How big is social sharing? Very big!

ShareThis and Starcom MediaVest collaborate to release the first study on social sharing. The study focuses on ShareThis’ database of sharing activity for it's widget in March 2011 and includes a detailed analysis of more than 7 billion sharing signals across all major sharing channels, specifically looking at the sharing patterns of more than 300 million monthly users across the top 1,000 publisher websites of ShareThis. The analysis is based by the proportion of people who share via the different options on the widget.

Sharing is big, no surprise

Social sharing now produces an estimated 10 percent of all Internet traffic and 31 percent of referral traffic to sites from search and social. Search is around twice as big.

Facebook dominates as channel used to share

There are two sets of numbers here, this is because some content is…

Interesting infographic from Advertising Age in the US. It certainly appears that Facebook is the place to engage with married mums! What gems can you spot? [caption id="attachment_5287" align="alignleft" width="600" caption="Social Media Demographics from Advertising Age"][/caption]…

Though the big networks continue to grow, including Facebook, LinkedIn and Tumblr, this data from Ignite indicates a maturing (to some extent) of the social media space with some big 'web 2.0' businesses in decline. What does this mean? Only time will tell, and though Facebook is the default choice for most I think it's both natural and encouraging that platforms find a niche, after all isn't that the nature of things? Let us know what you think... …

Facebook Insights for domains feature now lets you tag your site to show interactions of Facebook users with your site

We know how important social plugins are now (specifically the Facebook social plugins such as the 'Likes' and 'Comments'). Their usage is constantly increasing with over 2.5m web sites now using them since early 2010, and with 600m consumers in Facebook, it represents a huge source for creating awareness about your brand and traffic to your site. This week Facebook just made visualising, monitoring and managing that a whole lot easier with an upgrade to Insights for Facebook - see this post from the developer blog for an explanation of the analytics and how to set it up. We've done this and it's relatively easy - just adding a Facebook specific meta tag to the header of your home page.

Insights (Facebook's analytics tool) isn't new, it's just been…

Using The Social Media Balance Sheet"„¢ tool to measure social media presence - for sector and competitor research

Social Media Metrics have to date mainly focused on the view of their effectiveness from inside the company. At Evonomie we"€™ve been looking for a while for an external qualitative method to measure companies"€™ online activities as part of a strategic review. Internal or in-company quantitative methods are in abundance and focus on activity, surveys and return on investment (ROI). These are certainly valid metrics and there is a comprehensive list in Jim Sterne"€™s book Social Media Metrics. The real question when conducting research is how can you capture the metrics if you"€™re outside the company? You don"€™t have access to their analytics so need to make a judgement on what"€™s important and whether the information is available.

Benefits of benchmarking competitor use of social media

Reasons we want to measure the social…

Richard Pentin (of TMW) has done some sterling work by teaming up with the IAB Social Media Council to tackle the hottest digital marketing potato; measuring and benchmarking social media ROI. Well, more specifically measuring social media activity that in turn impacts ROI. Despite the very serious sounding name of the IABSMC, we feel that this provides some great thinking that in a framework could well help us all to formalise a way to manage, measure and compare social media performance. The SlideShare presentation talks through each step of the process from establishing your intent, assigning the most relevant KPIs around the 4 As "€“ Awareness, Appreciation, Action and Advocacy "€“ and references other benchmarks in order to draw meaningful comparisons. What do you think are it"€™s strengths and weaknesses? It would be great to hear your feedback and ideas.

A framework for…

I watched an online presentation this week by Jason Falls - he's founder of Social Media Explorer if you wanted to check him out -  it's relatively basic stuff but he gave some great pointers about the different ways to measure social media and how goal setting is the first key to success. I believe that it's important to put clear goals to any marketing including social media. You will hear some purists talk about "conversations" and social media is all about being "human", I agree 100% with that sentiment and yet not having a clear purpose and measuring progress seems crazy to me. Especially when you consider how can be to persuade senior management to release investment into 'new' areas like social media. The importance of a plan Although some guru's like Guy Kawasaki might disagree with me, my belief is that social media marketing has little impact without a plan…