Social media channels are a formidable influence on brands as the Internet becomes the main source of information and consumers trend towards trusting their peers over companies. While this may seem common knowledge, it’s essential we watch the benchmarks that demonstrate increasing engagement on social media. Whereas the old hat was that consumers talk about brands online, we now are able to pinpoint the where and how users are soliciting and sharing information, as well as how it directly leads to buying decisions.
Here are four statistics we regularly look to at Alterian:

Three out of four Americans use social media (Forrester)

This statistic may suggest that social media is an all-encompassing phenomenon, touching many audiences equally. But the truth is just the opposite. As ReadWriteWeb just highlighted, personalization of online media is growing in parallel, or through, social media – bringing us back to the core need to not just reach consumers, but engag with them.

Two out of three of the global Internet population visit social networks (Neilsen)

Traditional engagement is based in cultural idioms – ranging from the proper form of addressing a close friend in the U.K. to the appropriate way to exchange business cards in Japan. Now, social networks are becoming a melting pot of interpersonal connections, and deeper levels of engagement call for more advanced analysis and technology.

Visiting social sites in now the fourth most popular online activity – ahead of personal email (Neilsen)

While email has dominated communications for some time, social sites are allowing multiple layers of interaction with multiple people, all in real time. This doesn’t say at all that email is dead – more that we have the capacity for more complex levels of engagement. Even more, email is experiencing greater segmenting across demographics. For example, the Blackberry user base might live and die by email, whereas the iPhone / Twitter user base may prefer a variety of social apps over their baseline emails.

Time spent on social networks is growing at 3X the overall Internet rate, accounting for 10% of all Internet time (Neilsen)

Despite this increase, it’s important to note there’s still only 24 hours in a day. It’s not only that we’re making more time for our interactions on social networks, it’s that these services are becoming more ingrained in our daily activities.

So, how do we derive value from these statistics? Value is found by leveraging what data you find and applying it to day to day operations such as overall messaging, targeting and segmentation, Web site creation, direct mail and email, call center and lead generation. Social media is offering deeper levels of engagement across these forms of communication – calling for the advanced technology like Techrigy SM2 that can help firms to achieve broader and more personal interaction with consumers. Beyond that, we can monitor responses to campaigns in real time to provide more transparent ROI and the ability for marketers to manage campaigns on the fly and adapt to the needs of their audience.

About Marcus Tewksbury

Marcus Tewksbury has written 12 post in this blog.

Marcus is a respected author, speaker, and thought leader on optimizing marketing organizations to most efficiently, and effectively create value added experiences for high worth customers; a process that he has termed Customer Relationship Marketing, or CRM(arketing).

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