in an article by Paul Braat (@Braat) that shows what tools are being employed to distribute content on the web. Unsurprisingly it shows Facebook and Twitter have the potential to be significant traffic drivers. Given the cost of marketing on Facebook and Twitter, it makes it hard to find reasons why they shouldn’t be part any business’s marketing strategy.

Is Social Media a passing fad?

Here’s a few statistics that I’ve gleaned from various sources that would say that it definitely isn’t!

1: Social networking sites are officially the most popular sites on the internet after porn sites.

2: 2/3 of the global internet population visit social networks.

3: Time spent on social networks is growing at 3x the overall internet rate.

4: 87% of sales come from referrals. The average person is exposed to 3000 advertising messages per day. Only 14% of people trust advertisements whilst 78% of people trust the recommendations of other consumers.

5: Facebook is the 3rd most trafficked website in the world.

6: As of November 2010, with more than 500 million active users, if Facebook were a country, it would be world’s third largest after China and India.

7: Over 50% of Facebook’s active users log on in any given day and on average people spend over 200 million minutes per day on the site.

8: People are watching 2 billion videos a day on YouTube and uploading hundreds of thousands of videos daily. In fact, every minute, 24 hours of video is uploaded to YouTube.

Based on all that, it’s clear that a company should have a presence in the social web! To end I’ll leave you with a quote from one my favourite marketeers:

“Conversations among the members of your marketplace happen whether you like it or not. Good marketing encourages the right sort of conversations.” – Seth Godin

Location-Based Marketing

Two new services that have recently been launched – one that’s already here in the UK and one no doubt to follow very soon – are bringing the power of location-based marketing alive.

Here in the UK, O2 has recently announced the launch of a six-month pilot scheme of location-based mobile marketing, in partnership with US firm Placecast. Customers can opt in to the service, by registering on o2more.co.uk, that will then see them receive relevant marketing messages, depending on their age, gender, interests and location.

The service uses Placecast’s geo-fencing technology meaning that when users enter a geo-fenced area ‘owned’ by participating advertisers, they will receive promotions and discounts via SMS and MMS.

Then at a recent gathering at their Palo Alto offices, Facebook announced an extension to their Places feature. Now businesses will have the ability to offer deals to users who ‘check in’ using the site’s Places feature.

One of the first partnerships Facebook announced was with the Gap. It plans to run a campaign offering a free pair of jeans to the first 10,000 users who check in to their local Gap store using Facebook’s mobile application.

Find Me, Join Me, Follow Me

Recently, i’ve come across the following 3 lines, in a spam message and in the email signature of the chairman of Ecademy:

Web 1.0 – Find Me
Web 2.0 – Join Me
Web 3.0 – Follow Me

Without analysing it too much it does appear to sum up the evolution of the web and the popular trends over the last few years.

Could almost be:

Web 1.0 – Google
Web 2.0 – Facebook
Web 3.0 – Twitter

Whilst it hasn’t reached the entire population of the planet, for those with reliable high speed internet access it’s now a hyper connected world. And these three ‘versions’ of the web offer 3 slightly different but very useful ways to filter the vast amounts of content available to all:

Web 1.0 – Search driven
Web 2.0 – The social web and RSS
Web 3.0 – Conversational and peer filtered

There’s one other significant factor that’s changing the way we access and use information and that is the mobile web or arguably the iPhone.

So what should you do to make sure you are communicating with your customers or target audience?

Talk to us about a updating or building your website. We offer as standard:

- Search Engine Optimised page design

- Facebook integration and/or Facebook applications

- built in RSS feeds and Twitter integration

- iPhone optimised version of your site