On Words and Business

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.

The teens are being touted as the decade of the mobile device and all the marketing and media that go along with them.

According to CTIA, 89% of the US population own cell phones.  Only about 16% (predicted to be 37% by 2014) of those are smartphones–ready for all this marketing and media to arrive. That number is predicted to be 37% by 2014, but even that will be only about a third of the population.

I don’t fundamentally disagree that things are going mobile; and I know other parts of the world are more mobile and have more smartphone than we do. I just worry about those who don’t have or can’t afford smartphones.

Will other forms of marketing and media suffer with the focus on mobility?