Digital & Social Media Statistics – February 2012

As I complete the second edition of monthly social media statistics I’m realizing the speed of statistics lags behind the real time web. As a result, the February 2012 statistics are almost always January related, if not even more delayed. I don’t see any way around this, but if you do give me a holler. Otherwise I’ll keep on trucking with our monthly edition of statistics.

Social Networking

  • Every second 700 Facebook posts are published and 150 pounds of candy are consumed.
  • The average Facebook user’s engagement jumped 32 percent this year and now the social networking site accounts for 7 of the average internet user’s 36 hours spent online each month.
  • The U.S. online video audience cracked 100 million in December, 43 percent higher than one year ago. The number of video streams grew as fast, rising 44 percent to 43.5 billion in December.
  • People over the age of 55 are the fastest growing group joining Facebook, according to research from Nielsen – and a survey by Kantar Media’s TGI MobiLens claims that people over 50 are more likely to use social networks on their mobiles than people under 30.
  • There are now over 2.8 billion social media profiles, representing around half of all internet users worldwide.
  • China is the most socially-engaged market in the world, with 84% of Internet users contributing at least once a month to either social networking, blogging, video-uploading, photo-sharing, microblogging or forums – they are followed by Russia, Brazil and India.
  • Twitter is growing at a rate of 11 accounts per second.
  • Pinterest has attracted an average of 3 pins per user, the average The Fancy user has 66.8 fancies (aka Pinterest’s version of pins). Still, The Fancy’s 250,000 member user base pales in comparison to Pinterest’s user base of 11,000,000.

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What I Got Right (and Wrong) About Pinterest Two Years Ago

Two years ago Pinterest founder Ben Silbermann spoke at an L2 Innovation Forum we hosted in New York City. At the time the idea for a network founded on our tendency to collect fascinated me, but I have to admit I didn’t get everything right about the emerging social network. Let’s take a look at what I got right, and wrong, about Pinterest.

Pinterest May Be More Important Than We Think

Or, The Inevitable Rise of User Generated Content

Back in 2010 I wrote that Pinterest is an “artful haven” that “operates outside of niches” where “members can express themselves through all objects:”

“Regular netizens become brand advocates for self expression and objects tell stories. These collections go on display for all to see, and friends, friends of friends, and anyone at all can search for people’s “pins” by tag, person, curated lists and more. This all matters because, as Ben says, “people are discovering things through people.” People want to know what their fashionable friends are getting, and in this way brands can earn authentic levels of influence.”

So far sounds about right, but I wish I would have spent more time explaining what I think this means for the Internet as a whole. Although the benefits of Google are unmistakeable, manually curated sites like StumbleUpon and Pinterest are shifting our focus away from search toward discovery.

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Infographic: e-Commerce Shops Ship Free or Peril

Online retail spend is expected to reach $300 billion in the U.S. alone by 2015, but how can you make sure your e-commerce store reaps the benefits of this fast growth? Offer a good product, market it well, optimize your store, and then follow up with free shipping.

“A free shipping offer that saves a customer $6.99 is more appealing to many than a discount that cuts the purchase price by $10,” says Wharton School of Business Professor David Bell. In other words, free shipping creates a perceived value that far outweighs the cost to the shop owner. Free shipping also increases average order size and reduces shopping cart abandonment.

Today nearly half of all retailers are offering free shipping, but these kinds of numbers prove that free shipping is moving away from a “point of difference” benefit to become part of the built in cost of running an e-commerce shop that hosts tangible goods.

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For the Best Facebook Engagement, Talk About Your Product

After focusing on the conventions of acquiring likes en masse, marketers are starting to internalize the importance of a much more meaningful metric. Engagement is emerging as the holy grail of social media marketing, but how do brands get fans talking?

By now companies are accustomed to wooing fans with free samples and sweepstakes exchange for likes, but the principals of engagement are slippery and less formulaic. Brands like Johnnie Walker and BMW emerge as clear leaders in the area of engagement, but what is it that they do differently than the likes of Burberry or Chanel? Perhaps more important, what kinds of posts get people talking?
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Dreamy Search Engine of the Future Would Deliver Profundity

It might be the English major in me, but I can’t help but wish a search engine existed with the express purpose of delivering profound results for the people. “Aha” moments would dominate the search rankings while information you can get everywhere else falls behind the work of daring thinkers.

This technology, of course, trickles into the ever difficult world of semantics. We’d have to answer “What is profound? How do we determine what resonates with some people while other pieces of information prove repetitive or outside the realm of understanding?”

It’s hard enough today for normal search engines to classify and rank information by search term relevance, but in the future I see tremendous value in reclassifying and making sense of information in entirely new and unheard of ways. Think Pinterest, for example. The social network thrives off of the idea that people collect things they’re fond of. Take this a step further and really what you have is a classification of information based on personal affinity.

The real accomplishment here is that Pinterest didn’t have to devise some grand algorithm or fuss with crawling the web. The social network turned users into the sorters of information, and in many ways that’s what makes Pinterest special. It’s no search engine, of course, but the information that trickles to the top is the well liked.

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Optimize That: Website Load Time and Your Bottom Line

Humans are creating more information on the web every year than we did during all of our existence prior to the Internet. That’s a whole lot of data and a ton of information to sort through. That’s why I’m creating a new column called Optimize That. These succinct, to-the-point articles deliver quick and easy tips to help you optimize your digital presence for optimal money-making opportunity. Let’s get started.

On Your Website, Time is Money

Ever been to a website that took so long to load you thought for an instant that you might have been teleported to the days of noisy 56K modems? If you’re like the average consumer all it takes is a couple of seconds to lose somebody forever.

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Don’t Fear the Net, Just Play By the Rules

Have you heard of Disney’s ‘Club Penguin’? You probably will have, if you have children of an age that are just starting to become curious about the internet. Tech entrepreneur Lance Merrifield set up the child-friendly social network in October 2005, and it’s attracted over 150 million children since it was launched. Children younger than 13, who are still too small for Facebook and don’t fancy the daunting prospect of teen chatrooms, have embraced the site, which offers a safe haven for children to meet others online. Participants can decorate an igloo, ‘waddle’ around and socialise ‘safely’ – but how?
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What Disappearing Car Doors Can Teach Us About Marketing

Future Car DoorRemember hydraulic-powered car doors that ascend into the heavens like bat wings?  They’ve been a fixture in our vision of cars of the future since Back to the Future, a little piece of pop culture that predicted where we’d end up when flying cars came to fruition.  I’ve always taken these lifting car doors as a matter of fact.  ”They aren’t available en masse yet,” I’d always think to myself, “but soon car doors will all operate like this.”

As it turns out, many people think this way, but there’s usually someone who jumps in and shatters our preconceptions with new ideas.  These are the innovators of the world, and they often end up creating products that change everything.  Take the car door example I mentioned earlier as an example.  The company in the video below doesn’t think car doors show fly up like wings.  They think doors should slide downward and retract into the car  (somewhat 80′s seeming video below).

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