The effectiveness of social media tools to drive business results is not always obvious and is constantly changing. As Betty White said on Saturday Night Live, “When I first heard about it [Facebook] I thought, what a huge waste of time.”
And that was the running joke for years on late night talk shows about Twitter, too. But on its fifth anniversary it’s clear that Twitter is no joke. For its birthday the staff posted some interesting stats on the Twitter blog, including:
- It took three years, two months and one day to get to the billionth tweet. Now there are a billion tweets a week.
- A year ago, people sent 50 million tweets a day. On March 11, 2011, the tally was 177 million.
- There were 456 tweets per second after Michael Jackson died in 2009. That record was broken on New Year’s Day this year with 6,939 tweets after midnight in Japan.
- There were 572,000 new accounts created on March 12, 2011; there were 460,000 new accounts created daily, on average, in the past month.
- Mobile users increased 182% in the past year.
- Twitter has 400 employees today, compared to eight in January 2008.
There is constant fear and predictions of the sale of Facebook and Twitter, but Biz Stone, the co-founder of Twitter, says that is not the case. "We are not for sale," he said. "People insist we are, but we're not. I think we have created a strong brand, but we need to do that second part, which is build a strong business on top of all that work. In that regard we are just beginning."
On the other hand, LinkedIn filed for an IPO in January. Unlike Facebook or Twitter, LinkedIn is considered more of a professional or B-to-B tool. A study from the Society of New Communications Research of 114 executives across 10 countries found that the execs had decreased their use of almost all social networks other than LinkedIn, and that 97% of the respondents used LinkedIn.
But does LinkedIn—with almost 100 million users worldwide—drive business results in cross-media marketing campaigns as Facebook and Twitter do? I heard an expert say the answer is no because LinkedIn is for networking, job hunting, and keeping you in touch as people change jobs, but it is not an effective marketing tool.
I disagree. I think the effectiveness of different social media tools is based on the preferred tool of the target audience. I worked with one supplier who wanted to market its product to in-plant printers. They targeted all in-plants with the same message and the same medium and were unsuccessful.
I suggested that they would have greater success if they used Facebook sites with university in-plants, which is the tool they use to communicate with students, while corporate in-plants would be more likely to use LinkedIn. Of course, better segmentation results in better results.
Do you think that social media plays a role in cross-media marketing? What do you find more successful: Twitter, Facebook, or LinkedIn?
