Social Media Statistics: Facebook, Twitter, Flickr, Linkedin and more…

The way we communicate online has gone through a sea-change over last few years – Infact, majority of netizens spend most of their time on social Media / Networking  sites. Even though India Software companies are lagging behind in adoption of social media, others are flocking them in large numbers.

Twitter has been a rage over past 1 year, Facebook has become one of the most visited sites on the web, Professionals are flocking Linkedin and keep their profiles updated. Do you want to know the numbers behind these uber-popular social media sites?

EConsultancy recently published following mind-boggling statistics on their blog – Here is a peek into the numbers

Social Media Statistics

• Facebook claims that 50% of active users log into the site each day. This would meanat least 175m users every 24 hours.
• Twitter now has 75m user accounts, but only around 15m are active users on a regular basis.
• LinkedIn has over 50m members worldwide..
• Facebook currently has in excess of 350 million active users on global basis.Six months ago, this was 250m…This means over 40% growth in less than 6 months.
• Flickr now hosts more than 4 billion images.
• More than 35m Facebook users update their status each day. 
• Wikipedia currently has in excess of 14m articles, meaning that it’s 85,000 contributors have written nearly a million new posts in six months.
• Photo uploads to Facebook have increased by more than 100%. Currently, there are around 2.5bn uploads to the site each month.
• Back in 2009, the average user had 120 friends within Facebook. This is now around 130.
• Mobile is even bigger than before for Facebook, with more than 65m users accessing the site through mobile-based devices. In six months, this is over 100% increase.
• There are more than 3.5bn pieces of content (web links, news stories, blog posts, etc.) shared each week on Facebook.
• There are now 11m LinkedIn users across Europe.
• Towards the end of last year, the average number of tweets per day was over 27.3 million.
• The average number of tweets per hour was around 1.3m.
• 15% of bloggers spend 10 or more hours each week blogging, according to Technorati’s new State of the Blogosphere.
• At the current rate, Twitter will process almost 10 billion tweets in a single year.
• About 70% of Facebook users are outside the USA.
• India is currently the fastest-growing country to use LinkedIn, with around 3m total users.
• More than 250 Facebook applications have over a million combined users each month.
• 70% of bloggers are organically talking about brands on their blog.
• 38% of bloggers post brand or product reviews.
• More than 80,000 websites have implemented Facebook Connect since December 2008 and more than 60m Facebook users engage with it across these external sites each month.

Mind-blogging statistics uhh…. Think how they will change in next 2-3 years ! We will literally be living our lives online rather than offline !

source: http://trak.in

How social media can help your business

Social networks are vibrant and constantly evolving. Yet the fact today is that Social media is beyond adding friends and sharing status. More and more people are getting involved in this area to perk up their business. Be it small business or huge, the adoption of social media is just augmenting with time that because of the outcome it has to offer.

1. High Traffic and Links : By using Social Media methods you can bring high traffic to your site. They are of two kinds one is primary traffic where you get direct visitors from social networking sites and then we have secondary traffic, which is actually indirect referral traffic from websites which is linked to and send you visitors. 
    
2. Cost Effective Method : Social media, which tends to have lower costs than other forms of marketing could be beyond doubt cost effective for those required to get customers spreading and sharing messages. 
    
3. Direct Conversation : Conversation is the most important part in any kind of business and Social Media is a source that let you to have direct conversation with your customers. One way it will help you is by providing the products and services they desire and secondly you can get their feedback and ideas to improve further. 
    
4. Powerful Recommendation : Anybody rather than buying from a company who is faceless would prefer going by some recommendation. Yes, of course even in our daily life we believe to purchase in what is been recommended to us. As we know that influencers play a vital role in buying process, one way you can reach your audience is with Social Media. 
    
5. Shaping Relationships : There are ways you can be social without social media , but the initial goal behind networking online is to build relationships that can be the most effective way towards successful business. You can look at bloggers who are making the best use of it by the RSS feed reader, where one can read the post as soon as published on the blog they admire, which can further be commented on. But through Social media – especially Twitter and Facebook, you can have direct conversation with many bloggers and audiences to shape your relations further in also about 140 characters. That’s the power of social networking for business. 
    
6. Chance To Improve : With Social Media sites you have the biggest market research company at your finger tips. 
    
7. Enhance Brand Exposure and Loyalty : Social Media is the quickest way to enhance personal branding, which also makes it easy to track social media buzz around your brand and monitor it.
8. Time Saving Element : It is always said that everything on Social Network is quick and that holds true for any kind of business too. 
    
9. Get Connected To Your Peers : Social Media again gives you a quick chance to get connected to your peers when required. For example, a web designers, developer and programmer can get help for any related issues just by a tweet message on twitter or status update on Facebook. 
    
10. Obvious ROI : It goes without saying that if you focus on your audiences, customers and add value to their lives, you will surely attract followers. They will soon become your fan and start trusting your brand, which in turn gets you more leads. So all you need to do after that is to measure your Social Media ROI.

Christmas SEO – optimise right now to gain Christmas trade

        If you are reading this right now and considering what to do to help optimise your website for Christmas you are already working at a disadvantage. Webmasters who are ahead of you right now started their Christmas optimization work and enjoying brisk Christmas trading. 

Why is seasonal SEO important?

Along with consumer spending which generally increases at Christmas so does SEO activity which means that no matter which market you are active in, online, the competition suddenly heats up. This means that your struggle to get a bigger slice of the pie is suddenly meeting a lot more competition and unless you can match and surpass that you will most certainly be left behind. 

Because online spending skyrockets during Christmas and there are hundreds of millions of dollars of cash you can chase the good news is that even modest SEO action during this time have the potential to bring you quick rewards. If you are in need of some Christmas SEO assistance and are not sure where to start here’s a quick guide. 

Concentrate on keywords 

Chances are you have already identified this year’s ‘must have’ product for your sector. This is one of the most important keywords on which you should focus. You can help your cause by writing themed ‘linkbait’ blog posts on your website, and developing internal linking strategies using the name of that product as the anchor text so that pages inside your site which contain that link to your cart and homepage and special offers pages. 

Generally speaking, you should also avoid using the manufacturers’ standard product descriptions on your website. These are seldom written with SEO in mind, and they can severely damage your optimisation efforts. Instead, concentrate on writing carefully constructed product descriptions that hit all the relevant keywords. Do use the manufacturer’s content however as a ‘core’ around which to augment the writing in the number of total words and then fine-tune it through your own, highly targeted, keyword-focused optimisation efforts. 

Blitz your social media

This is perhaps the one time of the year where ‘shouting’ more frequently, in order to be noticed makes perfect sense. When it comes to social media (Facebook and Twitter, for instance) the volume of postings and their frequency increase from all their participants as everyone gets engaged in this time of the year. You now really need to stand out from the crowd. 

You might choose, for example, to run a competition on Facebook. Have users tag themselves in a photo or join your group in exchange for the chance to win a prize. Alternatively, invite all of your online followers to an event in your shop (if you have one). Lay on some entertainment and offer a discount on all purchases for the evening. Events and promotions of this sort can help you to make the most of your existing online communities and they will also generate further word-of-mouth publicity which, in turn, should become more sales. 

Think about PPC

Normally, almost all the work I do for clients is so they can go from a pay-per-click campaign (usually Adwords) which keeps draining their resources, to total organic traffic success. This is, however, the one time of the year when a PPC campaign makes sense. It provides and additional layer of advertising and exposure and, when handled correctly, it can bring in traffic which you might otherwise have never reached so fast. 

You can improve your chances of appearing at the top of search results by bidding on relevant keywords. These keywords will probably (but not necessarily) be the same ones for which you are optimising your content. Generally speaking, your PPC campaigns should focus on the products for which you anticipate there will be the highest demand, and those on which your margins are highest.

It is worth remembering that Google Adwords is not the only PPC channel. Depending on the nature of your business you might also want to consider buying ads on sites like Facebook. Make sure that you track your PPC campaigns closely over the course of the festive period and beyond. It is often possible to significantly improve your click-through rates with a relatively modest change to your strategy.

When it comes to online traffic keep conversions in mind

Finally, you should always keep in mind that the purpose of your campaigns is not just to drive traffic. Instead, you should always be aiming to convert leads into sales. In order to improve your chances of doing so you will need to optimise not just your content but also the website itself. After all, your online presence is the digital equivalent of a shop with all that this implies. Treat it the right way in your mind and general thinking and you will find that it pays you back, loads.

Source:-http://helpmyseo.com/seo-tips/320-christmas-seo-optimise-right-now-to-gain-christmas-trade.html.