Social Media: Truth In Numbers
As a marketer and social media enthusiast, I try to keep up to date on all the fodder about the latest in social media trends. I read multiple RSS feeds daily, constantly attend industry events, and listen to colleagues, clients and even competitors as they croon about what’s hot in social media marketing. Recently, I attended three events:
At all three events the focus of conversations, the industry scuttle, was about social media. Primarily discussions centered on how effective social media (Facebook, Twitter, Youtube etc.) are as marketing/business growth tools and the amount of small to medium-sized business that are utilizing social media to grow their businesses. I came away from the events with some fascinating statistics and research I’d love to share with you
Social media is not just for teenyboppers.
- 77% of social network users are over 25 and 43% are over 35.
- More than 50 percent of Facebook/Twitter users are over 35.
Social media budgets are spiking.
- In 2010, 71% of businesses plan on increasing their use of Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and blogs as marketing weapons — 2010 Social Media Marketing Industry Report.
Everyone’s Facetweetube’ing.
- There are more 400 million people on Facebook and, astonishingly, there were more than 1.2 billion Twitter updates (Tweets) in January 2010 alone. Small businesses dominate the social media space.
Small businesses are cashing in quickly on social media.
- More than half of these businesses using social media say that sales lead generation and customer acquisition are the greatest benefits — Small Business Marketing Forecast 2010.
There are mountains of statistics to support what all of us at Piehead already know… if you’re not into social media, you’re out. In the few short years that social media has been a marketing vehicle, it has had an enormous effect on the way Piehead does business. More and more of our clients are allocating efforts towards social media marketing. They are growing their ability to communicate with their customers and most importantly, growing their active/appropriate customer bases. In turn, their customer acquisition/retention rises, product offerings increase and they see a spike in their bottom line. While I would like to take credit for this, I can’t.
The business growth we are seeing among our growing roster of clients is due to one thing, their (Piehead client’s) willingness to utilize social media as a primary marketing tool. It’s our clients that keep all of us at Piehead on our toes. All of this means two things, I will happily stay active at industry events and Piehead will continue to enable our clients to stay at the cutting-edge of social media marketing and results.
