Category Archives: Social Media Marketing

Facebook Statistics Ireland – November 2011 Stats

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A client of mine just asked me to research current Facebook stats in Ireland and so I utilised the facebook page advertising tool to collect some basic information.

At the time of writing (30/11/2011), there are 2,060,740 facebook users.

53% of facebook users in Ireland are Female.

46% of the entire population (4,484,300 according to CSO) are on Facebook

I’ve also created a summary chart with Facebook’s age distribution spread in Ireland for anyone that wants to download, share or use these statistics in presentations :-)

13-17 275,620
18-24 491,880
25-34 628,220
35-44 370,880
45-54 172,780
55-64 73,200
64+ 48,160

What is Twitter?

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Twitter is a social network. On twitter people post short <140 character messages called tweets. The difference between twitter and facebook is that tweets are generally available for everyone to search on so it’s not as egocentric as facebook.

Even though tweets are public, most people follow others on twitter (people who follow are called tweeps). This means they get a quick view in their timeline of what tweeters they’re following are saying.

Features

  1. Timeline – shows what tweeters you are following are saying
  2. @mentions – see who mentioned you
  3. Retweets – see what others in your network have retweeted
  4. Favourite – save your favourite tweets
  5. Save searches – Keep an eye on your favourite topics
  6. Twitter Lists – Group users together to watch them
  7. Trends – Shows what’s currently popular

What are the #tags on Twitter?

On Twitter people can search and tweet based on the concept of #tags, where words that are commonly searched are simply preceded with a #. It is an unofficial symbol, i.e. not invented by twitter but it has become very very useful. As all tweets are public (on public accounts), #tags are used to give a topic an id e.g. #eurovision. Anytime anyone posts with this word included it can be seen in real-time by people who search for it. This is very useful for media / news companies. For example, in Ireland TV stations such as TV3 use the #tv3 tag, so if anyone posts a message containing this tag, their researchers can find it instantly during a live program.

The genius of twitter is its simplicity.

What is Internet Marketing?

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Internet Marketing is a buzzword thrown around today like an old basket ball. It’s important if you have a business website to understand the basics so that you can score three pointers on your competitors.

Essentially it is any activity performed online that promote your product or service.

Here is a list of the top most critical Internet Marketing Activities:

  1. Search Engine Optimisation: You have to ensure that your website has the correct keywords embedded within it to have a chance of being shown on the search engine results page.
  2. Google Pay Per Click Advertising or Google Adwords: Using Google Keyword Research you can pay for your site to appear on the Google Search Engine Results Page (SERP). Be careful here as you can pay a fortune for ads that aren’t optimised and remember to ditch terms that aren’t giving you a return. These ads can also appear on websites that use Google Adsense.
  3. Facebook Pay Per Click Advertising: Facebook advertising is very exciting for certain businesses as you can target customers by age, location, sex etc. It can be expensive but if you get a customer to join your facebook page you have access to them potentially indefinitely.
  4. Affiliate Marketing: Often there’s a website out there that provides information to your target market. It might be worth offering them a percentage of your profit if they can generate significant sales for you. There are many third party services that link affiliates with merchants such as TradeDoubler. If it’s a niche you could update your site to track who has generated sales for you.
  5. Social Media interaction: It is important to engage with your consumers in a non-salesy way so that they learn to trust you. Building up this kind of relationsip will influence a customer when it comes to future purchase decisions.
  6. Add facebook like button to your site: If people like what you’re offering they may well share it on facebook if you make it easy for them to do it.
  7. Google Places: Don’t forget to add your site to Google Places otherwise know as Google Local Business Centre. When people do local searches these results often do better than regular SERP entries.

There are lots more things that you can do to market your product or service online. This is just a taster of some of the more important Internet Marketing techniques that I use on a daily basis.

 

Should I add a Facebook like button to my website?

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Short answer: Err… Yeah!

Adding a facebook like button could be the single best thing you do to your website this year. There are hundreds of millions of people using facebook today, and over 1.5 million active Facebook users in Ireland, hundreds of thousands using the mobile version on iPhones and Android based phones.

It’s a relatively simple thing to add to a site, you can add it to your homepage or to every page on your site depending on the content management system used.

Once you’ve added it, end users can like or recommend your page, which means that your page will appear on their facebook profile and can even appear on their friends’ walls.  This is a truly viral way of spreading the word about a web page.

The beauty of it is that if a page is likable, it will naturally spread. On slang.ie I added the like button to all slang entries and some entries have received 10s of thousands of likes and shares, significantly increasing traffic to the site.

I recently added a facebook like button to http://www.hartleypeople.com and it has already received many likes from the local community.

A facebook like button should not be confused with a like box.  A like button is a small button that appears  somewhere on a webpage that allows logged in facebook users to like a page. It will also show how many others like that page too.  A facebook like box however shows facebook posts embedded on a webpage.  On the Hartley People site you will see a facebook like button on the top of the content on the home page and on the bottom right you will see a like box.

What’s the difference between a Facebook User, Page and Group

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When I meet a client and they ask me ‘Can I have more than 5000 friends on Facebook?’ it’s horrible to see the look on their faces when I say no to them.

With Facebook if you are likely to reach more than 5000 people you need to set up a page or group.

If you want to promote something that potentially has lots of ‘fans’ or more accurately ‘likes’ then you need to set up a page.  Some good examples here are products, companies, causes, celebrities etc.

The down site with pages is that you cannot message all your subscribers directly.  In order to reach them you must post interesting content that others will like and interact with.  The more interactions the more people will see it.  Should the post be deemed interesting by facebook it will appear on subscribers walls.

With a Groups, you  can message all of your contacts.  With a regular user account you must select members individually to message.  With groups you can message everyone, which is very useful. Groups are very useful for committees and clubs that need to message the entire group through email. Groups are also useful for inviting people to events.

Essentially, everyone needs a personal facebook user account as their control centre.  You can then set up multiple facebook pages and groups depending on your requirements.

My advice is set up a page for your subscribers unless you have the specific requirement to message all of your members on a regular basis.