The Internet Marketer» Social media

Social media churn rate is faster than is necessary for effective exposure

Pete — Fri, 07 Oct 2011 07:39:14 +0000

This interesting post by Bit.ly asserts that the “half-life” of social media link is short; so short in fact that it’s effectiveness comes into question.

Sarah Kessler helpfully translates this as:

A link to breaking news typically has a short half life; it is no longer relevant after a short amount of time. Something less timely, like a funny video, wouldn’t see the same steep drop off — so those cute kittens tend to have a longer half-life.

Mason found that the type of content, however, isn’t the only predictor of how a link gets shared. It also matters where it is shared. The half-life of links posted on Facebook is on average 24 minutes longer than links to the same content posted on Twitter. And links in emails and instant messages remain active slightly longer than links on Facebook.

Bitly’s chart above indicates the Mean Half Life of a…

Link on Twitter: 2.8 hours
Link on Facebook: 3.2 hours
Link via Direct Sources (email, IM, etc): 3.4 hours
Link on YouTube: 7.4 hours

Simply put: Social media churn rate is faster than is necessary for effective exposure

Many thanks to Paul B for flagging this interesting info

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Do you have Social Networking guilt?

David — Tue, 25 Jan 2011 07:11:40 +0000

Facebook and Twitter are all the rage. Many advertisements you see a company’s logo along with “follow me on facebook and twitter” along with the respective icons.

Reason to have guilt: Do you feel guilty that you aren’t doing the same thing with your business? You should if your business depends on a lot of people coming through the door; restaurants, nightclubs, hospitality come to mind. If you have a business like this then you are probably doing you and your business a disservice. I know some restaurants that tell the latest specials and some fast food places post coupons.

Reason to not have guilt: Not every business will benefit from social networking. Would you follow a funeral home on Twitter? How about a concrete manufacturer? I may be wrong but I would say these businesses would be less likely to benefit from social networking.

One thing to keep in mind is that if you are going to use facebook and/or twitter (or other services) you need to make sure you have the time to update them. No use advertising it if it is not going to be updated. You need to give your customers a reason to visit you on these services.

Where does your business stand? After all, you know your business and clients better than anyone!

David Radzikiewicz
A7Designs
Adelaide Website Design

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The real costs of internet marketing with Social Media

Pete — Wed, 29 Oct 2008 08:33:14 +0000

Using blogs, Twitter, Face Book and the plethora of other emerging social media ‘devices’ to promote your website is without doubt a powerful new force and worth considering when planning your website’s internet marketing campaign.

Social media evangelists will exclaim loudly (and passionately as enthusiasts do) that if you create great content in the social media entities that match your target market then you have an excellent chance to attract traffic. You may even pick up some great Google PageRank’d links that will also help in your site’s overall ranking. There’s no doubt about it, social media will help your website sales, but at what cost ?

Feeding the content machine
For social media to work for you, someone has to feed the content beast. Someone has to invest time and effort in creating articles/blogs/lens/etc Inventing stories (just like this one !) or whatever form the social media entity calls its particular form of content.

To effectively improve your website’s marketing status you’ll need to be grinding out that content on a regular basis. How regular ? Monthly; weekly, daily ?
I’d value input from social media gurus (leave a comment !)

“That’s easy” social media evangelists will exclaim – they live and breathe social media so it is easy – for them – but if you’re a social media mere mortal; or time poor and flat out running your business then it’s really not at all easy. If fact finding time – any time at all – becomes a genuine problem!

Time poor
So…. Have you noticed that many websites have out of date information ?

When I point out the sales disadvantage of this to clients their response is typically ‘no time’.
What they really mean is that busy business people have to prioritise their time and website updates along with other non core activities typically get re-prioritise, sometimes right out of existence.

If these busy folks don’t have time to update their website, then you would be extremely optimistic thinking they (that’s you by the way!) would invest time on non-core social media activities. Particularly so when the social media activity is probably perceived as even further removed from core business activities &/or comfort zone.

If you don’t have time to drive social media to acheive your internet marketing objectives, then maybe you can delegate it; if of course you have staff with reasonably developed authoring skills; if they have time for this task; if they are motivated etc.

The alternative is to get one of the new breed of social media consultants to do it for you; which is probably the most sensible solution but unfortunately costs have suddenly sky-rocketed again…

So has anyone done a cost-benefit analysis for using social media as an internet marketing aid ?

At this stage I think that directly engaging with social media is a poor use of time for small business but Im happy to be proven wrong.

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