On Words and Business

These days, social media and mobile apps get all the attention from the marketing set. Not to say that we oldsters aren’t joining the party, but when it comes to making it look easy, both of these are pretty much the purview of the younger set, the Millennials.

But guess what…according to Nielsen (in this report on Marketing Chart) Boomers’ use of Twitter jumped 469% in 2009 (there was nowhere to go but up!). 80% of Gen-Xers use tools like Facebook and Twitter. The Greatest Generation, those over 65, are a different story when it comes to the social media and mobile bandwagon. They are a bunch who like email, though, so you can still reach ‘em online.

Go forth and market…

The small business success index takes on social media:

• 75% have a company page on a social media site like LinkedIn or Facebook.
  I have a company page on LinkedIn and am wishing there was more I could do with it. In my world, Facebook is for personal use and I don’t see that my customers would be looking for me there. Are you?
• 39% have a blog
  Check. This is it.
• 26% tweet
  Nope.
• 61% use social media to identify new customers
  Working on this one.

How are you using social media technologies in your business?

According to a recent survey , more than half the journalists surveyed said that social media sources are important or somewhat important, and 89% said they used blogs in their research.

If you want to get noticed, it seems like socializing in cyberspace is increasingly the way to do it.

Read more about the story on MediaPost.

The Economist published this special report on social networking, including a discussion of why the networks grow so fast, how small businesses are using them to their advantage, how it’s changing the world of job hunting, and what we can expect in terms of privacy issues.

As of October, 2009 Facebook was the clear winner in the numbers game with over 430 million users. Wow.

In case you are wondering about social media and if and how it reaches your (or any) audience, check out 20+ mind-blowing social media stats.

Some that I find interesting:

• LinkedIn has gained about 1 million members each month since last August
• More than 65 million Facebook members access their accounts via a mobile device
• Average number of tweets per day (as of end of 2009): 27.3 million

A fascinating blog I just discovered: The Numbers Guy

It’s all about how numbers are reported in news and business; and how sometimes they can confuse an issue (purposely or not). Statistics made fun. Sort of.