“We want to build our social presence.”

“We engage thought leaders to improve brand resonance.”

“We’re keeping an eye on reach, true reach, and potential reach to improve amplification.”

I hear statements like this every day. Hell, up until a few months ago I said statements like this every day. These are common goals for social media, and there’s nothing innately wrong with them, but these goals are bad. Let me show you what I mean with a simple exercise you can use on your own goals:

“We want to build our social presence.”

Why?

“To be more visible to our audience.”

Why?

“To raise brand awareness.”

Why?

“So that, when a customer is ready to buy, we’re top of mind.”

Why?

“To improve sales.”

“To improve sales.” That’s your real goal on social. That’s your business goal. Building a social presence, engaging thought leaders, improving reach – these are all tactics to achieve your goal. It might seem like I’m splitting hairs here, but in an industry where we’re inventing words just to find new metrics (I’m looking at you, “retweetability”) it’s important to use proper business language to stay connected to business reality.

We need to start talking about social goals in terms of the number of leads generated, the number of support tickets created and closed, the number of email addresses collected. These aren’t the pretty, feel-good numbers, but they are real numbers. Once you start focusing on the real numbers you can start using the whatever metric as the flavor of the week to see if you can improve your real numbers.

This is how social will grow and evolve. When we can go into sales meetings and say, “I got you 20 leads this week and 5 look like they’ll close.” When we can go to support meetings and say, “We caught a disgruntled customer, fixed her problem, and sold her an upgrade.” When we can go to a marketing meeting and say, “We got 400 qualified email addresses for the next outbound campaign.”

Social will grow and evolve when we do. Are you ready for the change?

Pingdom’s 2012 Social network demographics wanted to know the answers to these questions and more, so they examined age and gender data from 24 of the top social media sites.

Talking to B2B social media marketers every day about how to craft their social media marketing strategy and content, most of what they know about their social audiences is anecdotal. So, whether or not you’ve begun to close the loop with your social media marketing by tying your marketing efforts to real ROI, these demographics are a great place to start with creating your marketing strategy that makes the best use of your time and energy to truly engage your audience!

Before we get to the data, the sites included in this survey are: Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Pinterest, Tumblr, Reddit, Hacker News, Slashdot, Github, Stack Overflow, Orkut, Quora, WordPress.com, Blogger, Flickr, Myspace, Tagged, Hi5, LiveJournal, Yelp, deviantART, StumbleUpon, Goodreads and Last.fm.

You may note one glaring omission: Google+. Unfortunately for us there is no data on Google+ in DoubleClick Ad Planner, the Google-owned tool they used for the demographics data. Also note that the demographics data used in this survey is for the United States.

OK! Onto the social media analytics!

1. Average Age Distribution in Social Media:

More than half of these social media users are between 25 and 44 years old.

While only 2% of social media users are 65+ years old, obviously this age group will continue to grow as social media users and consumers continue to age.

I think it’s important if you’re B2B  trying to sell via social, to note who the users of social media are versus the people within companies with the purchasing power, and make sure to tailor your content to both crowds.

2. Age Distribution per Site:

This chart should make something very clear; social media is most definitely not just for the young. Some examples:

• 55% of Twitter users are 35 or older.
• 63% of Pinterest users are 35 or older.
• 65% of Facebook users are 35 or older.
• 79% of LinkedIn users are 35 or older.

However, as you can see on the flip side, 58% of Reddit users are under 35. So, if you’re posting to Reddit keep it young, fresh and witty!

3. Average User Age per Site:

Based on the sites in this survey, the estimated age of the average social media user is just under 37 years old. Here are some other observations:

• The oldest users. LinkedIn has the oldest user base, with the average user being 44.2 years old.
• The average Facebook user is 40.5 years old.
• The average Twitter user is 37.3 years old.
• The age trend for Facebook and Twitter. Compared to a previous survey we did 2.5 years ago, the age of the average Facebook user has gone up two years, while the age of the average Twitter user has gone down two years. In other words, Twitter’s user base is getting younger, while Facebook’s is getting older.

4. Gender Balance on Social Media Sites:

• 17 out of 24 sites (71%) have more female than male users, that’s 2/3 of the social networks!
• The average gender distribution is 48.75% male, 51.25% female.
• Most male-dominated site? Slashdot (87% males) is the standout, followed by Hacker News (77% males) and Stack Overflow (76% males). In general, the more tech-focused sites in this survey have more male users than female.
• Most female-dominated site? Pinterest (79% females) is in a league of its own, followed by Goodreads (70% females) and Blogger (66% females).
• Facebook and Twitter have the same gender distribution: 40% male, 60% female.

Thank you to the in depth content and analysis and images from Royal Pingdom.

OK, so that settles it. We all need to be producing content, but what kind of content??

The data shows an interesting difference between B2C and B2B content marketing objectives. B2C marketers place a greater emphasis on improving brand perception (+16% compared to B2B), improved SEO (+15%) and increasing traffic to site (+15%).

For B2B marketers, the emphasis is more significant in the areas of generating leads (+26% compared to B2C), thought leadership (+22%) and nurturing leads (+10%).

Generating B2B Leads:

In a perfect world, your perfect customer needs you, finds you, and cannot wait to buy your product, service or whatever your pink elephant is. So, create content that will help potential customers solve their problems, including but not limited to, using your product.

- Answer the specific questions you hear your customers and prospects asking. We’ve talked about how to create content from ground zero before, and it still applies.

- Showcase customer success stories. You have a customer or two, right? Take five minutes of your time talking to them and then use their story to create B2B marketing content that kills two birds with one stone.

Making Your Thought Leadership Count:

Thought leadership is an important part of branding for B2B social media marketing, and so while your management team is drafting your newest white paper, your blog need not die.

Many companies are turning to their employees on the front lines to create content for their B2B marketing content. It’s a great way to create brand spankin’ new content and tap into creative minds around your company. Just like Eric Brown of Urbane Media says, there’s no reason why someone who is communicating with customers over the phone shouldn’t be able to use his or her first hand experiences to create some thought provoking content.

Making Sure B2B Leads Feel the Love:

If you haven’t realized that sales and social media marketing go hand in hand in the B2B world, you’re missing a huge opportunity. Just last week, Argyle’s social media manager overheard one of our sales guys talking about a lead that he was trying to get on the phone, and it turned out that the lead had been Tweeting with @ArgyleSocial for the past few hours. If you don’t work in one big box of an office, as we do, and are still siloing your Sales and Marketing departments, it’s time to hold a meeting.

If you’re not going to invest in B2B social media marketing software that allows different users from each department to both have access to leads coming in via social media, then at least hold weekly meetings to run through your most highly engaged social media community members and hottest prospects with both teams.

Moreover, your marketing department could then create B2B marketing content that’s geared towards these hot customers, and sales people could create blog posts with targeted content specifically to help win these leads. It’s a B2B social media marketing win, content generation win and once it’s a sales win, it’s officially a Michael Scott win/win/win.

Image via Econsultancy.com

“Twitter was home to a staggering 77% of total online conversations about and during the debate.” Mashable noted according to a social media analytic report by Attention. So while like it or not, the candidates have to deal with Twitter’s 140 character soundbite-centric world, what can we B2B social media marketers learn from the #debate?

1.Both candidates have a five point plan to fix the economy

Five points to fix the economy. FIVE. If it only takes five points to fix our economy, then you never need a B2B social media blog post, marketing plan, or white paper with more than five points. I mean, sure there are exceptions to every rule, but the candidates seem to understand that we’ve come to a point as a society where if information isn’t short, sweet and easily digestible- your audience will up and leave for another source providing them with what they want.

2. Body language counts for almost as much as what was coming out of the candidates’ mouths.

I keep hearing and seeing the comparison of the two candidate’s body language. Mitt, head up, smirking smartly. Obama, head down, writing, thinking or as Saturday Night Live parodied, being distracted by forgetting Michelle’s anniversary present. What is “body language” to a B2B company with 1:1 social media marketers? I’d say it equates to company culture. Your company culture infiltrates the emails sales people are sending to clients, the tone marketers use to write copy that goes on the website, blog as well as social media marketing. It’s not just what you’re saying, it’s how you’re saying it.

3. No matter how big the gaffe, the news will go on.

Sure Twitter was abuzz about the debate in a way never before seen, and it was talked about a LOT, and is still being talked about. However, once the Jobs Report was released the very next day announcing that the unemployment rate is now 7.8%, the lowest level since almost four years ago in January 2009, did you notice what the Democrats did? They focused most if not all energy on highlighting this key indicator of Obama’s abilities, drawing focus away from his failed performance at the debate.

Life goes on, the world keeps turning, and there’s always new news. If your B2B social media team find itself caught between and a miss-tweet and a social media snafu- say your apologies, to be sure- but change the subject! Attention spans are short and if the debate can show us anything, it’s that no matter how big or bad you think something has gone, take a deep breath and change the conversation, because people will be talking about something else… tomorrow, if they aren’t already.

Did you follow the #debate on Twitter? Did you enjoy it for it’s “comedy gold” like @EricBoggs? Did you join in the debate chatter yourself? Did you find yourself on a Storify account of the debate the following day, as I did? I hope you’re looking forward to the Vice Presidential debate as much as I am! Should be a doozy, and at the least, there will most likely be more B2B social media marketing lessons to learn! Feel free to follow my (warning: highly partisan) tweets @CMBlog and let me know what you think!

Images via Digital Trends, Rollins College Facebook

Want to get more retweets? We’ve found the key: Start tweeting about sports.

In a recent study I conducted on the social activity of Argyle’s customer base, 21 of our 50 most retweeted accounts were sports-focused. For comparison, no other category had more than three accounts in the top 50. The most retweeted post in Argyle history was from an LA Lakers community site: “Steve Nash, Kobe Bryant, Ron Ron, Pau Gasol and Dwight Howard. That’s not a bad starting five.” (Hard to disagree.)

Why do accounts that post about sports get such high retweet rates? Should we really all just start tweeting about sports, or are there deeper factors at work?

Before diving into that, let me just take a moment to satisfy the budding statisticians in the audience. I’m defining the “retweet rate” of a given post as the number of retweets it got divided by the number of followers that the account has. So, if an account with 10,000 followers posts something clever and gets 100 retweets, that’s a retweet rate of 100 / 10,000, or 1%.

The retweet rate for an account, then, is just the average of the retweet rates of all of its posts. And based on the data we’ve collected, a “typical” account has a retweet rate of .1%. So for every 1,000 followers the account has, a post receives, on average, about one retweet.

Back to the original question: what’s with all these sports-related retweets? To get to the bottom of this question, we have to understand why people retweet.

Why do people retweet a post?

Many community managers make the incorrect assumption that people retweet content because they like said content. This is false. People click links that they think will be interesting. They favorite posts that they find particularly notable. But they retweet content they think will resonate with their followers.

A retweet is like retelling someone else’s joke. Sure, you found the joke funny when you heard it the first time. But you’re retelling it to someone new because you think they will find it funny.

When someone retweets you, they are telling their followers “Hey! You might like this!” And that begs the question: Who are your followers’ followers? And do they care about your content?

Consider Your Followers’ Followers

Sometimes there’s a natural overlap between your followers and your followers’ followers. For instance, if you really love Breaking Bad and you follow @BreakingBad_AMC, it’s likely that a healthy number of your followers also watch the show. Therefore, content posted by the community managers running @BreakingBad_AMC have a very receptive group of followers’ followers.

Now consider that you’re the community manager for a company that makes accounting software. Your customers all have one thing in common–they’re all accountants. But who follows accountants? (Yes, you’re allowed to chuckle at that.) The answer is actually really simple: all kinds of people follow accountants. Their wives, kids, neighbors, friends, coworkers and golf buddies.

Get where I’m going with this? Most of their followers aren’t accountants. So if you’re the aforementioned accounting software’s community manager, tweeting a torrid stream of accounting-related content simply won’t get retweeted. You may be incredibly successful at generating clicks and favorites, but retweets will be few and far between.

Use the tried-and-true cocktail party analogy. If you were at a cocktail party and you met an accountant, the last thing he would want to talk about would be work. He’d be worried that your eyes would glaze over and you’d immediately look for a way out of the conversation. In social media, the unfollow button is incredibly close at hand at all times, so that accountant is much more likely to start a conversation about Breaking Bad, both in real life and on Twitter.

(@BreakingBad_AMC isn’t an Argyle customer, so I can’t run an easy report on their all-time retweet rate. But after eyeballing some of their most recent posts they’re getting a retweet rate five to ten times higher than an “average” account. Hardly surprising.)

So what do I do if I sell B2B accounting software?

Many community managers will be in a similar predicament as the aforementioned accounting software community manager. So what do you do if your followers’ followers don’t care about your content? Some suggestions:

• Identify commonalities in your followers’ followers. Many of Argyle’s followers’ followers are 25-40 years old, putting them solidly in the group of people who remember the 90s fondly. On a recent Friday, we created a campaign around the hashtag #90sSentence asking people what their favorite 90s-themed sentence was. These posts got a ton of retweets.
• Participate in targeted hashtag conversations. The goal of a retweet is to amplify your message, but it’s not the only way to achieve this. If you regularly participate in a targeted community formed around a hashtag, your message will be seen by exactly the people you care about. Amplification achieved.
• Optimize for different metrics. While retweets are a powerful tool for some brands, it’s totally valid for you to optimize your efforts for metrics such as mentions, favorites and clicks while discarding retweets as an important KPI. There’s nothing wrong with admitting you’re not the LA Lakers.

How many retweets does your brand get? Are you more like Breaking Bad or accounting software?

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Many of those marketers reasonably assume a good route to understanding this question is to see how their presence compares to those of other similar brands. And I recently talked with one marketer who was pretty pumped to learn about the newest social presence analyzer – the CScore.

Similar to Klout, Kred and other social influence scoring services, the CScore lets you enter your Facebook URL and get a short report on the health of your social engagement. And there’s that handy-dandy numeric score so you can understand how you compare to other brands.

But wait. The marketer is asking the question, “How successful is my social media presence?” and then getting the answer…

42?

Oh. That’s helpful…right?

Mm, maybe not so much. Now, these tools sometimes do provide interesting (and maybe even useful) metrics, but a “universal social media influence score” simply isn’t relevant or helpful. Businesses require context in order to make data mean something. How can you give a car dealership in the Schenectady a score on the same scale as a fashion magazine in Madrid? Klout, the CScore, etc. are all lacking context, which leaves you comparing apples to oranges to pluots. (Yeah, that’s a real thing. I didn’t know.)

I have hope that Klout, CScore, and other social influence metrics will eventually address these concerns for businesses. Imagine a tool that takes in data from Facebook and Twitter, segments that data by industry, location and/or other factors and compares your brand’s social media presence to others who are similar to yours. You could have a real picture of where you stand in your social media landscape.

But really, the best social media metrics for your business are the ones that relate your social presence to real business outcomes. Don’t be led astray by a numeric score on an unknown scale. Think social media ROI instead!

Thoughts? Is there a place for the current state of social influence scores in measuring social media success? What would your ideal social influence score look like? How do you place yourself on the social media spectrum of influence?

We’re seeking to answer some simple- but meaningful – questions with some simple datapoints, as detailed below.

Post Frequency

We’re curious how frequently specific verticals share content on social sites on a monthly basis.  A higher volume obviously indicates more attention, probably more investment, and – by way of a small extrapolation – possibly more success.  A lower volume likely indicates less internal attention, investment, and success.

As a standalone datapoint, post frequency isn’t terribly illustrative.  But when benchmarked against relevant industry averages, social pros can get a sense of how they stack up against their peers and competitors.  Especially by indexing post frequency against audience size.

Conversation Rate

We’re scanning the most recent 200 posts for each handle in our sample to determine the breakdown of original posts versus replies.

A high conversation rate – meaning the percentage of posts that are in reply to someone else – indicates active engagement and an outwardly-focused social strategy.  Companies that use social for community activation and customer support will have high conversation rates.

A low conversation rate may indicate a small audience or perhaps a not-that-social audience.  It may also indicate a broadcast-based social strategy and an opportunity for more customer/community engagement.

Link Rate

The link rate illustrates the percentage of social posts that contain links.  Links give companies a valuable opportunity to cookie and track social prospects at a detailed level, yet very companies take advantage of this capability.

I’m interested in exploring the breakdown of links pointed internally – back to the company site – versus links pointed externally to other sites, blogs, and news organizations.

Share Rate

The share rate indicates the percentage of your posts that are shared or reTweeted by your audience.  We’re seeking to answer a number of questions around content quality, audience engagement, and social strategy by digging into share rates by company and by industry.

We’re sourcing data from public Twitter and Facebook APIs and aggregating the data to create industry-wide benchmarks and insights.  And of course we plan to surface this data to our customers and prospects so that they can understand their social marketing performance.

The early returns are fascinating, even though we’re just getting started with this project.  I’m excited to see what comes back so that we can analyze, organize, and present the results…and hopefully help our customers, prospects, and friends socialize more effectively.

Turns out, this red chart isn’t that bad. We’ve been changing up our social strategy here at Argyle by publishing higher quality and lower quantity to social.

The first of the bottom numbers says my clicks have dropped by 9%, which kind of sucks. Until you look at my number of posts, which has dropped by 34%. That means that my clicks per post has risen by 38% (the last number). The content we’re curating and creating is 38% more valuable to our customers, which means our new strategy is working exactly how we planned.

So maybe red charts aren’t all bad.

Obviously this topic is near and dear to our hearts at Argyle – plus I did a call with Susan as a part of her research process – so I thought that I would share a few thoughts.

The report’s “Six Ways of Measuring Revenue Impact of Social Media” is pretty much spot on:

It was refreshing to see that “Anecdote” made its way onto the list. Even though it is decidedly low tech and not much fun to talk about as an industry analyst or technology vendor, anecdotal measurement is the right place to start and the ideal practice until a more integrated/automated approach becomes apparent and/or necessary.

The marketing immaturity reflected in the report aligns with our day-to-day experience at Argyle. Most social marketers have their hands full solving urgent problems around workflow, automation, and management. Revenue attribution is important, but it isn’t always the top priority when there are other pressing productivity problems.

That said – it is encouraging the data in the report underlines the ongoing quest of revenue attribution. 56% of the social professionals surveyed stated that “inability to tie social media to business outcomes” is a challenge. 70% scored themselves a 3 or less (on a scale of 1 to 5) when asked about their effectiveness at mapping social media to revenue generation. We obviously believe that these are important problems worth solving.

A 5-star effort from Susan, Andrew, and team – well worth the read.

Eric

This week’s Social Media Stat of the Week comes to us courtesy of eMarketer and Satmetrix. In a survey of 1,000 B2B and B2C companies, 47% of B2B companies did not track or follow up on brand mentions on social media at all.

That means nearly half of B2B companies are either using the push method of content delivery (and not listening), or are ignoring social as a viable marketing channel all together. I was shocked that the number was so high.

For the 53% of B2B companies that do follow and track social mentions, 56% count only the comments and followers. That’s the extent of their social media measurement – counting comments and followers. Wow.

Do either of these stats surprise you? Are these numbers worrisome?

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