It’s that time of year again! It’s time for the PR, communications, and marketing world to look at the challenges and opportunities ahead. It’s time we determine what’s in store for our businesses, our industry, and our way of working.
Is Facebook killing corporate websites?
Several recent studies point out to a decrease in traffic to traditional corporate websites and an increase in traffic to Facebook.
Does that mean that web users are turning their back on traditional websites or that they are spending more time on Facebook and are more likely to visit the corporate Facebook page rather than the corporate website?
It is worth noting that if the trend is very noticeable with traditional brand focused static websites, the trend reverses when it comes to transactional websites.
Big Brands Like Facebook, But They Don’t Like to Pay
Everybody wants to be liked. The question for Facebook Inc. is how much advertisers are willing to pay for the opportunity.
Facebook’s estimated market value, now in the neighborhood of $70 billion, is founded on the belief that companies will spend big to advertise on the site. Facebook’s revenues, which come largely from ads, were $1.6 billion in the first half of this year, up $800 million from a year earlier.
But most of its ads were for small advertisers, such as local businesses and small-scale websites, according to comScore Inc. Facebook is under pressure to grow its advertising on a grand scale, and to snag the sort of big brand names who now drive billions of dollars to TV, radio and print campaigns
LinkedIn reports earnings, base growing to 116M
LinkedIn reported its first earning since going public in May. The company reported a $4.5M profit for the second quarter (2c a share) on $121M revenue, a 50% increase over last year.
Don’t get too excited on the earning side, at least in the short term, the company declared that they were willing to sacrifice short term earnings to invest in new technology and product development.
On the user side, LinkedIn announced 116M users, a 61% increase over the same time last year.
The user numbers need to be taken with a grain of salt though. Over the last year, we have seen spammers creating massive numbers of fake profiles to spam discussion groups and infiltrate personal networks.
LinkedIn has been notorious for their lack of action against spam and spammers, one might argue, to ring up higher number of “users”, it will be interesting to see if they will change course in the future and tackle that growing issue before it has an impact on their real base.
Let’s hope for us users that some of the investment in technology and new product will address that growing problem.
Marketers want better social media analytic tools
A recent Web Liquid survey shows that although 95% of respondents state that monitoring social mentions is a priority, only 74% have strategies in place to do so.
The most used social monitoring tool is Google Alerts, used by 59% of respondents, followed by Radian 6 with 9% of respondents.
Not surprisingly, only 23% of respondents were satisfied with to monitor social mentions and only 23% are “very” satisfied with their social media analytics tool.
In an environment still ruled by traditionalists driven by traditional metrics, analytics still are the weak link.
The changing internet
A March 2010 to March 2011 study from Silicon Alley Insider shows that the way people spend their time on the internet is rapidly changing and if you are not paying attention, your brand could become a victim.
The study shows a rapid increase (69%) in time spent on Facebook and a steady decrease (9%) in time spent on traditional websites shrunk by 9%
Social media has dramatically changed the way users look and think about the web, how they spend their time on the web and what they expect from the web
Does that mean you should abandon your website? No, but you should seriously think about how you use it and how you drive traffic to it.
If the trend persists, SEO will become less important and will progressively be replaced by social media.
Another recent study (May 2011) by Comscore looks at how users spend their time on social media sites like Facebook. By the way, Facebook accounts for 90% of the time spent on all social media sites
- 27% of their time is spent “consuming and interacting” on the newsfeed/wall
- 21% on the profile section
- 17% on the photo section
Interacting has become a big part of the web experience, experience delivered through social media sites. What that means is if a brand or organization wants to keep their website relevant, they have to promote interaction.
How do you promote interaction on a website? With a blog section, with comments and by integrating your site with social media platforms.