Social Network Signup Surge in Q2 Twitter up +7% – Survey

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Social Networks Continue to Attract New Users

Twitter, Facebook are the most popular social networks in Ireland. Both Twitter and Facebook have shown an increase in new users by 3% and 7% respectively, since May 2012. Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and Google Plus have all experienced an increase in sign-ups and usage increase during this period.

Sign-ups and usage of all the major social networks have increased since May of this year and a steady increase since the beginning of February 2011.

Facebook and Twitter are still the most popular social networks by sign-ups. Facebook has the largest share of people over 15 with 56% of all Irish now having a Facebook profile. Twitter is in second place with 22%, LinkedIn and Google Plus third and fourth, with 18 and 16%.

Is Twitter and Social Networking Important for Business

Ipsos MRBI has tracked the social network sign-ups and usage of Irish people since February 2011. This quarters numbers show an increase in all networks except Foursquare.

The usage and sign up rates for all the major social networks has increased from February 2011 to the present. This signals a deeper integration of the social graph into Irish life.

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Question – Which Online Social Network do you have an Account with? Telephone sample with greater than 1000 respondents and all over 15.

Facebook is the network with the largest share of the population. Twitter, LinkedIn, and Google Plus complete the top four rankings.

The surprise from this survey is that Irish people are signing up to Bebo.

Google Plus gets a strong show of popularity with 16% of all Irish having an account. As a social network there is little improvement or difference between Facebook and Google Plus. The strengths, and the stated goal of Google plus, was to increase the Google experience for users.

The power of Google Plus lies in its connection with all the other Google products, Google Search, Gmail, YouTube, Google Drive and Google instant. By connecting these separate products Google is able to — in theory — provide a richer and deeper contextual experience for us all. This is the real value Google Plus provides users.

What does this Research Mean?

This research gives insight into which social networking platforms are popular.

Is social networking important for business? Perhaps asking what can a business do with social media is a better question.

The three main uses for social media are:

  1. Awareness
  2. Sales
  3. Loyalty

If your existing social media strategy consists of pushing interruption-based advertising through social networks then your results will be poor. Perhaps rightly claim that social media does not work.

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The Social Media Funnel

Social networking and social medial channels are excellent at distributing your content (and really poor as an advertisement channel). Think of Content as the fuel for your social media sports car.

Any conversation about social media marketing and social networking has to include content. Remember content is fuel?

What are going to do with your Facebook Business page? Ask for likes? Ok that sounds good. What value is there for liking your page? Are you going to offer me funny videos? Pictures of cats? Tell my to buy from you? Think through the process strategically from your customer’s perspective.

Facebook is very powerful and you can reach all the adult population, but, what then? Like my page and buy it from me? Not much value for you customer with that strategy.

Leverage Social Media?

Where do you begin with social media and social networking?

The topic is huge and longer than is possible to sympathetically cover in this short post.

There are a few quick and easy wins you can do today to improve your social media marketing efforts. Add social sharing buttons to your website and blog. Think ‘Friction Free sharing’ of your content.

Which buttons to add? Twitter button, Facebook like and recommend, LinkedIn share and a Google Plus buttons. These will extent your reach into the social graph.

If you are using WordPress as you CMS install an appropriate plugin and you’re flying. Otherwise ask your web developer to integrate the above social buttons to your site. This is easy bread and butter for web developers. And all the major social networks make it easy to integrate.


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Your Turn!


What do you think of this research? Are you surprised?

What are your experiences with using social networking and social media for your business?

Getting any success/traction? What is your most successful social media marketing story?


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