The Social Media stats (in case you missed one):

1. Over 50% of the world’s population is under 30-years-old
2. 96% of them have joined a social network
3. Facebook tops Google for weekly traffic in the U.S.
4. Social Media has overtaken porn as the #1 activity on the Web
5. 1 out of 8 couples married in the U.S. last year met via social media
6. Years to Reach 50 millions Users:  Radio (38 Years), TV (13 Years), Internet (4 Years),    iPod (3 Years)…
7. Facebook added over 200 million users in less than a year
8. iPhone applications hit 1 billion in 9 months.
9. We don’t have a choice on whether we DO social media, the question is how well we DO it.”
10. If Facebook were a country it would be the world’s 3rd largest ahead of the United States and only behind China and India
11. Yet, QQ and Renren dominate China
12. 2009 US Department of Education study revealed that on average, online students out performed those receiving face-to-face instruction
13. 80% of companies use social media for recruitment; % of these using LinkedIn 95%
14. The fastest growing segment on Facebook is 55-65 year-old females
15. Ashton Kutcher and Ellen Degeneres (combined) have more Twitter followers than the  populations of Ireland, Norway, or Panama.  Note I have adjusted the language here after someone pointed out the way it is phrased in the video was difficult to determine if it was combined.
16. 50% of the mobile Internet traffic in the UK is for Facebook…people update anywhere, anytime…imagine what that means for bad customer experiences?
17. Generation Y and Z consider e-mail passé – some universities have stopped distributing e-mail accounts
18. Instead they are distributing: eReaders + iPads + Tablets
19. What happens in Vegas stays on YouTube, Flickr, Twitter, Facebook…
20. The #2 largest search engine in the world is YouTube
21. While you watch this 100+ hours of video will be uploaded to YouTube
22. Wikipedia has over 15 million articles…studies show it’s more accurate than Encyclopedia Britannica…78% of these articles are non-English
23. There are over 200,000,000 Blogs
24. Because of the speed in which social media enables communication, word of mouth now becomes world of mouth
25. If you were paid a $1 for every time an article was posted on Wikipedia you would earn $156.23 per hour
26. 25% of search results for the World’s Top 20 largest brands are links to user-generated content
27. 34% of bloggers post opinions about products & brands
28. Do you like what they are saying about your brand? You better.
29. People care more about how their social graph ranks products and services  than how Google ranks them
30. 78% of consumers trust peer recommendations
31. Only 14% trust advertisements
32. Only 18% of traditional TV campaigns generate a positive ROI
33. 90% of people that can TiVo ads do
34. Kindle eBooks Outsold Paper Books on Christmas
35. 24 of the 25 largest newspapers are experiencing record declines in circulation
36. 60 millions status updates happen on Facebook daily
37. We no longer search for the news, the news finds us.
38. We will non longer search for products and services, they will find us via social media
39. Social Media isn’t a fad, it’s a fundamental shift in the way we communicate
40. Successful companies in social media act more like Dale Carnegie and less like Mad Men Listening first, selling second
41. The ROI of social media is that your business will still exist in 5 years
42. Bonus: comScore indicates that Russia has the most engage social media audience with visitors spending 6.6 hours and viewing 1,307 pages per visitor per month – Vkontakte.ru is the #1 social network

At the same time, Facebook kicked off its Developers’ Conference, called F8. Like Twitter’s conference the week before, the gathering was for third-party developers of applications that live on Facebook itself and across a growing ecosystem. Founder Mark Zuckerberg announced a stunning array of changes and new initiatives that will directly affect the nearly 500 million people who now visit the site each month, not to mention all the brands anxious to reach them.

Facebook is moving aggressively to expand its ecosystem across much of the Web. Its new Open Graph effort, which provides Web site publishers with simple tools to integrate Facebook features and functions directly into their own sites, will be a game-changer.  In addition, Facebook has essentially set every users’ default to “globally social” — which is to say, it presumes all members of the social network want to be social not only on Facebook, but wherever it is extending its tentacles across the Web.

Web sites that add the new Open Graph features to their site can also add a tracking token — like the Google Analytics tracker — that will provide publishers data from Facebook’s new Insights analytics package. For instance, Levi’s new Friend Store leverages Open Graph.  If you see a “Like” button next to, say, a cool pair of jeans on the Levi’s site, and you click on that button, your endorsement will appear in your news feed on Facebook for all your friends to see, comment on and share. And Levi’s will be able to see the degree to which its site content went viral across your particular social graph.

In the meantime, Facebook will track everything you’re liking, posting, etc. for its own advertising platform, enabling it to target ads to its users based on what they’ve declared about themselves in their profiles and news updates.

Facebook believes it can help advertisers more precisely deliver ads that are directly relevant to the person who sees them. Moreover, it’s hoping that because users will see ads that pertain to their immediate needs, interests or desires, they’ll be more receptive to those messages.

At Ad:Tech, all the buzz was about how to integrate better into the interactions and conversations you might find on social networks, including Facebook and Twitter. Everyone in the business, it seems, is particularly interested in those 500 million monthly visitors to Facebook.  And Facebook knows it.

It’s also clear all the ex-Googlers in leadership positions over at Facebook learned a lot from their experience baking AdSense into the Web’s plumbing — you could call Open Graph a cousin to AdSense.  Moreover, as they continue to refine Facebook’s equivalent of AdWords, today’s search marketers will be able to add “social marketer” to their job descriptions more effectively.  In addition, all those SEOs out there have a whole new dimension to focus on as they work to optimize Web sites not only for search engines, but also for Facebook.  Keyword lists will take on whole new dimensions as semantics, target markets, personal interests, and rising and falling memes become a critical part of deploying ads on Facebook.

While there are many unknowns to contemplate around all this new stuff, the key concern will be the degree to which people become animated about privacy issues.  Facebook is being careful to advise its users about what their actions and activities will mean, and providing avenues for opting out of a variety of social settings.  Over time, however, people will slip.  A casual “like” may trigger a cascade of opting-in, and because most of us won’t pay attention when that happens, it’s likely the vast majority of Facebook users will have essentially bought in to the new scheme.  Still, there could be a backlash.

The rise of Facebook, and to lesser degrees Twitter, has been good for a whole variety of reasons.  The most important of these is the wave of innovation that has been unleashed, which may represent the first credible threat to Google since its ascendancy began more than a decade ago. The best news is, the entire marketing profession and the brands we serve are the major beneficiaries.

by Derek Gordon

Social media marketing is a term that describes the use of social networks, online communities, blogs, and any other online collaborative media for marketing, sales, public relations and traffic growth. Common social media marketing sites include Twitter, Digg, Facebook, Flickr, Wikipedia, Orkut and YouTube.

Why Social Media Marketing (SMM)?

There are a number of benefits associated with SMM, and here are just a few:

• It’s social – Remember the old marketing term ‘word-of-mouth’ advertising? Apply that same concept to the vast internet audience and you’ll begin to understand the viral potential that SMM commands. Imagine your unique content (a.k.a. ‘asset’ = news article, video, review, info graphic, etc.) being passed around and discussed with a world-wide audience.
• It’s a recommendation – In the same way that a high placement in Google’s natural search results is a recommendation from a trusted source that your page is relevant, so too is the viral effect created by social media.
• It feeds SEO – The major search engines put a fair amount of value and trust on pages that perform well in the social arena. Add to that the potential for link-bait (other sites linking to yours) and you have a healthy boost in your Search Engine Optimization efforts.
• It’s affordable – While there are no guarantees that an asset will ‘go viral,’ the ones that do receive an initial rush of traffic, residual traffic, brand awareness, and inbound links; all for $20. Assets that perform at the lower end of the viral spectrum still receive exposure that warrants a rate of twice that amount, if not more.

Getting Started

Where do you begin? Some learn by doing, others outsource. Whichever path you choose for your business, ViralFire.net can light the way. Contact us today!