Advertising
Twitter Usage in America, Dive into the Data
Edison Research is launching their “Twitter Usage in America 2010″ report today with a live webinar. The report is part of their full Internet & Multimedia Study and includes some quality data. Here are some of the highlights:
- “The percentage of Americans who are familiar with Twitter has surged from 5% in 2008 to 87% in 2010.” We can all blame CNN’s Rick Sanchez for this.
- There are really only 17 million Americans using Twitter. The inflated number of accounts represents SPAM accounts and users with multiple accounts.
- “The percentage of Twitter users who are African-Americans in the current U.S. population… stands at roughly 25%.”
- “The majority of Twitter users are “lurkers,” passively following and reading the updates of others without contributing updates of their own.”
- “The percentage of Twitter users who follow brands is more than three times higher than similar behavior expressed by social networking users in general.”
- “A significantly higher proportion of Twitter users update their social networking profiles – and access Twitter – using mobile phones than the average user of other social networking sites and services.”
- “Only 7% of Americans are aware of location based social networks”
- “Twitter users are more likely to have improved their financial situation in the past year compared to the total population (32% to 18%)”
Twitter Users are Unique
There are still, relatively, very few of us living and breathing Twitter on a regular basis (and sharing our breakfast choices). The users driving the content on Twitter are not reflective of social networking users as a whole. They are very much early adopters and more comfortable interacting with brands. This is great for marketers looking to engage influencers.
“The fact that Twitter users are far more likely to follow brands and engage in brand conversations makes them responsive to marketing, but also considerably different to mainstream Americans,” said Tom Webster, VP Strategy adn Marketing at Edison Research.
Marketers can clearly find in Twitter a healthy community of influencers ready to engage. But as Tom points out, Twitter users are a bit of a different breed. Marketing strategies that work well on Twitter may not hold true within other communities. Many marketers would no doubt agree with this assessment, but it is very interesting to dive into some of the data behind it.
Twitter Has A Strong Black Community
Why are so many African Americans on Twitter (There are Black People on Twitter)? Who knows. Why do so many white people love Frisbee Sports? It does not really matter why, but it’s important as marketers to understand the demographics of the channels we are marketing in. Depending on the brand in question, this may or may not be important to your marketing. Nevertheless, this demonstrated even more that Twitter is an outlier.
And now for a couple surprising numbers…
Twitter Users Make More Money?
If you were on Twitter in the past year, you had a significantly higher chance of improving your financial situation. The question is why? Is it because Twitter users are more likely to be business owners? Entrepreneurs?
“WTF is Twitter?” is so 2009
Oprah, Ashton, The Real Shaq oh my. Thanks to some celebrity and media love affairs with the blue bird in question, Twitter has shockingly infiltrated 87% of American brains. To jump from 5% to 87% in 2 years is quite the leap. So while 17 million Americans are the only ones truly using the service, hundreds of millions know we are here. Twitter can continue to have a large influence (as large as Facebook) on what society talks about with a much smaller core user group.
Thanks to Edison for the great data. Check out the the webinar or download the full report.
Cottonelle Almost Gets Social
I really enjoyed the Cottonelle “How do you roll?” commercial when I first saw it last week, asking people how they prefer to present their paper, over or under (apparently the answer is over).
But, for a campaign that can get people to the internet pretty easily, their integrated social media, if you can call it that, reminds me more of any empty roll that needs to be replaced.
Yes they have two of their commercial’s characters on Twitter, and a Facebook page, and the poll itself with a nice map of results. But these small efforts are social for social’s sake with very little thought toward tying it all together. They even went out and interviewed folks on the street to add to their actor interviews and put all of it on Youtube, but check out the views on those videos. There is obviously nothing being done to promote them.
It smacks of a brand or agency that thinks social media is suppose to be cheap and easy. I see a multi-million dollar traditional ad campaign and a dollar store social media effort.
There is no effort to engage the consumers, whose attention they are buying with some major TV spots, in a long term way. I am sure the media buys will produce a short bump in sales and if that is all Cottonelle wants, then fine, good show.
But in 2010, pointing people to a micro-site that does not extend the relationship beyond the length of a media buy, is traditional advertising and less effective. The opportunity is to build a community, to engage the consumer in a way that creates a longer term relationship (meaning more money), to ask questions of consumers, to answer questions, to get the people they are pulling in with a clever, simple question, and convert them into spending more time with their brand. Consumers want dialogue.
It is a cute campaign Cottonelle, but perhaps you should consider building consumer relationships with a longer shelf life than say, I don’t know, a roll of toilet paper?
Superbowl Commercials and Youtube with Bridgestone
Bridgestone has had several top ranking Superbowl commercials over the last few years and has seen great return from them. From this, they have begun to see the value in sharing that media through social sites like Youtube and are beginning to actively invest in these tools and social media as a whole. Michael Fluck, Director of Brand and Retail Marketing, had a quick talk with us about this and more.
Bridgestone will be attending Social Fresh Nashville, a one day social media conference for marketers, on Jan 11, 2010
One of my favorites of their Superbowl Commercials
The Democratization of Advertising
The Democratization of Advertising
Presentation Transcript
- The Democratization of Advertising JasonKeath.com
- Santa Claus is Real
- YES Kids Love Santa.
Read the rest of this entry »
Youtube Edges Closer to TV Numbers and TV Money with Wedding Dance
Google put up a blog post today about how they monetized the viral video hit Jill Peterson and Kevin Heinz’s wedding party dance(below). This video was posted on July 16th and has generated over 12 million hits in 2 weeks.
TV Numbers
For some perspective, the highest rated American prime time TV show during that time was America’s Got Talent with 13.2 million viewers. TV has long been light years ahead of any online numbers. This example shows that the gap is closing. Truly remarkable content is beginning to reach large viewership numbers online in shorter and shorter time spans. And it is not always professionally produced.
And the gap is only going to narrow. The online audience will continue to grow larger. The information is moving faster and faster. And more and more people are becoming savvy content creators.
Who is Making the Money?
Google is, the content middle man, the distributor. The distributors hold a lot of the power moving forward. Think iTunes on the music front and Amazon on the book front. The “rights holders” to the song in the video, Forever by Chris Brown, were also able to easily monetize (I assume his label or manager). The song has shot up to the top 5 on both Amazon and iTunes.
A Workable System
This did not happen overnight. Youtube has been a battleground for some time now, with entertainment industry giants facing off against Google on profit sharing. Google has been working voraciously behind the scenes to make this process easy for the rights holders. Instead of deleting every piece of copyrighted material, the entertainment industry can overlay an amazon download link for the song and Google Adwords in the sidebar. Everyone is happy.
Of course it would also be nice if after a certain viewer threshhold the video creator got a peice of the action as well. No word on that from the Google blog as of yet.
