The Social Profile Interaction Tool

In The Social Profile, you’ll learn about 12 distinct personas that represent motivations for interacting online. These personas aren’t mutually exclusive—consumers self-identified themselves as falling into as many as three of these 12 categories. We’ll also help you understand how consumers interact with marketers like YOU across email, Facebook, and Twitter.

• Get to know your audience based on their personal motivations, not just their age, income, or gender.

• Learn why consumers’ use of social media is dictated by their individual motivations, not by the channels themselves.

• Realize the importance of understanding your audience, so you can predict what they want from your brand, meet their expectations, and increase your ROI.

Customers no longer pay attention to your brand for the same reasons across all ages, incomes, and gender. That’s why you must give consumers a chance to interact with you based on their personalities. And by simply taking the time to meet your audience, you’ll be able to make informed decisions about what, when, and where your marketing messages should be delivered. With our 12 consumer personas, you’ll be able to deliver one-size-fits-one messages that will truly resonate.

Focus on 5 key social networking personas

Based on both the amount of content they consume and produce, the five most valuable, in order of their total content usage, are Megaphone, Open Book, Social Butterfly, Business First, and Enthusiast.

Megaphone
Representing 7% of online consumers, Megaphones want to connect, educate, and share resources and information online with others. Despite the relatively small number of them, Megaphones have a disproportionately large influence on brands and the internet as a whole. These consumers are by far the most active group of consumers in social media of all types. 65% regularly maintain a website, blog, or both.

Twenty percent of Megaphones use Twitter daily and have three times more followers than the average consumer. Their Twitter usage continues to increase, unlike many of the other personas. Megaphones are easily influenced; they’re the most likely consumers to become a subscriber, fan, or follower at the recommendation of others.

Open Book
Accounting for 6% of online consumers, Open Books are uninhibited consumers who freely express their likes, dislikes, experiences, and opinions with the online world. Open Books may appear similar to Megaphones as they’re active in creating content and commenting in social forums. But they’re more likely to blog regularly than Megaphones, and their biggest difference is in their intent. While Megaphones are primarily interested in connecting and educating, Open Books want to divulge their experiences online and find others who can relate to them.

Open books are motivated to fan a brand on Facebook or subscribe to email due to exclusive con¬tent and the ability to interact—not bypromotions or sales. Despite a high propensity to use Twitter regularly, Open Books don’t typically follow brands. Open Books want to interact with companies through email and Facebook. Monitoring a working ‘From Address’ and encouraging candid feedback is a good first step in gaining their loyalty.

Social Butterfly
Totaling 13% of online consumers, Social Butterflies focus on making and maintaining numerous online friendships. They use Facebook to manage their social lives, and Facebook friends are personal friends, not work contacts. Social Butterfiles are interested in becoming Facebook fans of brands, as well as promotions and sale notifications across email, Facebook, and Twitter. Social Butterflies are also active bloggers (mostly about their personal lives) and are among the most voracious consumers of online video and podcasts.

Forty-five percent of Social Butterflies become a fan of at least one Facebook brand, higher than any other persona. Twenty-seven percent of these consumers say they’re more likely to buy after becoming an email subscriber, com¬pared to 16% who report being more likely to buy after becoming a Facebook fan. Twenty-eight percent of all consumers under the age of 25 are Social Butterflies, and more than half of all Social Butter¬flies are Millennials. Keep Facebook interactions lighthearted. Promotions and freebies are better through email.

Business First
Representing 8% of online consumers, Business Firsts use the internet for business purposes, keeping up with the latest trends, communicating with business contacts, and making new connections through sites like LinkedIn. In short, they’re actively engaged in promoting their companies and personal careers online. These consumers use email constantly throughout the day, and although they don’t typically follow brands on Twitter, they’re among the most active Twitter users. Business First Consumers have nearly three times more followers than the average consumer.

They also maintain their own websites, blog frequently, upload videos, post to wikis, and write articles. The only exception is Facebook; they use this channel less frequently, primarily to connect with business contacts or to keep tabs on their children. These consumers are motivated to become a subscrivber, fan, or follower by the promise of product updates, company information, and education. They’re less likely to be motivated by discounts or entertainment.

More than half of Business First consumers are men between the ages of 25 to 54. These consumers receive more email per day and subscribe to more commercial email than any other consumer persona. Business Firsts are the most affluent persona, with a median income of $80,200.

Enthusiast
Encompassing 32% of online consumers, when Enthusiasts go online, they’re motivated by offline interests and hobbies. From sports, movies, and music to food, pets, and travel, they connect with people who have similar hobbies, or search for information that will support their lifestyle interests, including entertainment and education.

Enthusiasts tend to be younger, more affluent, are less likely to have children, and are active on email, Facebook, and Twitter. However, they view each channel as serving its own distinct purpose. They rely on email for promotions and in-depth content that doesn’t make as much sense on social networks. They use Facebook to show their support for their favorite brands, and they use Facebook and Twitter to network with other Enthusiasts.

Consumer Profile Tool

Last year Forrester’s Social Technographics® created a social profile tool that classifies consumers into six overlapping levels of participation. Based on their survey data you can see how participation varies among different groups of consumers, globally.

Digital Morning Interactive Tool

I highly recommend you to go download The Social Profile report and see what consumer persona you fall under. After you’re done reviewing the report I recommend checking out another another tool that shows you where your customers start their day online.

Digital Morning will reveal whether your customers wake up to Email, Facebook, or Twitter, so you know where to deliver your messages, and what to say.

In its six-year history, the site has become ritualized in our daily lives. It has even attracted the unwilling who join for fear of being cut out of the social fabric. It has connected old friends and family. It has helped make and break political campaigns and careers. It has turned many of us into daily communicators of one-line missives on the profound and mundane. And it has tested the limits of what we care to share and keep private.

The half-billion-member-mark can’t be understated. To put the number into perspective, the population inhabiting Facebook now equals that of the United States, Japan and Germany combined. Or, two Mexicos and a Brazil. The universe of Facebook membership is less than half the population of India, but in the last year the social networking Internet site has doubled in size.

Facebook Worldwide User Growth

If you look at the Worldwide growth of the social networking platform, you can see that we were celebrating 400 Million users back in February of this year, Three months after the network had reached 350 Million members.

Now it’s highly unlikely that Facebook will reach the 1 Billion mark this year, but “it is almost a guarantee that it will happen,” according to The Guardian. Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg explained: “If we succeed [in innovating and remaining relevant] there is a good chance of bringing this to a billion people… it will be interesting to see how it plays out.”

So, Congratulations to Facebook for reaching this historic milestone.

As Danny Brown commented on last month’s statistics:

The trouble with these stats (not yours but Compete and similar) is that they only take into account Twitter’s own API. It’s hardly used by the majority. Instead, it’s via smartphones and third-party apps by the likes of Seesmic and Tweetdeck. Gather that information and you’d have a far different graph, at least for Twitter.

I’ve searched Hubspot, Compete, Quantcast and others to find this data but to no avail, so this chart will have to do.

(Image via MarketingCharts)

The Facebook Economy

There are 550,000+ apps that are used on Facebook. Seventy percent of users engage with apps each month. There are one million app developers. Zynga, the top app developer, made $250 million in 2009. Of that amount, $80-$150 million is estimated to be profit, more net profit than Facebook itself made.

The most popular Facebook apps are:

• Zynga
• Rock You!
• Electric Arts
• CrowdStar
• Playdom
• Causes
• Slide
• 6 Waves
• Topzy
• iLike
• MindJolt
• RIM

Facebook Pages

There are 1,500,000 active Facebook pages. The average value per fan is $136.38. Extrapolating on that, many celebrity pages would be worth enormous sums:

Michael Jackson, with 13.3 million fans, would have a page worth $1.8 billion. Family Guy has 9.5 million fans for a worth of $1.3 billion. Lady Gaga and Barack Obama each have 9.1 million fans, worth $1.2 billion each. Vin Diesel has nine million fans, worth $1.1 billion. Starbucks has 8.2 million fans, worth $1.1 billion. South Park has 6.2 million fans for a worth of $845 million.

Popular Facebook pages include:

• Barack Obama
• Lady Gaga
• Michael Jackson
• Family Guy
• Vin Diesel
• Megan Fox
• House
• Twilight Saga
• Starbucks

Users

There are 500,000,000+ users of Facebook. Of those, 200 million users use it daily for an average of 55 minutes a day. If those users were all working for $5 an hour instead of going on Facebook, they would collectively earn $916,000,000 a day.

Advertisers

In Q1 2010, 176 billion display ads were posted on Facebook, 16 percent of the display ad market. Facebook says its advertisers have quadrupled since 2009.

If Facebook were a country, it would be the third most populous in the world after China and India. Today’s valuation of Facebook is $7.9-$11 billion.

(via VisualEconomics)

Last year I blogged about a new twitter contest software application that could be used by individuals or agencies. This year a new, simplistic application has been created called: Tweetons

A key to any successful Twitter strategy is to gain interested followers, but this is often the hardest thing to do. Deals, discounts and prizes for your Twitter followers is one way to get them interested in you.  Twitter has even recently launched their @earlybird account to capitalize in the surge of interest in deals. Rewarding tweeters who spread your message to their followers, either instantaneously or by entering them into a contest when they’ve mentioned your phrase, is made easier with Tweetons. Tweetons provides all the tools that you need in order to monitor customize your promotions.  It even provides a great dashboard to monitor all the statistics.

Tweetons has been used by a variety of companies and below are a couple of examples of how you might use their platform to manage your promotions:

1) Contests. With Tweetons you start by specifying the phrase that you want to track users mentioning. It’s good to create contests that are simple and easy to participate in, such as asking users to follow you and then to retweet a specific phrase.  Alternatively, have them enter a unique hashtag that mentions your brand in their tweet. After you’ve set-up your campaign, you want to make sure that you promote it on your website, blog, facebook page, etc. in order to gain as much visibility as possible. Make sure to publicly acknowledge your winners, as this will bring a lot of good will and personalization to your twitter account.

2) Instant rewards.  One of the great things about Twitter is the ability to interact with customers in real-time. Some restaurants have created campaigns that instantly send users discounts and coupons when the restaurant’s Twitter profile is mentioned. Tweetons provides you with the ability to track when your business is mentioned and instantly send customers your message, which can also include relevant information such as happy hour times and your special of the day.

Features:

• Powers sweepstakes and instant campaigns
• Allows you to auto follow anyone who’s mentioned your phrase
• Requires users to follow you in order to win
• Budgets for number of rewards
• Allows you to set the probability of winning
• Gives you the ability to specify start and end dates for contests
• Provides automated responses to winners, losers, and all participants
• Allows you to control how frequently someone is able to enter the contest

In this video I tell my story from the first affiliate squeeze pages I optimized for the search engines to the social media strategy I executed to drive over 1.3 million pageviews to a microsite in less than 4 days. I readapted the presentation I gave at the Search Exchange internet marketing conference in North Carolina, for the web. You will hear the type of stories that have the best chance of generating viral exposure on a digital network. At the end of the video I also list some tools that could be used to build a influential account on Digg.com, my platform of choice.

Neal Rodriguez covers best practices on social media marketing on nealrodriguez.com. Subscribe to Neal’s feed to stay abreast with his updates.

6 months ago I questioned if Twitter was in trouble? – Today it’s easy to see that the site has plateaued and is declining in growth amongst American Internet users.

Having a hard time coming up with that next blog post to publish?

Try social news aggregators. These websites are extremely helpful mashups of relevant feeds from social websites, popular blogs and news sources.

Most of the content on social media aggregators are freshly pulled from a wide variety of sources and can be a fountain of inspiration for anyone who is tired of blogging about the same things everyday.

The following news aggregators can be used daily/hourly to generate fresh and relevant content for your blog. Most news aggregators and meme trackers have search bars so this is the first place you want to start. Beginning with a search for you relevant keywords is the fastest way to come up with content ideas, and prevents you from being distracted by other material.

Once you find an article in your niche, make sure to add your own original take on the article so you won’t be contributing to the echo chamber.

Top 5 Sites for Social Media News Aggregation

1) PopURLS

One of my favorite social news aggregators on the web. This site replaces other online resources such as: Reddit, Del.icio.us and Digg. A one page scroll-friendly social news website that shows just the headlines and also includes news feeds from Google & Yahoo, videos from Metacafe and Youtube as well as blog posts from popular blogs like Boing Boing, this aggregation site is not to be missed.

2) Techmeme

My tech news site of record, these guys cover topics specific to the industry as a whole. If you are looking for breaking tech news this is the site for you. Techmeme arranges all of these links into a single, easy-to-scan page. Story selection is accomplished via computer algorithm extended with direct human editorial input. From Ars Technica to ZDNet these guys cover the spectrum for tech news.

3) Alltop

Displaying all the top headlines from popular topics around the web, Alltop Co-founder Guy Kawasaki has created a platform different from a search engine, The purpose of Alltop is to help you answer the question, “What’s happening?” in “all the topics” that interest you. They do this by collecting the headlines of the latest stories from the best sites and blogs that cover a topic of your choice. They then group these collections — “aggregations” — into individual web pages. Then display the five most recent headlines of the information sources as well as their first paragraph.

4) Buzzfeed

BuzzFeed Tracks the Web’s Obsessions in Real Time. Featuring topics from the outrageous video that’s about to go viral, an obscure subculture breaking into the mainstream, a juicy bit of gossip that everyone at the office will be talking about tomorrow, or an ordinary guy having his glorious 15-minutes of fame. This site feels more like a magazine including all the fluff, but the “Just Launched” section will get your creative juices flowing.

5) Google Reader Play

A newcomer to the scene Google Reader Play is a new way to read popular articles and an interesting interface for browsing web pages. “In Google Reader Play, items are presented one at a time, and each item is big and full-screen. After you’ve read an item, just click the next arrow to move to the next one, or click any item on the filmstrip below to fast-forward. Of course, you can click the title or image of any item to go to the original version. And since so much of the good stuff online is visual, we automatically enlarge images and auto-play videos full-screen,” explains Google.

The Google Blog points out that Google Reader Play doesn’t show your subscriptions. It only shows a list of recommended pages and Google uses your actions (starring, liking or sharing items) to improve the recommendations. If you want to read your subscriptions in Google Reader Play, use this URL:

http://www.google.com/reader/play/#stream

Do you use any of these social news aggregators or know of any other excellent social news websites that I’ve missed out?

Post your comments and let me know other aggregator websites you use for news aggregation. If you like this blog you can Subscribe my blog feed. You can also Follow me on Twitter.

Not much change in the top 3 since last month’s top social networking sites, as Facebook continues to gain market share in the Unites States, growing steadily with over 53% US Market Share, Twitter has actually dropped in visitor traffic in the US. The largest drop in US Market Share of Visits in April was Myspace with over a 1% drop in traffic.

Assuming these statistics are logically accurate, this infographic highlights the significance and magnitude of social media. If you are looking for Word of Mouth Advertising, Social Media is here to help boost your efforts. By focusing your marketing attention to the Top Social Networking Websites, you will see the immediate benefits of “fishing where the fish are”.

It’s getting harder to ignore some of these numbers:

• YouTube is the second largest search engine on the web.
• 50% of YouTube’s 300 million users go at least once a week.
• Facebook usage is up 400% since last year.
• 3.5 billion pieces of content are shared each WEEK on Facebook.
• 96% of 18-35 yr olds. are on a social network.
• 34% of bloggers post opinions about products & brands.
• 25% of search results for the World’s Top 20 largest brands are links to UGC.
• 80% of Twitter usage is on mobile devices – Imagine what that means for bad customer experiences?

(Infographic by Derri Hasmi - link)