Social Media Spending Projections

by Adam Schoenfeld on March 24, 2010

Social Media is growing like crazy. Need some data to help prove it in your organization? There have been several studies projecting social media spending. Let’s take a look at 3 recent reports that show businesses making a strong commitment to social media going forward.

Social Media Percent Budget

In their annual survey of CMOs, the Duke Fuqua school looked at social media spending as a percent of total marketing budgets. Currently social media account for 6% of budgets, up from 4% 6 months ago. It’s a small piece of the pie today, but CMOs have big expectations for Social Media going forward. Respondents expect nearly 20% of their total marketing budget will allocated to social media in the next 5 years.

Social Media Spend 2014

Looking more broadly at the market, Forrester projects social media marketing as the fastest growing interactive marketing category. Growing at a 34% CAGR and expected to go from a mear $716M in 2009 to $3.1B+ in 2014.

Social Media Projetion 2010

EConsultancy conducted a survey looking at budgets in 2010. They found that 86% of marketers plan to increase their social media budget in 2010 while only 1% plan to decrease their budget.

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Twitter Spam: A Case Study

by Adam Schoenfeld on March 15, 2010

As Twitter adoption grows, so too does Spam. It comes in many shapes and sizes and we’ve all experienced it on Twitter. Watching the stream at 140 Twitter Conference was an interesting case study. A tweet from Mashable entered the stream followed by a massive influx of retweets. It took over the #140tc hashtag. I was sitting next to Chris Pirillo at the time and he raised a great question: “I wonder how much of that is spam or bots?”

Let’s take a look at the data…

The velocity of tweets in the first hour was dramatic. It’s clear how this story was able to take over the #140tc stream.

Mashable Tweet Volume

Following/Followers Ratio. One way to identify “questionable” accounts is by a high friends to follower ratio. Looking at the people retweeting the Mashable post on #140tc, show 11% with a ratio of >1.5 and 4% over 3.

Twitter Spam Follower Ratio

Blank Profiles. Users with little or no profile data is another potential sign of a spammer or bot. In this sample data, 12% had blank bio, and 14% had a blank location. While 9% had both fields blank.

Tweet Spam Blank Profiles

So What?

Neither of these measure are a perfect way to identify Spam — both provide a directional analysis. The spammer and bot issues on Twitter suggest that look at who is responding can be important, particularly when content gets picked up by big publishers like Mashable.

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140 Twitter Conference Seattle Recap: #140tc Analysis

by Adam Schoenfeld on March 9, 2010

I had the pleasure of attending my second 140 Twitter conference in Seattle yesterday. Keeping up with the LA Event, Parnassus Group put on another great conference. We used 20 Decibels to track, measure, and export the #140tc hashtag data. Our campaign captured tweets for the 2 days leading up to the event, the event itself, and ~12 hours following. We used Steve Broback’s favorite Twitter app, Microsoft Excel, to turn the export into charts. The Parnassus group will be following up with a sentiment analysis of this data shortly – I’ll update here with a link.

140tc Tweet Volume and Velocity

The #140tc hashtag was very active – there were 5,489 tweets from 1,445 people in the period tracked. Ben Parr’s opening keynote generated a high point in activity. Later at ~5pm Mashable tweeted a story about Hootsuite integrating Foursquare. This generated another wave of activity as Mashable Retweets took over the #140tc stream. Chris Pirillo noted that many of these were likely spam bots (we’ll cover that in a future analysis)

140tc Twitter Followers

Not surprisingly, conference attendees are active twitter users. The follower numbers for this group are impressive. Over 1/3 of people have over 1,000 followers, and 7% have over 5,000 followers! The average number of followers is 3,830.

140tc People

The average person tweeted #140tc 3.8 times in the period tracked. However, there some stood out from the crowd. To make the top 20 list, it required 247 tweets! The top 20 were Jaxx_Magee, Kathy E Gill, Alecia Sullivan, Jonathan I. Ezor, Ray Prock Jr., Rich Harris, Brian M. Westbrook, Kathy Gill – Live, Sarah Fosmo, Nansen Malin, John Knight, Craig Sutton, Seattle Wine , Mike Tallent, Jeff Fowle, Eric Earling, nazila, Shona Milne, Damon Cortesi, and dakini_3. Special props to Kathy Gill (@kegill) for having 2 handles in the top 20 list :)

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5 Ways to Manage Twitter at Scale

February 26, 2010

Last week at Socia Media Breakfast, I learned that AT&T has 15 Customer service reps and a full-time analyst dedicated to Twitter. This got me thinking about how businesses organize, scale and manage a large Twitter presence. I looked at 5 case studies for 5 different approaches:
1.) Organize by Customer Services Reps: AT&T
AT&T sends ~1,000 [...]

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SMBSeattle Tweet Data and People

February 18, 2010

I woke up bright and early this morning for SMBSeattle’s February event. Tac Anderson from Waggener Edstrom and Neil Beam from AT&T led a discussion on Social Media ROI. The discussion provided great examples of how social media value can be measured in large corporate settings. I was impressed to learn that AT&T has 15 [...]

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Social Media ROI, Are we there yet?

February 10, 2010
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Two reports circulating this week got me thinking about social media ROI – survey data from Mzinga and General Sentiment’s Media Value Report.
Take-aways: 1.) we aren’t there yet – social media adoption is now mainstream, but measuring value & ROI is lagging. 2.) There are several methods marketers can and should use to quantify the [...]

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10 Awesome Seattle Businesses and Organizations on Twitter

February 5, 2010

Seattle has hundreds of great business and organizations active in social media. With Seattle Social Central, we’ve been tracking many of these great local organizations on Twitter. We took a closer look at 10 businesses and organizations that have caught our attention. They come from a range of categories, from non-profits to travel to retail. [...]

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Measuring Twitter Campaigns: The Funnel Approach (Whitepaper)

February 2, 2010
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Funnels are popular way for marketers to measure campaigns. Can a funnel approach be applied to social media campaigns? We think so (in many, but not all cases). The paper below includes a basic funnel approach for measuring Twitter campaigns and a sample analysis based on one of Dell’s recent tweets. We created this paper [...]

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Bill Gates on Twitter: Week 1 by the Numbers

January 27, 2010
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Bill Gates sent his first tweet just over one week ago. The world’s richest man immediately drew a huge following and media attention for his new Twitter presence.
Let’s take a look at Bill G’s first week on Twitter by the numbers…
1.) Reach: Bill Gates has 365,000+ followers and counting and has been added to 13,056 [...]

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Social Media Marketing: Attitudes & Projections (Survey Data)

January 25, 2010

We have a passion for social media data and we’re always excited to find new research in the space. A recent survey conducted by Alterian shows continued interest and investment in social media marketing. The study surveyed 1,000+ marketers, agencies, and service providers and included questions focused on attitudes and expectations for social media for business. [...]

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