A Profile of the Active Social Networker

This isn’t an episode of Criminal Minds, but if you were conducting an indepth investigative analysis where you were asked to present a profile of the “suspect” most likely to visit social networking sites and blogs, social media marketing articles here’s what you’d come up with.Our most active social networker/reader of blogs is a woman between the ages of 18 and 34 and likely to be Asian or Pacific Islander. She lives in New England, holds at least a bachelor’s degree and earns less than $50,000 a year.Nielsen’s State of the Media: The Social Media Report – Q3 2011 presents us with this profile tidbit as well as a raft of other facts about the monumental popularity of social media, including not only who’s using it, but how social media continues to grow like an amoeba, adding a lot more impact to businesses and brands like yours.Findings in this new study show that blog posts and social network messages reach nearly 80 percent of online Americans and take up nearly a quarter of the time we spend online. Specifically, such sites consume 22.5 percent of our online time, with online games coming in a distant second at 9.8 percent.Congratulations. You finally have a handle on the social media thing. Now the real work begins: pinpointing the most powerful people in your online networks and cultivating those relationships into more business wins.Big brands like beauty retailer Sephora and giffgaff, the U.K.'s fastest-growing mobile network, have called on enterprise social media suite provider Lithium Technologies to help launch and sustain their strong online communities. According to Lithium's principal scientist Michael Wu, a key part of that process is identifying top influencers and turning them into company advocates. social media marketing dallas For small businesses with smaller budgets, there happen to be a number of low-cost (or free) social analytics companies--several with targeted business offerings--that provide scores and reports to help you find and engage your network superstars.Many of them are still works in progress, Wu cautions, with an overemphasis on "bandwidth," or activity and quantity of followers, friends and fans.

Consumers cling to email, too

Other online activities attracting users in Nielsen's Top 10 are email, with 7.6 percent, followed by portals, videos/movies and search each coming in at around 4 percent. Even less time is consumed in instant messaging (3.3 percent), learn social media marketing software manufacturers (3.2 percent), classified auctions (2.9 percent) and current events and global news (2.6 percent.)HootSuite lets users manage multiple networks, schedule messages, develop custom analytics reports and more. HootSuite is free, but certain features, including reports, work on a point system. Users must upgrade from a free account to have access to all the site's features.With Sprout Social, users can organize multiple accounts and multiple identities in one place, schedule messages and measure success through reports. The interface is among the sharpest around. Sprout Social also has some cool tools for discovering new people to follow and engage. Packages range from $9 per month to $49 per month."Even if you make a lot of noise, you're not guaranteed to be influential," he explains. "But of course the algorithms will get better."Below, we take a quick look at a few of the most influential influence rankers.Based on more than 35 variables on Facebook and Twitter to measure "true reach," "amplification probability" and "network influence"Free and arguably the most high profile, Klout has partnerships with foursquare, Google Chrome, The Huffington Post, LinkedIn, Spotify and about.In the big screen adaptation of William Patrick Kinsella’s short story, Shoeless Joe, the main protagonist -- an Iowa farmer played by Kevin Costner -- hears a voice in his head that says, “If you build it, he will come.” importance of social media marketing While Costner’s character went on to build an iconic baseball field that eventually drew thousands of fictional visitors, you and your business can’t afford to take the same risk. If you build and manage a website, you have to promote it, and according to a new study, adding Twitter’s free ‘Tweet Button’ to your web pages drives traffic to your site and has the potential to lift your sales.

Facebook is still king

The report also says Americans spend more time on Facebook than any other website, with figures showing more than 140 million visitors in May. That's nearly triple the 50 million visits logged by the second-highest site, social media marketing agencies Blogger, which is a hosting platform for individual blogs that use the Blogger domain.Actionly is a paid social media monitoring tool that gives users the ability to create custom searches from which to pull data, track ROI and measure post-click conversations. It also facilitates the management of multiple social media accounts from its dashboard. Best of all, Actionly integrates with Google Analytics. Plans are $20, $50 and $100 per month.NutshellMail from Constant Contact tracks users' social media presence on a number of sites, including Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Yelp, foursquare and YouTube, and delivers a summary via e-mail. It's a great tool for managing brands on a budget.Business websites that include Twitter’s Tweet Button receive seven times the number of social media mentions than sites that don’t display such social sharing hooks, according to a new report from BrightEdge, a San Mateo, Calif.-based enterprise-level search-engine optimization firm, which tallied the responses of four million tweets.The report says the evidence points to social sharing buttons -- like the ‘Tweet’ button at the top of this article -- are a means of driving traffic to your website. In its most recent Social-Share Analysis: Tracking Social Adoption and Trends (link opens a PDF file), BrightEdge says 53.6 percent of the search and social media marketing largest 10,000 sites on the Web displayed social links or buttons on their homepage in August — a figure that’s up slightly from a 52.8 percent just a month earlier. The company takes the “glass half-empty” approach to these statistics, saying far too many brands are not taking full advantage of social sharing tools like Twitter’s Tweet and Follow button, especially since the tools are free and easy to install.