Resources for social media
| Joe Marchese, Mar 09, 2010 03:00 PM |
| A great local Web experience has long been promised by the Internet, but very rarely delivered. However, with the rise of services like Yelp and Foursquare, and continued improvements in geo-filtering tools, it appears that local will finally live up to its potential.
How big a deal is figuring out local? Think of it this way: Google was built on local advertisers, through use of what was called the longtail. The struggle for local marketing and user experience has always been a question of content. Local merchants rarely have the resources to develop a quality digital presence; even when they could, the information would be out of date very quickly. Enter social media local sites like Yelp and Foursquare, which have turned tagging and reviewing local merchants into a game. Getting hundreds of thousands of people to do the work to create up-to-date local content has always been the missing link. And the fact that services like Foursquare make it not only easy, but fun, to use your GPS-enabled phone is the final piece of the puzzle. Why is this important to national marketers? Because, like politics, all marketing is local. Papa John’s advertisements during various national sporting events had me thinking pizza. So my next step was to find the local Papa John’s. While I was going through the online ordering experience (which is fantastic), I decided to check out this Papa John’s Yelp rating, and was very disappointed to find that after seven reviews, my local Papa John’s only had one star and a number of customer complaints. That would usually have led me to pick someplace else to order from, but I wanted to see if the delivery service was as bad as Yelp said. So I ordered. After an hour with no pizza, I decided to call the Papa John’s that I’d ordered from, but no one picked up the phone. I called multiple times; still no answer. An hour and a half after ordering, my cold order arrived — or at least, part of my order. We all know that customer service is always important, but what I learned from Yelp was that my experience was not an isolated incident for my local Papa John’s. I also developed an even deeper trust for Yelp reviews when it comes to making service decisions. For Papa John’s, Yelp offers an opportunity to keep up with what people are saying about its stores locally, so the company can best capitalize on the money it spends to advertise nationally. In short, blending local reputation and national advertising will be key to digital marketing success. Source: Mediapost Online Spin – Social Media Will Finally Make Local Marketing Work |
According to a survey conducted by Crowd Science, with Twitter being accessed from mobile devices to a greater extent than other social media, Twitter users also use social media more in such locations as cars, restaurants and restrooms. 11% of Twitter users admitted to accessing social media while driving during the preceding 30 days, compared with just 5% of other social media users. And 29% of Twitter users said they had accessed social media from cars at some point in the past, compared with 13% of non-users.
John Martin, CEO of Crowd Science, notes that “Twitter is more of a mobile media phenomenon than other social networks, so these results, while a little disturbing, are… not so surprising… the bottom line is that either type of activity takes a driver’s attention away from the road.”
The survey found that only 27% of Twitter users tweet daily, while 46% check updates daily. In addition, 24% of Twitters users have never tweeted, or have ceased doing so.
According to the survey, 40% of Twitter users access the service via mobile at least sometimes, compared with 32% for Facebook users, and 8% use mobile all the time vs. 3% for Facebook.
In addition to the greater usage while driving, the survey also found that over the past 30 days:
Twice as many Twitter users as non-Twitter social media users (8% to 4%) had accessed any social media from a theater during a movie or live performance, 17% of Twitter users vs. 12% of non-Twitter social media users had accessed social media from a washroom or toilet, and nearly three times as many Twitter users as other social media users have accessed social media from restaurants (31% vs. 12%)
Considering the attitudes of Twitter users, says the report, a significant number of social media users use the applications because friends and contacts do (17%), or because stopping or reducing its use would be damaging to their social status (15%.).
32% of Twitter users feel they spend too much time using social media, 22% say they’ve written things on social media that they’ve later regretted, and 16% report that they often neglect important activities to spend time on social media. Yet 25% of Twitter users say social media is their favorite leisure activity, compared with 14% of non-Twitter social media users.
Additional survey results include:
41% of Twitter users prefer to contact friends via social media rather than telephone, compared with 25% of non-Twitter social media users, 11%, vs. only 6% of those not using Twitter, actually prefer social media over face-to-face contacts, 14% of Twitter users said they have revealed things about themselves in social media that they wouldn’t under any other circumstances, and 8% admitted to “frequently stretching” the truth about themselves online.
Twitter users tend to be older than non-Twitter social media users (54% over 30 years old, vs. 42%):
They are twice as likely to be self-employed or entrepreneurs (18% vs. 9%), 24% vs. 15% “buy gadgets/devices when they first come out,” 48% vs. 30% have created a website, 37% currently maintain a blog, twice as many as non-Twitter social media users
The Crowd Science study was conducted across more than 600,000 visitors to multiple websites between August 5-13, 2009, targeting social media users age 12 and up.
For more information from Crowd Science, please visit here.
