Brands On Facebook And Twitter Favored By Consumers

People who are Facebook fans and Twitter followers of a brand are more likely to buy the brand's product or recommend it to a friend, according to a new study by Chadwick Martin Bailey and iModerate Research Technologies.

The study of 1,500 consumers found that 60 percent of Facebook fans and 79 percent of Twitter followers are more likely to recommend those brands since becoming a fan or follower.

More than half (51%) of Facebook fans and 67 percent of Twitter followers are more likely to buy the brands they follow or are a fan of.

"While social media is not the silver bullet that some pundits claim it to be, it is an extremely important and relatively low cost touch point that has a direct impact on sales and positive word of mouth," said Josh Mendelsohn a vice president at Chadwick Martin Bailey.

"Companies not actively engaging are missing a huge opportunity and are saying something to consumers - intentionally or unintentionally- about how willing they are to engage on consumers' terms."

The study also found that people view brands not engaging in social media as out of touch.

When asked the question "What does it say about a brand if they are not involved with sites like Facebook or Twitter?" they said the following:

* "It's EXPECTED that a company have some digital face - whether it's on FB or Twitter I don't know - but they need a strong electronic presence or you doubt their relevance in today's marketplace." Female 50-54

* "Either they are not interested in the demographic that frequents Facebook and Twitter or they are unaware of the opportunity to get more exposure in a more interactive method." Male 35-39

* "It shows they are not really with it or in tune with the new ways to communicate with customers." Female 18-24.

 * "If they're not on Facebook or Twitter, then they aren't in touch with the "electronic" people."  Female 55-59

 

 

Liveblogging: Twitter CEO Evan Williams Keynote at SXSW

We're here at SXSW Interactive waiting for the keynote with Twitter CEO Evan Williams who will discuss "The Next Generation of Social Media." There has been some speculation that an announcement of Twitter's ad platform could occur at this event, but that may or may not happen. We'll see.

Either way, I'll be liveblogging the keynote below. Please forgive the inevitable typos.

Williams will be interviewed by Umair Haque of the Havas Media Lab."

Liveblogging starts

02:00:  Still waiting...

02:01: Introduction beginning...

02:03: Here we go...

Evan Williams announces...A new platform for integrating twitter into websites: it's called @anywhere

Signin using twitter id, your own publications can be followed starting with amazon,huffpost youtube yahoo,....a bunch of others.

Umair asks - if i'm at newspaper and i want to read one of fav columnits

 

ev: @anywhere reduces friction - not strict rules lleaves alot of innovation up to devs and third parties...a lot to be done with it

easily tweet from column itself. you may just want to follow the columlnist....straight from byline

"one of the things we've found with twitter is discovery is one of the hardest challenges..."

twitter is very easy way to keep in touch.

 

Umair: what are key benefits to site?

ev: give you connection back to users that you didn't hav before - twitter drives tons of traffic, so should reslt in more followers for a site than just sending out links...

 

hopefully result in more people who are your fans using twitter, talking about you content...

you can bring in users' tweets into your site, and create a sub community with it

Umair: people and organizations build stronger relationships?

about lowering barrier to that according to Ev.

03:13: Ev: We're still focused pretty much on how do we create the best experience for users and businesses...

How do we create a business out of this? There's tons of business users on twitter today..

We just want to make that better, easier, and faster.

What is Twitter? Maybe the right question is what is twitter evolving to?

It's always been a difficult question to answer. We think of it as an information network to help people discover what they care about (in the world)

You can follow the flaming lips if that's what you care about....you can be smarter and make better choices...that's valuable...

its like saying "what's the internet?" it's about who you are. what you need at the time.

02:16. As we grow, one of the things that becomes painful is having a lot of centralized decision making and forcing poeple through slow processes, so we have teams and try to give them the resources they need...

Role for interacting with teams?

I don't get into the nuts and bolts of code...I personally like to get inovled in product and strategy...what we should be doing...the nitty gritty, work wth product teams. half my time. the other half think about company and right culture internally...

been thinking a lot lately about how to scale the company and adopt the characteristics we want...how to define these characteristics..paralllel between service and the company we want to create - openness big value of twitter . transparency. a company that behaves by that as well. easy to say and harder to do as you grow...

02:19 Openness means a lot of things. we debated whether openness or transparency is the right word. you can let people see what you're doing, but a door lets people come in and mess with what you're doing ..users have taken twitter and morphed it into what they want it to be. ....we've encouraged and supported that. a core part of being open.

Your basic assumptions are usually wrong. "Openness is a survival technique."

We talk about nine assumptions you should have one of them is assume there are more smart people outside the compay than inside. it's a key thing to remember as you get bigger...

  02:21:   Deals with Bing/Google first guys we shared full stream of public twitter data with. a lot of debate...people inside twitter...if there's all this data that could be highly moentizable., does it make sense to give this data away? We came to the decision by going to the principle by how do we create the most value for the user....the reason google/bing could help that - ther'es valuable knowledge within the twitter network. there's a lot of valuable tweeting that people don't necessarily see...it's a way to bring more valuable to the tweets.

02:24: It was a tough decision to come to....big partners aren't who they want to limit it too..announced a couple weeks ago that they would license the data to other partners...

One of the exciting next things to happen with the ecosystem ...creating core experiences that fill holes in user expereince...sharing photos, shortening links, apps, etc.

Real businesses built off twitter - cotweet,etc. we know twitter can be used for customer support, but twitter.com interface isn't built for that. cotweet recently got acquired who wants to focus on that more.

We'd love to see much more focus on creating those deep experiences.
 
"We're pretty open." THere is some control we need to employ. if we were completly open, it could hur the users in time....it has to be managed a lot - being open and having an open api makes it much easier to build apps to spam twiter. sending cease and desists every day to spammers - using the twitter brand...

One reason third parties are so important - a lot of people falling for these guys' tricks...we have to assert some kind of control.

02:29: An email i recently got...to support - someone in chile thanking twitter for helping communication...this is very gratifying for us because we've always held it important to make twitter reach the weakest signals in the world...because twitter's so simple....sms still really important to us...

We're really happy we've been able to get sms coverage...not as easy as just providing a service on the internet.

02:21: To me it comes back to is someone getting value out of twitter. if they're search google and they come upon a tweet and get value out of a tweet, we consider them a user...ther is a curve for adoption. "we have a pretty wide definition of user." we're trying to lower the barrier...at the beginning a lot of focus was on telling the world what you're doing...now we're getting to the point where there's something interesting on twitter for almost everybody...mentions flaming lips again...critical that it's a two way medium, but this could be as simple as a retweet or a reply...

02:35 Press secretary of the white house started using twitter in an authentic way from inside the white house in a way that you wouldn't usually see things....official channel, but they're using it in a new way. "very fun" to see.  It's about reducing the walls beween people who have a lot of influence and the people they influence. That's the most profound promise of the Internet, and we're riding the wave I started on ten years ago with blogging..."

02:41: There's more and more stuff every day you may want to follow and search for...our goal is not just to maximize that. We understand that people have limited time/attetion. We have no interest in increasing just the amount of time you spend on the Twitter site. "If anything, we'd like to decease it."

The open exchange of info has a positive impact on the world...

02:46: The obvious stuff will be just signing in and tweeting more stuff, but there's another level of value created by lowering frition (@ platform)

If the channel helps the business get better, that tha's very powerful.

02:49: If you live on the web, you're used to having a relationship with companies/services you use..

A lot of people walked out of this keynote. I'm pretty sure the guy next to me fell asleep. No joke.

 

More States Using Twitter To Communicate Travel Conditions

A growing number of state transportation departments (DOTs) are communicating news and information to travelers using Twitter, Facebook and other social media.

The American Association of State Highway and Transportation Officials' (AASHTO) survey of 32 state DOTs found 26 states or (82%) are now using Twitter to communicate with travelers when major traffic incidents or severe weather such as snow storms, hurricanes and tornadoes force roads to be closed or detours.

Almost half of the states surveyed (14) have an active Facebook page and 23 states use video on their website. Eighteen states also have an active YouTube channel.

"Using social media tools allows us to carry messages to constituents through the forums they already use rather than expecting them to seek us out," said Washington State Transportation Secretary Paula Hammond.

"We have improved our agency's credibility with the public, improved communication efficiency and saved taxpayers money."

Washington was one of the first state DOTs to use Twitter and now has 8,000 followers on its main WSDOT Twitter account and 3,000 followers on its Seattle area traffic account.  Washington, along with Mississippi, Tennessee, Texas, and California are among several states using multiple Twitter accounts to give travelers the ability to personalize their information based on specific highway routes or their geographic location.

Overall, state DOTs are finding that social media is more efficient in reaching the public with time-sensitive traffic and travel information, according to the survey. Among the various social media tools, respondents found Twitter (65%), RSS feeds (56%), podcasts (18%) and Facebook (13%) to be the most effective ways to reach their audiences.


 

Twitter Celebrates 50 Million Tweets Per Day Milestone

Thanks to the Olympics, hockey sticks are easy to see this time of year, showing up during the actual games, on morning shows, and on talk shows.  One's sort of shown up in a graph of Twitter's growth, too, as the number of tweets per day has been increasing at an impressive rate.

Kevin Weil, a member of the Twitter analytics team, explained late yesterday on the site's official blog that the following stats do not include tweets from spam accounts.  Also, the stats correspond to original tweets, not tweet deliveries, which tie in to how many followers people have.

He then stated, "Folks were tweeting 5,000 times a day in 2007.  By 2008, that number was 300,000, and by 2009 it had grown to 2.5 million per day.  Tweets grew 1,400% last year to 35 million per day."

As for the current rate, Weil continued, "Today, we are seeing 50 million tweets per day - that's an average of 600 tweets per second."

There isn't any sign of a slowdown occurring, either.

NBC execs must be more than a little jealous of this popularity.

Next Page »