Social Media Statistics That Affect Your Marketing Plan [INFOGRAPHIC]

Every year, the social media landscape shifts and its up to forward-thinking companies to anticipate this change and stay on top of things.

Creative social marketing is still creative marketing, but creative social marketing that’s supported by the right platform at the right timecan be truly effective.

Brian Honigman comprised a list of 100 Fascinating Social Media Statistics and Figures From 2012 for The Huffington Post that can help you get a better grasp on where trends for the top social networks like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest and Google+ are headed. Here’s three highlights from each, and a handy infographic from iStrategyLabs for easy browsing of the 2012 social media statistics:

Facebook

• 77 percent of B2C companies and 43 percent of B2B companies acquired customers from Facebook.
• 80 percent of social media users prefer to connect with brands through Facebook.
• 25 percent of users on Facebook don’t bother with any kind of privacy control.

Twitter

• 56 percent of customer tweets to companies are being ignored.
• 34 percent of marketers have generated leads using Twitter.
• Twitter is projected to make a total of $540 million in advertising revenue by 2014.

Instagram

• Users on Instagram spend 257 minutes using the app, as opposed to the 169.9 minutes spent on Twitter in August 2012.
• 40 percent of brands have adopted Instagram for marketing.
• Of the top brands, 20 percent surveyed had 10,000 or more followers.

Pinterest

• Over 80 percent of pins are repins.
• Pinterest referrals spend 70 percent more money than visitors referred from non-social channels.
• Out of 17 million brand engagements, 15 percent occurred on the brand’s boards and 85 percent occurred elsewhere on Pinterest.

Google+

• Google+ pages appear in search results for 30 percent of brand term searches for brands with G+ pages, up from 5 percent in February 2012.
• Websites using the +1 button generate 3.5x the Google+ visits than sites without the button.
• Only 8 percent of Americans 12+ have a Google+ profile page.

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Social media makes claims on traditional media territory

1. GOOGLE HANG-OUTS ON AIR: Google wants this new live studio format to revolutionize the music industry by optimizing the sound quality for live performances rather than just voice. While this is early days, what will this do for artists? How will it impact the concert tour model? How will affect the business model of concert and tour companies like Live Nation? What new crop of artists and legions of fans will it connect and unleash independent of the traditional music industry? Here is a quick look at how it works and then, just imagine what this will do to the traditional music industry already reeling from illegal downloads, piracy and artist’s (most recently, like Beck) who are constantly exploring independent business models? Meanwhile, enjoy Suite 709′s new track using the platform.

2. HUFFINGTON POST LIVE: Yesterday Huffington Post Live did just that – went Live for the first time. It did so, in their own words, to build on the depth of conversations across on and around its platform in the comments sections and across social media. It was this deep engagement that gave them the confidence to threaten traditional media territory and also to allow user interest to drive the content rather than prescriptive programming. Such engagement is the type of feedback loop that traditional news outlets are so desperately trying to earn and struggling to maintain.

3. INSTAGRAM SHOPPING: The popularity of Instragram – the mobile only app that lets you apply filters to photos and share them – has captured the attention of brands as well who are now tapping into that popularity and sharability to sell product at a fraction of the cost of traditional media. In short, it’s social shopping in an instant with a peer recommendation built in. So it’s little wonder you see big brand adoption rates and community growing so quickly in the latest Interbrand research below.

All three efforts are nothing short of a land grab in the gap between “the way things have always been done” and how they are now. These companies are reverse engineering out of the eyeballs and conversations they are capturing through social media back into traditional media territory effectively severing the ties of pre-existing media companies to the future.

The window of time in which companies (whose media plans and profit centers turn on traditional media alone) can change and adapt to new social technology and consumer behavior is closing. And left too long, they will find themselves on the wrong side of history.

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Big Brother (and Everyone Else) Is Watching You

In George Orwell’s classic novel Nineteen Eighty-Four, we were introduced to the concept that “Big Brother is watching you.” Sixty-three years after the novel’s publication,  Big Brother is not the only one we have to worry about. It’s everyone. Your private life is forever over.

Here’s a quote from the novel. 

“In the past, no government had the power to keep its citizens under constant surveillance. The invention of print, however, made it easier to manipulate public opinion, and the film and the radio carried the process further. With the development of television, and the technical advance which made it possible to receive and transmit simultaneously on the same instrument, private life came to an end.”

Today, we’ve taken it even further. Digital technology, social media, and instant access to data has turned our society into perennial Peeping Toms, snoops, busybodies, yentas, task chair critics, citizen journalists, and purveyors of all kinds of content. And I’m not just talking about the marketers!

We have risen to the occasion that presented itself—open forums to express ourselves—whether for personal or business purposes. We jumped on the social media bandwagon to be heard. In this crazy world, all we want is to matter. Now, our fans and followers feed our egos daily, only as long as we keep contributing to the feed.

Some of us hide behind the anonymity of alias profile names to avoid any connection to our 

“real” selves. But, how hard is it to be 

found out? Our lives have become open books to all who seek to read them.

As marketers, many of us are early adopters, experimenting with the next new thing as if our lives depended on it. We have a strong need to share what we learn and know, so we have become digital explorers in the proliferating media channels.

According to Beverly Macy in the Huffington Post, “As we continue to turn to the Internet to watch, consume, and share entertainment, big brands are building media channels… [Companies] are finally acknowledging that social media has become the new rocket fuel powering all aspects of the organization today.”

What does this mean to marketers? More channels to attract target audiences. Increased online marketing budgets. More rich data about prospects and customers. More competition for the smallest piece of market share.

And what does this mean to us as consumers? More places to get lost online. More marketing messages and conversations around those brands. More free stuff to entice us. More sharing. And more information about us online.

Everyone is watching. Are you?

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