DreamGrow Social Media

Social Media and Young Adults

Pew Internet & American Life Project released a study about internet and social media use among Millennial generation by situating it within similar data for adolescents and adults older than 30. The data on teens is drawn from a survey conducted between June 26 and September 24, 2009 of 800 adolescents (ages 12 to 17). The adult data are drawn from a survey conducted between August 18 and September 14, 2009 of 2,253 adults (age 18 and over). Here are some of the key findings:

Blogging is down among young adults

• One of the findings is that young people are blogging less than they used to. 14% of online teens say they blog, down from 28% in 2006.
• Also the commenting activity is lower as 52% of teen social network users report commenting on friends’ blogs, down from the 76% who did so in 2006.
• In 2009 15% of internet users ages 18-29 maintain a blog —a 9% point drop in two years. However, 11% of internet users ages thirty and older now maintain a personal blog (7% in 2007).

Social networking sites’ usage numbers

• 73% of wired American teens use social networking websites. 55% of online teens used social networking sites in November 2006.
• 47% of online adults use social networking sites, up from 37% in November 2008.
• 72% of online 18-29 year olds use social networking websites, significantly higher than the 40% of internet users ages 30 and up who use these sites.
• Adults are increasingly fragmenting their social networking experience as a majority of those who use social networking sites – 52% say they have two or more different profiles.
• Among adult profile owners 73% have a Facebook profile, 48% have a MySpace profile and 14% have a profile on LinkedIn.

Teens are not using Twitter

• 8% of internet users ages 12-17 use Twitter. Older teens are more likely to use Twitter than their younger counterparts; 10% of online teens ages 14-17 do so, compared with 5% of those ages 12-13.
• Young adults lead the way when it comes to using Twitter or status updating. One-third of online 18-29 year olds post or read status updates.

Mobile

• Three-quarters of teens and 93% of adults ages 18-29 now have a cell phone.

Internet usage

• 93% of teens ages 12-17 and young adults ages 18-29 go online. 74% of all adults ages 18 and older go online.
• 48% of online teens have bought things online: books, clothing or music, up from 31% in 2000.

Image credit Bina Sveda

2010 Digital Trends, Ideas and Technologies (Part 1)

Incredibly insightful presentation from David Carr. Digital Trends for 2010 based around 4 themes including: Real-time, Won’t believe the hype, Good cause/Cause Good and Developing a Playful Side.

Our Most Read Social Media Post For 2009

Happy, happy, happy new year to everybody! 2010 will be the best year yet. Social media will integrate into our lives and we stop counting how many times someone is checking their Facebook. Here are our most read post from the 2009.

46 Free Social Media Monitoring Tools. It’s a good strategy to see first what free has to offer and the try to find tools that fit in the gaps you need to fill.

22 Social Media Marketing Trends for 2010. This is what we think will be important in social media in 2010. The slide show in the post was featured on Slideshale and got more than 2000 views in first week.

Market Share of Social Networking Sites 2009. What is going up and where should I participate? These are questions everyone is trying to answer.

Facebook More Visited Than Google. Facebook has a good chance to become THE site people visit and a new poster boy to replace Google.

A Simple Social Media Platform. We drew a picture just to get a clear vision how a simple social media platform should look like.

8 steps to social media goodness. Blindingly obvious for some but I still felt that it’s good to write down the basics and revisit them from time to time.

World Map Of Social Networks. People are stat junkies, as with the firs post on the list, everyone wants to see the numbers.

Social media weekend: Seth Godin, relationships, marketing is dead. All our social media weekend link post got a lot of readers, but this one stood out. We’ll continue to give you links every weekend.

The Mobile Internet is Bigger Than You Think. I wa really blown away by the numbers. The mobile is BIG. Really, really big.

Social media helping to spike up Mercury sales in New England. Our take on sucessful social media case.

We’ll try to keep thing interesting. Every post we make should be useful to our readers. Please let us know what matters to you and we’ll try to cover that. Thank you for reading.
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Image credit Tibor Fazakas

22 Social Media Marketing Trends for 2010

I have collected some of the ideas that seem to be growing fast and make real business sense. Here we go in no particular order:

Some people have problems with opening the original Open Office presentation format when downloading from Slideshare. Here is the PowerPoint version of the presentation.

Great! Got featured on Slideshare:

Your presentation 22 Social Media Trends is currently being featured on the SlideShare homepage by our editorial team.

We thank you for this terrific presentation, that has been chosen from amongst the thousands that are uploaded to SlideShare everday. – the SlideShare team

Slideshare went down shortly after. Coincidence? Hmmm… )

And here’s the list:

1. The fact that audience has the control starts to sink in. (Control is an illusion)
2. Social media will get real budgets. (Most of these budgets will be inhouse)
3. Social media will be integrated to overall marketing activities.
4. Social media ROI will become important. Measure how much do we get out of social media.
5. Brands start to use listening platforms to monitor the conversations.
6. Social media will reach behind corporate firewalls. (Read more)
7. Customer service and interaction with businesses becomes social. (Personaly touch pays)
8. Measuring online activities and their effect on offline sales will become increasingly important.
9. Media will fragment even more and smaller communities can be hyper-targeted.
10. Social networks chatter will be incorporated into CRM systems.
11. More sales will originate from social media contacts (B2B and B2C).
12. Marketing will hit mobiles big time.
13. All search will be real-time. Web, blogs, social networks.
14. Real-time will be the right time. Delays will cost customers.
15. People will use more social networks’ messaging instead of regular email and IM. (Webmail providers should be worried.)
16. First large scale successful augmented reality applications.
17. Campaigns will get more dynamic, spanning from offline to actionable social channels.
18. Social networks will become more commercial.
19. Ads will be more interactive and connected to social networks.
20. The home page for internet users will be social network’s profile page.
21. Facebook will grow to 700 million? (Let’s look at some numbers).
22. Shopping will be integrated into social networking sites.

The Mobile Internet is Bigger Than You Think

This is a really eye opening presentation. I have to say that I have bee a bit skeptic about mobile. But maybe it’s time to reconsiders. One interesting fact from Wikipedia:

The world’s largest individual mobile operator is China Mobile with over 500 million mobile phone subcribers.

The number of mobile phones worldwide 2009 is 4.1 billion (Wikipedia), exceeding any other device including cars, credit cards and TV sets. As social media is a perfect fit for mobile devices then my thoughts about this platform are changing.

6 marketing trends for the 2010

When looking for trends that are crowing in importance in the next year I found two blog post from Eric Tsai that look what will continue or accelerate in the coming year.

3 Brand Marketing Trends That Will Continue in 2010 looks at what is already going on and the three directions are:

• Brands Must Become More Social Online
• Shift in Value Perception Creates Opportunities for Brands
• Community Building is Now a Priority

3 Web Marketing Trends That Will Accelerate in 2010 looks at measuring, mobile and integrating offline with online.

• A Shift in Web Properties to Blend Online With Offline Campaigns
• New Measuring Matrix: Hybrid Measurement
• Marketing Platform Extends to Mobile, Social, and Local in Real-Time

For different points there are benefits to consider, ideas for action and myths to consider.

The main trend is move to the social media where people hang out and spend more and more of their time. As one of my friends noted on Facebook today

I don’t want to click a link and discuss something in some blog, but if you bring the conversation to me, here on Facebook, I’m willing to hang with you.

Survey of Online Consumer Behaviour

The 3rd annual survey of online consumer behaviour, by Harris Interactive and sponsored by Tealeaf, highlights the importance of online customer experience (GB Online Consumer Behaviour Study: 2009 Harris Interactive). Some of the fingings are:

53% of all British adults surveyed said that given the economic climate they are now conducting more transactions online than they did in the past year.

77% of adults that have conducted a transaction in the last year saying they have experienced problems. (89% in 2008 and 86% in 2007)

Website problems are having a dramatic effect on the bottom lines of online businesses with 46% of adults revealing they would abandon a transaction entirely after experiencing a problem on the website. 40% said they would abandon and then turn to a competitor, leading to potentially long-lasting loss of revenue.

13% of online adults who encountered issues said they shared those experiences on a social networking site.

About half (51%) of all online adults said social media has influenced online transactions, 52% of online adults saying they used a particular
vendor after reading good reviews.

The nex big thing? 48% of respondents said they had a web-enabled mobile device and of these, 31% have conducted online transactions using a mobile.

The presentation of the findings: