For those email marketers using Silverpop's Share to Social feature, which allows you to share your emails into recipient's social networks; it can sometimes be difficult to know which networks to use - after all you don't want to list all of them when they may not be big enough or from the right demographic. That email preview window is not infinite in size and so making optimal use of screen real estate is a must.

There has been a bunch of informaiton released recently which shows the reach of social networks today.

First up, from Comscore; data on the Top 10 Social Networking sites in the UK:

Secondly, it is unsurprising that younger audiences are more engaged today;

Finally research from Ofcom shows that it is amongst the older audiences that social networks are experiencing the most growth. 25-34 years olds on Facebook increased from 40% last year to 46% this year; whilst 35-54 years grew the fastest - up 8% to 35%.

(hat-tip to ClickZ for pointing me to the data)

Posted by Riaz Kanani at 10:56 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Social Media has been a big topic in marketing for a while now. Last month, Forrester released a report showing that more than 50 percent of marketers planned to increase their investment in social media and predictions place this area as the strongest for growth in 2009.

With conversations coming online through networks like Facebook and Twitter, marketers need to move to take advantage of these new communications channels to reach both existing and prospective customers. To date, the traditional online methods of advertising to this audience have not been successful, but this is because they have not been able to engage with the user. Solving this is a big challenge for marketing today.

This is not something that can wait either.

Rebecca Jennings at Forrester Research posted some statistics earlier this month on how the Baby Boomer generation (43-63 year olds) in Europe are actively using Social Media today.

The research shows that almost half of the younger baby boomers (43-52 year olds) are participating in Social Media today compared to approximately 40% of older baby boomers (53-63 year olds). This is not something that is restricted to Generation X or Y. You can see the country breakdown below.

Twitter (which has seen phenomenal growth last quarter) and Facebook (which is also growing in Europe) are focussed on generating conversations online and continuously trying to reduce the barriers to creating content. Over time, this will reduce the number of spectators and force marketers to become more actively involved and closer to their audience.

Posted by Riaz Kanani at 9:57 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)