Feel free to share and re-post and please link back to the source (CC license).

Facebook IPO is Coming [INFOGRAPHIC] is a post from: DreamGrow Social Media

I’m also using it to test how Pinterest embedding works.

Timing Your Social Media Marketing B2B vs B2C is a post from: DreamGrow Social Media

As a bonus we’ll make the results available for you, so you can benchmark your social media marketing efforts against other marketers.

Click here to take our survey

Please share this survey with other marketers so you will get better results. Thanks!

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Image credit yarranz

Social Media Marketing Survey is a post from: DreamGrow Social Media

Now that we have the top 10 social networking sites for December 2011 let’s see what happened last year. But before we go there’s another new entry to the top 10 list. Pinterest has entered the list with 0.39 percent market share. That is almost the same as Google+ with its 0.41 percent.

We haven’t covered Pinterest much but now the data shows it’s important and we had our first encounter with it on our own site. Last Saturday and Sunday we had a surge of traffic reaching almost 1000 visits per hour and the source was Pinterest. We look at the data and give you an overview of the Pinterest in near future.

So, what happened in 2011? There were three new entries to the top 10 social networking sites. Surprisingly Linked in wasn’t there a year ago. The other two were Google+ and Pinterest.

Twitter grew its market share from 0.93 to 1.48 percent. The other big players, Facebook and YouTube, moved sideways with no significant changes in the market share. For Facebook the number around 64 percent seems to be as high as they will get but YouTube might still grow.

The social networking sites to watch in 2012 are:

• Google+ they are doing everything they can to make it work and even with all the Google’s might behind it it can go either way.
• LinkedIn This is the site that connects the professionals. It’s here to stay but their market share should stabilize somewhere between 0.6 and 0.9 percent.
• Twitter has still room to grow but it will not challenge the Facebook in its dominance. Google+ is another matter and the current fight between Google and Twitter about the inclusion of Google+ pages in search results is a clear indicator that Twitter feels threatened by the search giant.
• Pinterest a social bookmarking site that came out of nowhere. Still to early to tell but it has a power to drive traffic to your site comparable to that of StumbleUpon.

Percentages for the big players in November:

• Facebook 63.26%
• Youtube 21.16%
• Twitter 1.48%
• LinkedIn 0.56%

Let us know in the comments what will happen with social networking in 2012.

About this chart

The chart below is in logarithmic scale so that the smaller sites wouldn’t just a single line around 1% of social network market share. Every month in the chart lists the top 10 sites of that time by the market share of visits. Please note that it is just a percentage and 30% in January 2009 is a lot less than 30% in September 2010. The gaps in the the lines mean that the site wasn’t in the top 10 at that time.

I used an interactive chart making software Tableau Public for this visualization. If you don’t see anything below please try reload. If all else fails then look at the image or download the chart in PDF format: Top 10 Social Networking Sites by Market Share of Visits.

Top 10 Social Networking Sites by Market Share of Visits [December 2011] is a post from: DreamGrow Social Media

48 Free Social Media Monitoring Tools
If you want to know what’s happening in the social web you need monitoring tools. Before you get out your credit card and start to spend money try out some of the free social media monitoring services. This way you get a taste of what is available and if you need paid services.

Great Facebook Landing Page Examples
Having a great Facebook landing page helps to engage new users from the first interaction. Below is a list of Facebook welcome pages that are great for reasons such as engaging content, call-to-actions, incentives, design, interactivity and so on. While compiling this list I browsed about 600 or so Facebook pages from which most of them didn’t have a landing page or had a really poor one.

Must-Know Facts on How People View Websites
Do you know what is the first thing that your eye is drawn to on a website? And in what pattern do people scan your website? There have been many eyetracking tests on this subject and I’ll give you 15 most useful facts you should know.

Top 10 Social Networking Sites by Market Share of Visits [Monthly]
Every month we will give you an overview of social media sites and changes. Bookmark this link that will take you always to the latest data.

13 Cool Examples of Google+ Brand Pages
Our first look at the newly introduced Google+ brand pages.

Free Facebook Landing Page Creation Tools
Use Facebook landing pages to give people reasons to like your page. Now, that takes some tech skills to pull this off. If you don’t have those skill then there are some free tools available to get your basic Facebook landing page up and running.

Facebook Cheat Sheet: Sizes and Dimensions
What is the size of the profile picture in Facebook? How wide is page of your brand? Here are all the numbers you need and you can even download a handy PDF Facebook cheat sheet.

Google+ is failing! [DATA]
This post got us the bigest surge of traffic ever. Almost 2000 vistors in one hour. I have been monitoring Google+ traffic levels. Every time something new comes out from Google it gets a little boost but that will revers itself in a month or so. The pattern continues.

48 Social Media KPIs (Key Performance Indicators)
There are a lot of things you can measure about you social media efforts. I have compiled a list of KPIs (key performance indicators) that you can consider for you specific activities. One thing to remember is to remember that you should set at least some metrics that indicate if you are turning profit. Otherwise you can reach your KPIs and still loose money.

17 Social Media Marketing Trends for 2011
This was one of the most read posts last year but I think there’s more sense to give you the link to our 2012 social media marketing predictions.

The top posts generated about 33% of all traffic. Thank you!

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Image credit Steve Jurvetson

Top Social Media Marketing Posts of 2011 is a post from: DreamGrow Social Media

Social sharing is an unstoppable trend in email marketing. Actually, we could risk stating a thesis: email is a social tool, too. Why? Just check out the figures from our latest research on the impact of social sharing, which we unveiled in the infographic Email Marketing + Social Media. When 1+1 Equals More Than 2.

Read more Social Sharing Boosts Email CTR Up To 115% [INFOGRAPHIC].

Social Sharing Boosts Email CTR Up To 115% [INFOGRAPHIC] is a post from: DreamGrow Social Media

Download the full whitepaper here.

Read the full post: ComScore’s 2011 Social Report: Facebook Leading, Microblogging Growing, World Connecting | TechCrunch.

ComScore’s 2011 Social Report: Facebook, Microblogging is a post from: DreamGrow Social Media

Whenever you login to Facebook, you see only a very small fraction of all the content being posted by your friends at any given time. In order to determine which items should appear within your news feed, Facebook grades all content posts according to what it thinks your level of interest with each of them is likely going to be. The mathematical formula that determines this for Facebook is known as Edgerank.

Edgerank has many factors, but today I’m concentrating on comparing the two most basic forms of interaction with a Facebook post – comments & likes.

Research & Statistics behind EdgeRank

The awesome guys at EdgeRank Checker examined a random sampling of 5,500+ Facebook Pages. They analyzed 80,000+ of their Posts over the month of October (2011). The 80,000 posts were all of the “Link” type, to keep Clicks more accurately represented in their data. Each Post was analyzed (clicks, shares, fans, etc).

They analyzed how many Clicks a Post received against each major metric (Likes, Comments, Impressions). This can give a marketer a basic guideline on how many Clicks (on average) they can expect per engagement type. For example if you’re Post received 2 Likes, the Link on average should receive approximately 6 Clicks. The overall results are as follows:

• Avg Clicks Per Like: 3.103
• Avg Clicks Per Comment: 14.678
• Avg Clicks Per Impression: 0.005

So what does this mean?

For every Like a Post gets, it received on average 3.1 Clicks. For every Comment a Post receives, it results on average 14.678 Clicks. This ultimately means that the more engagement your update receives, the more Clicks it will receive. The most interesting fact about this data is that a Comment results in roughly 4 times the amount of Clicks.

What does this mean for you?

If you’re promoting your company’s campaign on Facebook, make sure you share content that your audience will want to engage with. This doesn’t mean that everything you share has to be unique, it just means that the content you share has to draw the attention of your audience and then connect Facebook users with your message.

If you look at Mashable’s Facebook posts, they always ask a question to engage their followers and encourage them to comment. More comments = more clicks.

Facebook EdgeRank Research: Comments 4x More Valuable Than Likes. is a post from: DreamGrow Social Media

Click here for latest version of this post!

For a detailed view use interactive chart at the bottom of this post.

The biggest news is that Google+ is now on the list of top 10 social networking sites in the US. Google+ entered with 0.33 percent of market share of visits and this placed it on the 9th position.

However, our data collected from Alexa (yeah, I know) shows that the Google+’s decline ended with the announcement of Google+ pages for brands about a month ago. My guess would be that if brands find enough value in their Google+ page then by promoting themselves they will eventually increase the popularity of the platform.

In the last few days Google+ seems to slipping again. Please Google make it work! I don’t want to live in the world without competition and dominated by one single social networking site. So, to help Google out go and create a Google+ page for brand.

Below is the chart of Alexa data for plus.google.com (click it to zoom). To put it in the context I have added Google Maps data as well. The chart shows that the down trend reversed itself after Google+ was opened for all users. After a month it started to fall again. The last change with Google+ pages for brands the trend reversed itself again. And as you can see from the chart it is declining again from early December 2011.

Before you start to comment about what you think of Alexa please read the note about Alexa.

Other than the big news about Google+ November didn’t see much changes in the overall line-up. All the big players maintained their positions moving up and down only slightly.

Percentages for the big players in November:

• Facebook 63.80%
• Youtube 20.83%
• Twitter 1.47%
• LinkedIn 0.63%

About this chart

The chart below is in logarithmic scale so that the smaller sites wouldn’t just a single line around 1% of social network market share. Every month in the chart lists the top 10 sites of that time by the market share of visits. Please note that it is just a percentage and 30% in January 2009 is a lot less than 30% in September 2010. The gaps in the the lines mean that the site wasn’t in the top 10 at that time.

I used an interactive chart making software Tableau Public for this visualization. If you don’t see anything below please try reload. If all else fails then look at the image or download the chart in PDF format: Top 10 Social Networking Sites by Market Share of Visits.

Top 10 Social Networking Sites by Market Share of Visits and Google+ [November 2011] is a post from: DreamGrow Social Media

We have compiled a list with top 15 most popular social networking sites. Together with unique monthly visitors and biggest traffic ranking sites, this list will give you a pretty good overview into the life of Social Networking sites.

Last updated: December 6, 2011

1. Facebook - Estimated Unique Monthly Visitors – 700,000,000  | 3 - Compete Rank | 2 - Quantcast Rank | 2 - Alexa Rank.
2. Twitter - Estimated Unique Monthly Visitors – 200,000,000  | 30 - Compete Rank | 5 - Quantcast Rank | 9 - Alexa Rank.
3. LinkedIn - Estimated Unique Monthly Visitors – 100,000,000 | 57 - Compete Rank | 26 - Quantcast Rank | 17 - Alexa Rank.
4. MySpace - Estimated Unique Monthly Visitors – 80,500,000 | 26 - Compete Rank | 44 - Quantcast Rank | 79 - Alexa Rank.
5. Ning - Estimated Unique Monthly Visitors - 60,000,000 | 180 - Compete Rank | 120 - Quantcast Rank | 128 - Alexa Rank.
6. Google Plus+ - Estimated Unique Monthly Visitors – 32,000,000 | *NA* - Compete Rank | *NA* - Quantcast Rank | *NA* - Alexa Rank.
7. Tagged - Estimated Unique Monthly Visitors - 25,000,000 | 382 - Compete Rank | 151 - Quantcast Rank | 141 - Alexa Rank.
8. orkut - Estimated Unique Monthly Visitors - 15,500,000 | *570* - Compete Rank | *540* - Quantcast Rank | 93 - Alexa Rank.
9. hi5 - Estimated Unique Monthly Visitors - 11,500,000 | 983 - Compete Rank | 392 - Quantcast Rank | 62 - Alexa Rank.
10. myyearbook - Estimated Unique Monthly Visitors - 7,450,000 | 522 - Compete Rank | 293 - Quantcast Rank | 1,036 - Alexa Rank.
11. Meetup - Estimated Unique Monthly Visitors - 7,200,000 | 644 - Compete Rank | 732 - Quantcast Rank | 528 - Alexa Rank.
12. Badoo - Estimated Unique Monthly Visitors - 7,100,000 | 1,346 - Compete Rank | 489 - Quantcast Rank | 125 - Alexa Rank.
13. bebo - Estimated Unique Monthly Visitors - 7,000,000 | 944 - Compete Rank | 434 - Quantcast Rank | 588 - Alexa Rank.
14. MyLife - Estimated Unique Monthly Visitors - 5,400,000 | 118 - Compete Rank | 688 - Quantcast Rank | 1,789 - Alexa Rank.
15. friendster - Estimated Unique Monthly Visitors - 4,900,000 | 1,920 - Compete Rank | 643 - Quantcast Rank | 301 - Alexa Rank.

Statistics from: Compete | Quantcast | Alexa | eBizMBA

Top 15 Most Popular Social Networking Sites is a post from: DreamGrow Social Media