No one can deny just how dominant social media has become. From Facebook, MySpace to Twitter, its meteoric growth has been incredible. Since the social media marketing landscape moves so fast, we thought of adding a new segment to our blog that would update you about the latest in the social media scene on a monthly basis. Generally, marketers are making a stronger push into social media, with 57% saying they are either currently utilizing social media, as opposed to 15% in an earlier study.
Michael Jackson's death showed us evidence of the worldwide surge in social media usage after millions of people logged on to find out more about the star. It's not surprising that the lion's share of this buzz was generated by social media sites. The tragic death of the King of Pop, Michael Jackson was the most widely talked about topic in the social media avenues this month. It was the power of social media on display and a pointer to the inevitable rise that we are going to witness in the months to come. Michael Jackson's death has just proved beyond doubt the ability of social media sites in generating loads of traffic on the web.
Twitter Talks
As per Nielsen studies Twitter continues to be the pick of the social media sites receiving almost 3 billion impressions 2.73 billion, to be precise. The growth of Twitter is awesome increasing 1,928 percent year-over-year.
From 1 million unique visitors in June 2008 it has grabbed 21 million unique visitors in June 2009. With this, Twitter became the fourth most visited social networking site in June after Facebook, MySpace and Blogger. Twitter launched a new live-updating search widget which enables users to create a continuous real-time update from the query you put along with title and caption. Also the tool provides the option to loop old results. Twitter unveiled a special guide Twitter 101 For Business to assist users understand and learn more about this social media phenomenon.
The newest buzz from Twitter includes the creation of an official Google Analytics Twitter account (twitter.com/googleanalytics). The reach of Twitter has made even the Whitehouse wary and it has blocked online access to Twitter according to LA Times.
Social Media Scan
Here are the month's top stories in social media marketing at a quick glance:
- Facebook continued to blaze in the US social networking scene for the sixth month in a row, with 87.3 million unique visitors in June 2009. As part of their recent update Facebook now added Twitter features where the user created pages are shown in every search results and other users can easily follow the updates of these pages, in their Facebook news feeds. It is reported that Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates had to abandon his Facebook profile because of the flood of friend requests.
- MySpace.com is the No:1 entertainment portal recording a visitor growth of 190 percent by increasing from 4.2 million to 12.1 million visitors in June 2009.
- LinkedIn, cited as a key tactic used by marketers to reach a B2B audience, according to a recent study also pushed its visitor number from 9.6 million to 11.42 million.
- Digg has changed the URL character of ‘digged’ stories which diverts traffic away from the source sites.
- Amazon spent nearly a billion dollars to acquire online shoe shop Zappos.
So, that’s how the social media scenario looks this month. The way its going Twitter looks like it should become a social media Goliath in the near future.
on
No doubt social media is the marvel of the times. I also support Heidi’s opinion -with social media we can carve out a unique, niche strategy for our businesses that can improve the visibility of our businesses across the web.
Looking forward to the next round up post…
on
Interesting round up! I often am surprised at this social media phenomenon, they’re connecting people on a ‘massive scale’ conforming to Marshal McLuhan’s ‘Global Village’ derivations rightly. Above all they can provide businesses unprecedented niche marketing opportunities. The only constraint is each business/website has to mould a penetrating model out from the amorphous state of social media, for heightening your business levels.
on
With increasing numbers of marketers using social media tools in their business promotional efforts, over 57% to be exact, there is no doubt that social media is going to witness a further rise in the days to come. Its intrinsic benefits obviously explain its dramatic growth.