Social sites eclipse e-mail use

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Social network sites such as Facebook and MySpace are now more popular than personal e-mail, finds a report.

The Nielsen survey of users’ habits found that 67% of all those going online were spending time at social network and blogging sites.

Social sites eclipse e-mail use - Facebook is grabbing more and more of web users' time.

Social sites eclipse e-mail use – Facebook is grabbing more and more of web users’ time.

Interest in the category is growing four times faster than the other top four sectors, said the report. In the UK one in every six minutes of the average web user is spent at a social site, it found.

“Social networking has become a fundamental part of the global online experience,” said John Burbank, chief executive of Nielsen Online in a statement.

“Social networking will continue to alter not just the global online landscape, but the consumer experience at large,” he said.

Nielsen measures interest in categories by the percentage of the web audience that regularly visit such sites. The latest statistics suggest that 65.1% of web users use web e-mail but 66.8% are turning up at social network sites.

This means, said Nielsen, that about one in every 11 minutes a web user is online is spent at one of the sites Nielsen counts in its “Member Communities” category which includes both blogs and social network sites.

Of these sites, Facebook has highest average time per user, found Nielsen.

The researchers also found that social networking sites are managing to reach a very broad swathe of web users. The fastest growing segment of users turning up and using social sites over the last year was among 35-49 year olds.

In particular, the report noted, almost a quarter of Facebook’s users were known to be over 50 years old.

More and more people want to get at their favourite social site and update via mobile, found Nielsen. In the UK the numbers of Britons looking at a social site via their phone was up 249%.

Source: BBC

Hispanics social media marketing strategy – a must

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Any company that comes in contact with online Hispanic consumers would be negligent not to include them on its social media marketing strategy. The focal point should be the identification of the technologies and social media channels that are a strategic fit.

By Havi Goffan

Any company that comes in contact with online Hispanic consumers would be negligent not to include them in its social media marketing strategy.

Any company that comes in contact with online Hispanic consumers would be negligent not to include them in its social media marketing strategy.

U.S.-based Hispanic consumers are significantly more likely to participate in online social media than their non-Hispanic counterparts, making a social media strategy a must for any marketer wanting to reach this group online, according to a new report from Forrester Research Inc.

The research findings are as follows:

Online Hispanics are more involved and likely to listen to word-of-mouth

  • 69% of 3,000 online Hispanics are Spectators, meaning that they watch, read or listen to what others have created online.
  • Only 42% of non-Hispanics online are Spectators

Online Hispanics are more active

  • 40% of online Hispanics have the highest level of online activity and are characterized as Creators, meaning that they take part in such online activities as blogging, publishing web pages and uploading audio and video.
  • Only 12% of non-Hispanics online consumers participate in these activities.

Online Hispanics have a higher level of “Influentials”

  • 77% of online Hispanic adults take part in some sort of online social activity: Forrester characterized this group as influential, reporting that on average 60% tell friends and family about products that interest them.
  • more than 70% of all Hispanics surveyed said they stay with brands they like, suggesting that marketers who successfully build relationships with them now will have advocates for the long term.

Why are Hispanics more predisposed toward online social networking?

  • First, Hispanics are customarily early adopters of entertainment technologies, and this corresponds online to the use of video, audio and other related social media technologies such as blogging.
  • Second, Hispanic culture emphasizes the group over the individual, therefore Hispanic consumers tend to look to others for advice or agreement on product choices.
  • Third, according to research, “even though many U.S.-born Hispanic consumers prefer to use the Spanish language, many media publishers and marketers in the U.S. don’t offer this option. Social networking provides Hispanics with opportunities to fill that online gap by contributing their own Spanish-language content”, Forrester says.

Hispanics social media marketing strategy – a must

Any company that comes in contact with online Hispanic consumers would be negligent not to include them on its social media marketing strategy. The focal point should be the identification of the technologies and social media channels that are a strategic fit.

25 social interaction metrics or how to measure your social media marketing campaign

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by Claudia “Havi” Goffan

How do we measure the effectiveness of your brand's social media marketing campaigns?

How do we measure the effectiveness of your brand’s social media marketing campaigns?

Social media has evolved into an every day way of interaction and communication for a large part of the population. And this evolution started in the last century when social media commenced amidst the original chats in chatrooms and blogs. The first blog was created in the late 1980’s: http://www.netfunny.com/rhf/ and it is still alive and well today. Online dating sites, also a part of social media, started with online chats and became famous in 1988 with the movie “You’ve Got Mail”. In 2008, one out of nine couples that got married that year, actually met online. It is expected that the U.S. online dating market will reach $932 million in 2011.

Companies are starting 2010 with sparkling new social media campaigns and everybody knows it’s about the engagement, right? So, how do we measure the effectiveness of your brand’s social media marketing campaigns?

The ultimate approach to social media marketing campaign measurement will look at the things that really matter: sales, profits, customer satisfaction and loyalty. But that may take some time and you need to know how to gage the effectiveness of your social media marketing campaign to see if you are headed in the right direction in order to meet those objectives. Therefore, I wanted to share with you 25 social interaction metrics of key performance indicators to use with your social media marketing campaign. This is not an exhaustive list neither it is listed by order of importance and each social media marketer needs to identify the ones that are most suited for them.

I hope you find them useful and that you feel free to share additional ones with us and with our readers.

  1. CTR
  2. Re-Tweets/Mash-ups/Re-posting
  3. Bookmarks
  4. Comments
  5. Downloads
  6. Email / newsletter subscriptions
  7. Number of Fans/Followers
  8. Feedback
  9. Forward to a friend/Invite / Refer
  10. Amount of Group activity/interaction
  11. Number of downloads or widget installations
  12. Key page post-activity
  13. Ratings
  14. Onsite Messaging
  15. Posts
  16. Number of Registered users (new / total / active / dormant / churn)
  17. Report spam / abuse
  18. Reviews/ Testimonials
  19. Social media sharing / participation (activity on key social media sites, e.g. Facebook, Twitter, Digg, etc)
  20. Tagging (user-generated metadata)
  21. Time spent on key pages
  22. Time spent on site (by source / by entry page)
  23. Total contributors (and % active contributors)
  24. Uploads (add an item, e.g. articles, links, images, videos)
  25. Views (videos, ads, rich images)

Quepasa Launches Developer Interface and Open Social Sandbox

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Quepasa Corporation (Pink Sheets: QPSA), one of the world’s fastest-growing Latino social networks, today announced the launch of its Developer Interface and Open Social Sandbox. The launch of the Developer Interface is part of Quepasa’s overall strategy to open the site to third party Open Social developers who would like to develop applications for its global audience. The Company believes that this new Developer Interface and Open Social Sandbox will become an easy mechanism for developers to test and submit their applications for inclusion in the site’s Application and/or Games sections and thus enhance the overall user experience and drive site traffic and monetization.

The Developer Interface consists of a toolbox that developers use when submitting an Open Social application for inclusion on any social site. The toolbox includes documentation of the interfaces available, a news area, a community built for the developers where they can communicate and interact with other application developers as well as with Quepasa’s development team, and the Open Social Sandbox where they can test completed applications with valid test data. The Open Social Sandbox also includes details of how to include Quepasa’s new virtual currency, QDollars, as the payment mechanism for premium applications and virtual goods.

“Having an open platform that allows access to Quepasa members through the Open Social framework is imperative to the growth of rich functionality for Quepasa.com and its growing user base,” said Louis Bardov, CTO of Quepasa. “The activity on Quepasa.com is based on user interaction and our users like to play social games with other members on the site, especially when there are possible rewards in the form of contests and virtual currency. While these contests have been very popular on the site, we are now going to invite and encourage Open Social application developers to build interesting and fun applications for the Quepasa community and we hope and anticipate that these developers will make the minimal modifications required to get adoption of their applications from our rapidly growing user base on Quepasa.com.”

Quepasa’s release of the Developer Interface and the Open Social Sandbox is the latest news in Quepasa’s growing success story. Since its launch as a social network focused on the growing Latino population just over 16 months ago, Quepasa has seen its user base grow to over 5 million registered users. This number continues to grow at an impressive pace because of Quepasa’s differentiated strategy of premium Latino content and entertainment. To date, this growth has been achieved solely through the viral acquisition, powered by Quepasa’s user base.

About Quepasa Corporation

Quepasa Corporation (Pink Sheets: QPSA), headquartered in West Palm Beach, FL with offices in Los Angeles, CA; Sao Paulo, Brazil; Scottsdale, AZ; Miami, FL; and Hermosillo, MX, owns Quepasa.com (www.Quepasa.com), one of the world’s largest, trilingual, Latino social networks. Quepasa.com is an authentic Latino community that provides fun, interactive, and easy to use social tools, and rich multimedia content in English, Spanish and Portuguese to embrace Latinos everywhere, and empower them to connect online, compete in contests and games and share their interests, ideas, and activities.

Contact:
Mike Matte, Chief Financial Officer
Quepasa Corporation
(561) 491-4186

Source: Quepasa Corporation

Materialism in the Non-Material World

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How many customers have you served at your café on Facebook, and how many friends have gifted you fertilizer or plants on FarmVille? The growing movement of social activity in the virtual world includes a great deal of very real economic activity, report researchers at the Helsinki Institute for Information Technology.

While many futurists believe that the growth of virtual worlds would encourage movement away from consumption, materialism is apparently trumping nonmaterialism. As people spend more time online socializing, they are also spending real money, such as making micropurchases of heart or balloon icons to favor their friends, family, or celebrity idols.

The reason is simple: Humans behave as humans whether it is in the corporeal world or online, notes infotech researcher Vili Lehdonvirta. What we buy proclaims our identity and denotes our status, and we want to have status online just as we do in real life.

The advantage that consumption may have in the nonmaterial world is that it permits economic activity with reduced environmental impacts, says Lehdonvirta.

SOURCE: Helsinki Institute for Information Technology