Notice to companies getting started in social media: You’re not an early adopter.
The most advanced firms are among Inc. magazine’s 500 fastest-growing companies, according to a survey by the Center of Marketing Research at the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth.
They’re ahead of the Fortune 500, which presumably means that they’re ahead of everyone.
Of those surveyed, 80% use social media. That’s up from 49% in 2008. And 14% are planning to use it. Read the rest of this entry »
Here’s some news that should warm the hearts of email marketers.
“Despite reports of its demise, email is still the most popular method of sharing, and despite its meteoric rise of late, Twitter is still not a very popular sharing channel,” writes Tim Schigel, CEO of ShareThis, the online sharing network, in a blog post.
Schigel reports that 46% of all sharing is driven by email, compared with 33% by Facebook and 14% by channels like Digg, del.icio.us and LinkedIn. Twitter’s “share” of this traffic? Only 6%. Read the rest of this entry »
Does Facebook work for B2B marketers?
It doesn’t, judging by the Big Money Facebook 50, a ranking of the best Facebook users.
According to this roster, Coke makes the best use of Facebook, as determined by “fan numbers, page growth, frequency of updates, creativity as determined by a panel of judges, and fan engagement.”
There’s only one problem: That the Top 50 consists entirely of consumer marketers—like Gatorade, Target, Audi, MTV and Victoria’s Secret. There isn’t a single B2B company among them. Read the rest of this entry »
Ad executives have shaken off their hangover. They’re more upbeat about budgets than they have been since the fall of 2007, according to a MediaPost article based on a report by Advertising Perceptions.
MediaPost’s Joe Mandese reports that the “study, which is based on an index of executives who plan to boost their ad spending over the next 12-months vs. those who plan to decrease it, currently stands at a positive difference of four percentage points, the highest level since the fall of 2007, when the index stood at positive eight percentage points.” Read the rest of this entry »
Want to connect with customers via social media? Don’t assume that they’re sitting at their work stations—they may be connected through their mobile phones.
That’s the gist of a new report from eMarketer. By the year 2013, The study predicts, 607.5 million mobile users—43% of all Internet visitors worldwide—will access social networks from their phones. In the U.S., 56.2 million, or 45% of all mobile Internet users, will do the same.
As usual, eMarketer doesn’t break out B2B, at least not in its email copy. And it admits that “estimating the market for mobile social advertising and marketing is premature, despite the promising user base.” Read the rest of this entry »
Hundreds of books and articles have been written about social media. But most fail to show that Twitter and other networks are of the slightest use to B2B marketers.
Usage patterns suggest that there is more talk than action on the b2b front.
A recent survey showed that only 38% of all business-to-business companies use social media, compared with 71% of the consumer marketers polled.
Their main obstacles? Lack of knowledge and inability to measure results. (For more results, see earlier blog post.
There are other reasons for this lack of belief. One is that many business people lack the time to go on social networks. Then there’s the resource issue.
Still, 38% is hardly a small number. It suggests that these tools do have their uses, and that it’s time to get active on them if you haven’t already.
What can the social networks do for you? First, they can help you reach customers who are attracted to what pundits call the real-time Web. Read the rest of this entry »
Don’t take this the wrong way. But are you a native or an immigrant?
We’re not talking about U.S. citizenship, but about your relationship to technology. Enquiro, using terms coined by writer Marc Prensky, defines people as either digital natives or digital immigrants.
Natives, those under 30, grew up with the technology. Immigrants adapted it as adults. So they relate to it in different ways, Enquiro says in a white paper titled, “Digital Natives and B2B Buying.” Read the rest of this entry »
Wake up, b2b marketers: You’re letting your b2c counterparts steal the play in social media.
Of the b2b companies surveyed by Equation Research, 38% include social media their marketing mix. But 21% do not, or are not planning to do so.
In contrast, 71% of the b2c companies polled are active in this area, along with 59% of the firms that identify themselves as both b2b and b2c. Only 9% are inactive. Business to business direct marketing firms are behind on both these fronts. Read the rest of this entry »