Applications, Digital Marketing, Social Media

Why should you use social media

This is a simple question. I am shocked when I hear business units tell me they do not need to use social media in order to help out their campaigns. It is really quite frustrating. Part of the reason to have a campaign is to get the word out on a product or service, to increase business, brand and market share. Right now, there is a great medium for that, and it is social media.

Mashable posted a great article titled 10 Fascinating YouTube Facts That May Surprise You. On number seven, the article give a very eye opening stat on YouTube:

As of February 2011, YouTube has 490 million unique users worldwide per month, who rack up an estimated 92 billion page views each month. We spend around 2.9 billion hours on YouTube in a month — over 325,000 years. And those stats are just for the main YouTube website — they don’t incorporate embedded videos or video watched on mobile devices.

490M unique users per month?! And that is going to the YouTube site alone, this does not count any type of embedded videos on other sites, or mobile! How could you not take advantage of a medium like YouTube? However, that is not all. Look at a couple other social media avenues, Facebook and Twitter.

Facebook boasts over 500 million users. Facebook Statistics gives us some good insights:

  • More than 500 million active users
  • 50% of our active users log on to Facebook in any given day
  • Average user has 130 friends
  • People spend over 700 billion minutes per month on Facebook
  • Average user is connected to 80 community pages, groups and events
  • Average user creates 90 pieces of content each month
  • Every month, more than 250 million people engage with Facebook on external websites
  • There are more than 200 million active users currently accessing Facebook through their mobile devices.
  • People that use Facebook on their mobile devices are twice as active on Facebook than non-mobile users.

TechCrunch’s article on Facebook stats states that “149 million Americans now actively use the social network (as of 2009, the network had 100 million active users in the U.S.). And 70 percent of these active users in the U.S. log on to the social network daily”. According to the numbers for just the US, 149M * .70 = 104M active daily users.

Compare that to the recent Super Bowl in the United States. The last Super Bowl drew a viewership average of 111M viewers. The average cost for a 30 second ad during the Super Bowl is $3M, to reach 111M viewers for 30 seconds one time a year. CNN-Money did an article explaining how the ads are worth the money, and they are, as people do watch for the ads, and then talk about them. Now where do they go to talk about these ads? They are not picking up the phone and just random dialing the phone book. They are going to Facebook and Twitter.

Twitter is no slouch on the social media front. As mentioned above, it helps to perpetuate the talk. The Next Web posted an article on the stats. Some of the highlights:

How many people visited Twitter.com in January worldwide? According to comScore it was nearly 75,000,000 . . . According to Compete Twitter.com received some 23,500,000 visitors. This puts the US market at around one-third of the Twitter user base . . . According to Twitter today some 50 million tweets are sent a day

I took a quick look around two Twitter accounts for stores (the Gap and Old Navy). They use the Twitter account for announcing discounts, new products, new designs, new blogs, mags, etc. That is going to 56k people for the Gap and 33k people for Old Navy to the people who directly follow the accounts. This does not include the millions who watch the public timeline. Just for a few words to type, that may take 30 seconds. A lot cheaper than a Super Bowl ad.

While these are good, I am not advocating abandoning the other avenues, like TV spots, newspapers/magazines ads, billboards, etc. They all have their role as well. But to ignore social media because you may not understand it, or it is not the traditional marketing methods, can really stifle the growth, and could even leave you way behind. The Super Bowl reaches 111 million people one day a year. The ads cost $3M per 30 seconds. It is a great avenue if you can afford it. Twitter reaches 75 million visitors a month. Facebook has an average of 104 million active users per day. It costs less to use the social media avenues, it reaches more people per day. Why should you use social media? Because that is where your customers are.