Where will social media go in 2012 and beyond?

Just a year or two ago, it was common to see "emerging media" as an alternative buzzword for social media. At the time, it made sense. Facebook was still skyrocketing in popularity, and new social networks were popping up every week.

But now that 2012 is here, it's safe to say that social media is no longer "emerging" and has fully arrived. And while some analysts claim the social media phenomenon is just a bubble waiting to burst, new Facebook statistics from TechCrunch show that the growth may have slowed, but it hasn't stopped.

According to their numbers from comScore, Facebook had 15 million new visitors in 2011 compared to almost 50 million in 2010. This highlights the fact that social media is now in a gradual growth stage, and not the exponentially fast growth stage it had been for years.

An article in ReadWriteWeb dove into this a little deeper, gleaning that the statistical focus will shift from the number of users on various sites to the engagement on those sites. "How much time?" will replace "how many users?" as investors, speculators and pundits look to see who's dominating our online lives.

The main reason for this is that social media across the board, especially Facebook, has more or less reached a saturation point. Echoing many people's complaints when Google+ first hit the scene, most users don't want to add to the long list of channels to keep track of. They are set in their social networking ways, and are now looking for new apps and devices to supplement those social networks.

For marketers, this means we have to move beyond where people are at and start looking at how they are using those social media channels. Regardless, it's good to see that social media continues to become more and more integrated into our daily lives.

Facebook Friday: It's All in the Numbers

The average U.S. Facebook user spends 7 hours and 46 minutes per month on Facebook. Are you one of them? How about a fan of one of the top five brand pages on Facebook? If it's Coca-Cola, Disney or Starbucks you like, then consider yourself part of the club. Check out today's infographic for more Facebook facts.

Wordless Wednesday: What's the Deal with Daily Deals?

Each week we'll post an interesting infographic we've found online. It's our little spin on the popular Wordless Wednesday blog post.

5 Important Stats about Brand Interaction on Facebook

Companies trying to establish their brands on Facebook is nothing new. However, now that brand proliferation is so strong online, it's good to step back and look at how the consumers are actually interacting with those brands.

A recent report from Constant Contact analyzed the online consumer behavior of nearly 1,500 Facebook users to see how they interact with brands. Rather than boring you with the entire report, here are the 5 key points I took away from the study:

• 78% like fewer than 10 brands: This is interesting, because that means a brand has to offer something of substance to be one of those few brands consumers are willing to follow.
• 58% like brands that they already use: This was the number one reason for why a consumer likes a brand. This is key because it contradicts the strategy of using Facebook to gain new customers. However, Facebook obviously plays into customer relations after the purchase.
• 56% more likely to recommend a brand: Echoing the previous point of post-purchase customer relations, more than half of those surveyed said they are much more likely to refer a brand to a friend after becoming a fan on Facebook.
• 13% post updates about brands they like: One of the biggest takeaways I got from this report is that very few consumers actively engage with brands on Facebook. This needs to be taken into account when brands are deciding what direction their Facebook page should go.
• 77% interact by reading posts: By a substantial margin, reading posts was the primary way consumers interact with brands. This is good news for brands that can't offer quick and easy discounts, because they can at least try to generate engaging content to fuel fan interaction.

While this survey focused on consumer brands, it's good to know that the quality of the content dictates how engaged fans will be. And although it's just one survey, there are still some very interesting lessons to take away as brands try to cut through the noise inherent to social media.

Mobile App Usage Higher than the Web

Every day we see people who are paying more attention to their phones than their surroundings. Walking and texting took over streets, malls, and high school halls. This phenomenon has become even more prevalent with the introduction of smartphones and mobile apps.

A recent study, conducted by Flurry, tracked the amount of time people spent on the internet versus mobile apps. They found that June is the first month in which mobile app usage has surpassed internet usage. Consumers spent 81 minutes per day on mobile apps and 74 minutes a day on the internet. 6 months ago internet usage was in the lead with 70 minutes per day and 66 minutes per day on mobile apps.

Data from June 2010 shows that mobile app usage has almost doubled over the course of the year. Last June the ratio was 64:43, with internet usage winning. This June's stats are mere 5 minutes a day away from doubling last June's stats.

This means that companies need to change their marketing habits and figure out how to reach the growing number of app users. It will be exciting to see what the creative juices of advertisers come up with!

Video Post: A Fabulous February for Online Video

It's no secret that Axiom understands the importance of online video. That's why we wanted to share a recent ComScore report about how well online video did in last month. Steve and Dave crunch the numbers and share their insight in this week's Daily Axioms Video Post:

What I Learned from the Science of Blogging Seminar

Last week, Hubspot's Dan Zarrella (@danzarrella) held a webinar called The Science of Blogging based on his research into blogger and blog reader habits. It was a great seminar with some eye-opening points, and if you didn't get a chance to check it out, here are some of the main takeaways.

• Analysis of 170,000+ blog posts show that links about videos get more hits than photo links. 
• However, photo links get more comments than video links. 

• Incentivizing commenting by the audience tends to work, because the word "giveaway" gets by far the most comments.

• Something to keep in mind when sharing blog posts on Facebook: As the reading level required for a Facebook post goes up, the chance it gets shared goes down significantly.

• Most blog views and links happen early in the week, but blog comments and retweets happen later in the week.
• Blog articles posted around 10am tend to get the most amount of views.
• Most re-tweets happen between 2pm and 5pm.

With the hundreds of thousands of blogs out there, obviously bloggers have to keep the best practices in mind if they are going to set themselves apart from the rest.

Black Friday Leads to Green Weekend for Online Retailers

Welcome back, I hope everyone had a great Thanksgiving and successful Black Friday shopping excursion. And yes, I do mean excursion because every mall and shopping center was a madhouse over the biggest shopping weekend of the year.

But even though lines of eager shoppers camped outside stores in anticipation of great deals and specials, Internet retailers enjoyed Black Friday success as well.

There were several Black Friday spending reports that came out in the aftermath of the sales frenzy, with comScore reporting a 9% increase in online spending this past Black Friday versus the same day in 2009. 

Also, a Coremetrics report that came out over the weekend reports a nearly 16% increase in online spending. There may be varying reports, but the general consensus is that online retailers showed marked improvement. That improvement is even more impressive considering another report showed that retailers only saw a 0.3% increase in in-store spending from last year.

The Coremetrics report also highlights a 26.7% jump in the number of people utilizing mobile websites, illustrating the importance of a strong mobile website. If shoppers can't easily access your website on the go, chances are they'll move on.

So as another Black Friday has come and gone, it's a good economic sign that we saw at least a slight increase across the board for retailers. And the significant spike we saw from Internet retailers is an even better sign for mobile and online development in the ongoing holiday shopping season.

Only 4% Online Adults Use Location-Based Services

The unfortunate side effect of following social media news as closely as many of us do is that we sometimes forget that not everybody uses, understands, or even cares about it to extent that we do.

For instance, looking around the social media news headlines you'd think that location-based services like Foursquare or Gowalla are dominating the social sphere. However, a very surprising report from the Pew Research Center shows that these services have a long way to go before they can be considered mainstream staples.

The title of the report, "4% of online Americans use location-based services," pretty much says it all. The rest of the study dives further into the numbers, but all of the statistics point to the same conclusion that these location-based services aren't being utilized across multiple demographics.

The report breaks down the use of these services by several categories, and if you piece together the highest percentages, the ideal geolocation user is an 18-29 year old (8%) Hispanic (10%) male (6%). But even the highest percentages are lackluster, given that the study covered online adults.

But this low usage rate is by no means a sign that location-based services are doomed to fail, it only means that they are not mainstream as of right now. However, these statistics should be taken into account by companies looking to launch any sort of location-based campaign, because the numbers show that it may have some trouble reaching a large majority of the online population.

Gender Confusion for Android

Android may still be the third must popular smartphone brand behind Apple and Blackberry, but it may not stay that way for long based on a recent Neilsen report. But despite the growth rate suggested in the report, Android is still dealing with a largely-male user base that lacks universal appeal. I look into both of these issues in today's video post:

Say What? Teens Send 3,300 Texts Per Month

Like most other millennials, I spent my high school years covertly sending text messages under my desk, afraid to go an hour without any contact with my fellow text-addicts. I also remember being scolded by my parents on a regular basis for racking up 500 or so texts a month.

Boy, have things changed.

A recent study showed that the average teenager sends over 3,300 texts per month. It's an incredible number when you think about how that breaks down. That's over 100 texts a day, or about 6 texts per hour factoring in 6 hours of sleep. It's also twice as many texts as millenials (18-24 year olds) are sending these days.

Teenage texting technology has made some advances over the years, and teens nowadays would scoff at using the same chunky flip-phone I was using back in my English class (back then, War and Peace couldn't hold my attention nearly as well as drama over the homecoming dance could).

Not only are smartphones becoming the norm in high school hallways, they're being used with greater efficiency.Both of these factors support the rise of texting so far, and more importantly show that it's likely to continue its stellar growth.

Video Post: Apple's Slice of the Pie

News outlets and blogs tend to jump all over any story about Apple or its upcoming products, but is it really dominating the news headlines like we think? There was a recent study done by the Pew Research Center that looked into that very topic, and Steve discusses it on today's Daily Axioms Video Post. You can find the article about the study here:

3 Reasons Social Gaming Is An Industry All Its Own

Just last week I wrote a post mentioning the growth of social gaming, and a new study strengthens the case that the growth will continue. Here are three key stats from that study.

1 out of 5 Americans over the age of six has played an online social game at least once.

Obviously, that number is just based on who was polled. But if you extrapolate that out, nearly 60 million Americans have or are playing social games. That's a huge number of users.

$2.2 billion worth of virtual goods were bought in 2009; expected to increase to $6 billion by 2013.

This is the major reason why social gaming isn't going away in the near future. The amount of money social gaming has already brought in is massive, and experts think that number is going to triple. As long as people are buying virtual goods, companies will continue to provide them.

35% of social gamers have no previous gaming experience whatsoever.

This was the most surprising stat to me, because ever since social games hit the market they've been compared to (and grouped with) traditional games. To me, this says that social gaming is becoming a completely different market, separate from the Nintendo/Playstation/Xbox-dominated industry of traditional gaming.

This is great news for social networks and bad news for the gaming industry. For social networks, social gaming provides monetization options other than just ads and banners. Unfortunately for the gaming industry, their struggles over the past couple of years are most likely to continue, because over a third of that social gaming demographic aren't playing traditional video games.

That being said, the gaming industry isn't beyond hope. However, it will take serious innovation and a continued push towards online gaming. The biggest takeaway is that social games like Farmville won't be put out to pasture anytime soon.

The "World" in "World Wide Web"

To a generation that came of age during the extinction of landlines and rise of smartphones, millennials know life is practically not worth living unless you can share it (digitally) with your friends, acquaintances and people you met a long time ago and can't remember where/when. A recent article in Harvard Business Review suggests that cultural differences can determine what kinds of information social media users share and who they share it with. These conclusions were drawn from Trendstream Global Web Index, a survey of more than 50,000 users of social platforms in 18 markets.

So how did North American countries measure up to others? Well, much the same as our comrades across the pond and down under (Europe and Australia) - of the users who have internet access, most maintain social networks and upload photos/ video, but only a small percentage maintain a microblog, such as Twitter. And although it seems the United States is socially obsessed, Brazil, Russia, India and China show the highest overall level of engagement with online networking tools.

North American users also seem to adhere to the good ol' American mantra "bigger is better," and tend to use social media platforms as a way to mass communicate to hundreds of online friends. Apparently Asian nations believe "less is more" and tend to treat blogging and social networking as a tool to connect with a select group of friends and family. For example, while users in North American countries are likely to have hundreds of friends on Facebook, Japanese users often have an average of 25 friends on mixi, a social networking site that never caught on in The States.

Surprisingly, users in other nations do not find themselves online for hours when they intended to log on just to tweet about the weather. The data revealed the prevalence of social networking does not correlate to any other online behavior. For example,although France and The Netherlands show similar levels of social media use, only 25 percent of French users report using internet banking while 87 percent of Dutch users do.

What does this really tell us? We're all going online to get and share information, just in different ways. Not a big surprise there. Do you fit into the category of the typical U.S. mass communicator?

Surprising Female Facebook Stats You Should See

A study was recently released by Oxygen Media about the Facebook habits of people ages 18-34. Feel free to check out Mashable's article about the study to get more details, but here's a quick breakdown of the surprising stats regarding females.

34% check Facebook first thing in the morning.

Mark Zuckerberg is probably loving this, because despite all of the warnings and threats of people leaving the social networking site, a third of women in that all-important 18-34 demographic are extremely loyal to Facebook.

42% feel it's okay to post photos of themselves intoxicated.

This was one of the more shocking stats I saw, especially when considering the number of companies who utilize Facebook to some extent in the hiring/interview process. As a side note, 89% also said that you shouldn't post anything on Facebook that you wouldn't want your parents to see, which means a lot of these women don't view public drunkenness as a major issue.

50% are fine with being Facebook friends with complete strangers.

This stat also surprised me, given the debate about Facebook privacy issues. However, the study was also done during the height of the privacy debate (May-June of this year) so it's possible that doing the study just a month or two later would've change things.

49% of women believe it’s fine to keep tabs on a boyfriend by having access to his accounts.

I'll start of by pointing out that 42% of men in this study felt the same way. But either way, this is alarming to me. This is basically saying hacking someone's profile is okay, as long as you're dating them.

I know that's a lot of percentages and stats, but I'm a numbers junkie. I'd highly recommend checking out the story to get more perspective. The one point out of all this that's abundantly clear is that the debate about social media and Facebook is still going strong.