You won’t believe these stats!

2010 was a BIG year for Facebook. The site’s user base grew 42% in the U.S. to more than 145 million, according to iStrategyLabs. The prime group of users 25-54 represents 50% of that user base. If you were under the impression that Facebook was for teenagers, it’s time to think again. EVERYONE is on Facebook.

No matter who your target demographic is, a good percentage of your target market are on Facebook. Facebook has more than 600 million active users, and half of them log on daily. People spend 700 billion minutes a month on Facebook. Yowza! That’s a lot of time.

In fact, the average American Facebook user spends about 421 minutes per month on Facebook, which equals about 14 minutes a day. None of the other mainstream sites come close:  users spend an average of one minute a day on Google and YouTube, and two minutes on Yahoo. Even if you lump them all the big-time sites together (including Wikipedia), Facebook is still the head honcho.

More than 30 billion nuggets of web content are shared each month on Facebook (that includes links, photo albums, etc). The fact that there’s a ton of stuff on Facebook doesn’t mean it’s harder to get noticed, though. Quite the opposite. A lot of people are on Facebook sharing information, and all you have to do is get on the train and get into the mix.

Also, the average user is connected to 80 pages. One of those pages could easily be yours, couldn’t it?

Furthermore, over two million websites have integrated with Facebook, and an average of 10,000 sites hop on board each day. 250 million people engage with Facebook from an external website each month. In other words: Facebook is all over the web.

Facebook has gone mobile, too: more than 200 million users log-in on smartphones or iPads. Mobile users are twice as active as non-mobile users. Since smartphones are surely going to rise in popularity over the next few years, we can expect to see many more active users.

In a nutshell: Facebook is the land of opportunity for small business entrepreneurs. It is now the most-searched, and most-visited. It’s also the place where web users spend most of their time.

So, in a nutshell? Facebook is the ideal place to connect. What are you waiting for?  There is a whole world of Facebook prospecting opportunities for your business, and the training is waiting for you at The Practical Social Media University.

Image: Courtesy of Facebook

And What You Can Learn

About six months ago, Starbucks held a “Free Pastry Day”, and attracted over one million people to their stores. How? Social media. Twitter and Facebook captured the buzz about the event and people went searching for a free pastry.

Starbucks is a leader in effective social media marketing. Starbucks has over eighteen million fans on Facebook. The company’s MyStarbucks Idea has also generated over 80,000 ideas, and the Vice President of Brand, Content and Online, Chris Bruzzo, credits Twitter for the success of the project. Starbucks was also the first company to offer a nationwide Foursquare deal.

So, where did Starbucks get their social media smarts? The company listens to their customers. Starbucks works on engaging a dialogue, and considers social media as a relationship, rather than a one-way promotion. Also, Starbucks uses social media to tell a story about their brand, via stories and videos. During the Haiti disaster, for example, Starbucks used videos as part of the Haiti outreach campaign on both YouTube and Facebook. Customers were able to donate to Red Cross in stores, and learned that Starbucks cared.

Alex Wheeler, Director of Digital Strategy at Starbucks, calls their social media approach “scrappy”.  As one of the first companies to really embrace social media, figuring out what worked and being open to different options was what led to their success.

As a small business entrepreneur, you can learn from the company’s social media activity. You can use social media to start a genuine conversation with your customers. It’s not about marketing as much as it’s about relationships (though, the relationships will lead to sales or clients).  And remember, your relationship is one that constantly gives value, and expects nothing in return.  Your are there to help and tell your story along the way!

This is yet another reminder of just how important your brand is to your social media success.  For more on this subject, please look over our lead article on “The Importance of Your Brand To Your Social Media Success.”

New survey has incredible results and news for businesses of any size

In a global study conducted by STUDYLOGIC LLC, surveying 4,204 people, 39% of correspondent’s said they “could not live without” social media sites. Of course, people were living before social media came along less than a decade ago, but they’ve become completely dependent in recent years. Almost half the respondents consider social media a vital component of their lives (somewhere up there with air, food, and water).

What does that mean for small business entrepreneurs? It means that companies can jump into a “vital” form of communication that people have become somewhat addicted to. People are using social media all of the time, according to this study. Four-fifths of respondents said that they checked in on social networking sites multiple times during the day, and one-third of respondents said they checked in several times an hour.

Before meeting a new business contact, more than half of the people surveyed admitted they’d done a little “snooping”. Of course, it’s hardly snooping when you’re looking at public social networking profiles, especially when everyone does it these days. Also, 60% of respondents claimed they had refused to hire a candidate due to a negative impression from a social media profile. As a small business entrepreneur, you’d better be careful what your social networks say about you: they can make or break a deal before it’s even begun.

Also, social media isn’t just in the office or at home anymore, it’s out on the road. 60% of travelers use social media to get in touch with friends or family when they’re traveling. 64% use social media to make their plans, and in the 25-34 age bracket 76% use social media to make their travel plans (um, if you’re a travel company, you’d better be tapping into Twitter and Facebook!). And, regardless of whether or not you’re a travel company, social media travels (literally) far and wide, and you’d better be on deck.

The STUDYLOGIC LLC survey demonstrates how widespread social media has become, and it’s good news for small businesses who know how to effectively harness the power of social media. Think about it: according to this study, social media has become a mainstream form of communication between friends and family (beyond telephone and email!), and if your business makes a genuine, honest effort to use social media well, you can enter this intimate form of communication. And, everybody is already hanging out there, all the time.

Mixing Business And Personal Updates

Should I mix my personal and business life in social media?

This is a really good question that is asked over and over again and a serious part of all our own branding strategies.  The answer is 100% to mix them both.  The reasons are quite simple.

Social media is all about engaging one-on-one, getting to know, and getting known.  Aside from your business, you may have passions, shared interests, similar backgrounds or a number of other opportunities to not only engage, but also connect with people.  This builds relationships and trust, two very important elements for a successful social media marketing campaign.

Why limit yourself?  Be you and be a better social media marketer at the same time!

This is just a small tip (of the iceberg) of what you need to know about branding strategies that will effect every aspect of your business.  There is so much more waiting for you in the resource library of the University.

Just as Google Analytics tells you what keywords and other sites are drawing visitors to your website, Twitter Analytics will tell you which tweets make or break your Twitter popularity. As you may know, some third-party vendors offer similar services, but Twitter will offer analytics for free (and they have no plan to charge anytime soon). Most likely, the startups that currently offer analytics are looking for a new business model.

A bar graph charts 6-hour increments, and shows mentions, follows and unfollows. You can also filter your tweets to see them in the following categories: “best”, “good” and “all”. The dashboard has been built by Smallthought Systems, a team that Twitter acquired in June. In other words: it should be simple, easy-to-use, yet thorough.

Just to give you an idea how exciting Twitter Analytics is: more than 12,500 people tweeted the story when it appeared on Mashable last month. Why is everyone so eager to share this news? In part, because small business owners like you will greatly benefit from Twitter Analytics. You will be able to measure your success, better understand your customers and improve your marketing communication. Tweet on, tweet on!

Here’s what they found: each social media share is equal to $1.78 in ticket sales. Facebook shares are most lucrative, equaling $2.52 per post. Next up: a share through e-mail equals to $2.34 in sales. A Linkedin share is worth $.90 and Twitter is worth $.43. Facebook is now the most important referral site for Eventbrite.

Eventbrite believes that sales that occur through social media, or “social commerce”, is going to be the next big hoorah in online business. Here’s a line from their blog: “True social commerce promises to leverage the speed and connectivity of social networks to drive sales transactions. It’s an elusive promise that many companies have struggled to realize, but those that do will disrupt industries and create a new scale of business.” According to Eventbrite, social media is going to become the mainstream marketing channel for online businesses. Then again, perhaps it already is?

Skype 5.0 includes a Facebook tab, which displays the Facebook news feed. You can post status updates, comments, hit the like button, and, via Skype, you can call a friend. For entrepreneurs, the ability to call or text Facebook connections will allow for a more personal and dynamic interaction with potential clients. Now that Skype is synced up to social media, it can be used as an effective marketing tool.

Think about it: if you are connected on Facebook, you can video chat with a potential client, face-to-face. It’s almost like old-fashioned socializing (except, well, it’s not). You can even have a 10-way group video call, if you’re hoping to inspire a crowd.

Skype and Facebook both boast over 500 million registered users, so this partnership is pretty big news for the online world. It’s also big news for entrepreneurs who want to take advantage of social media to reach potential clients and customers.

There is one program, though, that consistently rises to the top: TweetDeck. It manages several accounts, allows searches, and doesn’t even require you to be logged in to a browser. Could it be better? Sure it could. It’s one of the best mobile Twitter apps available. This presents opportunities for you, the busy business owner, to not just keep track of your colleagues and interests on Twitter, but to harness its lead generation abilities from virtually anywhere.

We’ve introduced a comprehensive How-To guide that will introduce you to Tweetdeck’s abilities and give great tips on how to use its numerous features to increase your business and build your brand.

Check out Using Tweetdeck to Get More Leads From Twitter in our Resource Library!

While the feature, called “Friends” is not yet widely available, it’s a big hint in the direction of future web news. Google News began featuring a “News For You” section a few months ago, in which users could select particular preferences. Also, Google has started to feature location specific searches. As these changes suggest: there is so much information on the Internet that searching is going to have to become more customizable. One way it’s going to happen? Twitter updates.

Actually, this Twitter tab is one of the many “layers’” of social networking features that Google intends to release over the next year. Rather than compete by releasing a “new Facebook”, Google is going to integrate social media features into their searching capabilities. Google is beginning to enter the social media game, which means that all small business entrepreneurs should be on board with social networks.

This is just another way that small business entrepreneurs can take advantage of the 16 billion searches that happen a month in this country on Google alone!  Search is the low-hanging fruit for finding new leads online!

The new feature will also help small business entrepreneurs who connect with clients through social media. If people click the Like button on your company Facebook page, their friends are more likely to see you on Bing when they’re searching for your kind of company or services.

What’s next? Bing and Facebook plan on displaying data from friends with every search result. Also, if you happen to be an expert in a particular subject, you will be featured in the results. Facebook thinks that the partnership will give Bing a boost, and it’s possible that, when opinions would be helpful, this so-called “decision engine” could attract more users. In any case, Bing isn’t the only company making search social: as we mentioned in the previous post, Google is working with Twitter to integrate social media as well.

In other words: social media is going to become a central part of mainstream search engines. Small business entrepreneurs would be wise to get cozy with social media, because it’s obviously here to stay. The future isn’t as much about keywords, as it is about “friends”.