Reading immediate future’s Top Brands in Social media Report 2008, there are some statistics which any PR or marketing person should be aware of.
Managing social media is a vital part of any brand strategy, the nature of the beast is that conversation will take place about your brand whether you like it or not and a failure to participate in these conversations can let misconceptions perpetuate or problems to go unmanaged. At worst this can have an adverse impact on the perception of your brand.
Independent market analyst Datamonitor has revealed how quickly the number of people participating in online social networking is growing: the UK currently leads Europe, in terms of membership, and is expected to reach 27 million users – a threefold increase on today’s figures – by 2012.
According to VNU.net, nearly half of the online adult population around the world is a member of at least one networking site, with Facebook and MySpace between them housing over 170 million monthly active users.
Other social media activity is also continuing to grow at a frenetic pace. According to Wave3 research of active users:
- 394m watch video clips online
- 346m read blogs
- 321m read personal blogs
- 307m visit a friend’s social network page
- 303m share a video clip
- 272m manage a profile on a social network
- 248m upload photos
- 216m download video podcasts
- 215m download podcasts
- 184m start their own blog
- 183m upload a video clip
- 160m subscribe to an RSS feed
These are not insignificant numbers of people and in recent research, 34% of bloggers revealed that they currently post opinions about products and brands on their blog. According to new research, 62% of people are more likely to trust and use online reviews written by fellow shoppers before making a purchase, hence the relative importance of bloggers to a brand is growing.
In general, people want brands to talk with them rather than to them and this shows in the statistic that 36% of online users state that they think more positively about companies who actually run their own blog.
The report is available by dropping Katy Howell an email, see here for details.
