Hands down, the most common reason for using social media was “Staying in touch with current friends” as 91% of respondents agreed it was a ‘minor to major’ reason they embraced social media.  Following closely behind were the reasons “staying in touch with family”  and “connecting with old friends you’f lost touch with” with 87% agreement and 86% agreement respectively.

The lowest motivators were “finding dating or romantic partners” and “reading comments by celebrities, athletes, or politicians”.  Only 3% of respondents stated that dating was a ‘major reason’ they joined a social platform, and only 5% said following celebs was a major reason.

Some other interesting facts in the report show that middle aged users tend to see more value in using social media to connect with others around a hobby/interest and that users under the age of 50 see the most value in staying in touch with current friends.  To see more data, view the entire report from Pew Internet.

Other interesting stats?

• People tend to share the most around 9:30 Eastern Time (so we cunningly timed this post for just before that peak moment),
• 75% of clicks on a share will happen within the first day that the content is shared
• Most users click within 2 minutes of a share
• Copy-and-paste to share can be used up to 10 times more than those social sharing buttons out there

More from the infographic:

Want the infographic for yourself? It was posted last month to the AddThis blog, as part of its five year birthday celebration: Happy Birthday AddThis!

The full-size files were provided through the Clearspring Flickr account here (Clearspring owns AddThis).

Most Shared In 2011

AddThis also told us that among the most shared content in 2011 from its tracking were:

• MoveOn’s campaign to get people to all share a status update pushing against big companies and Wall Street greed
• A photo of a dog lying next to the casket of a US Navy Seal who was killed in Afghanistan

Social Sharing “Half-Life” & More Information

If those stats about how short-term sharing seems to be got you thinking, that’s beginning to be referred to as the “half-life” of a share, and we have some past articles with further information:

• Infographic: Half-Life Of Social Media Shares
• Why “Second Chance” Tweets Matter: After 3 Hours, Few Care About Socially Shared Links

Social sharing will also be a big part of Search Engine Land’s upcoming SMX Social Media Marketing conference next month in Arizona, so be sure to check out the full agenda of our event.

Also consider subscribing to our free column related to social media, Search & Social, and see some of the resources we list on our What Is Social Media Marketing page.

Join us December 5-6 in Scottsdale, AZ for an intensive dive into successful social media marketing tactics from leading internet marketing experts. The agenda features laser focused sessions on Facebook, Google+, Twitter, viral marketing and location services.

You’ll have face-to-face speaker access, engaging Q&A and plenty of networking opportunities with all conference constituents. And with a program 100% dedicated to social media, you’ll absorb more proven techniques and strategies than any typical marketing conference, we guarantee it.

Register today and pay just $1145 for 2 days of actionable content, invaluable networking and essential conveniences like free WiFi, breakfasts, lunches and all day snacks and opening night reception. Rates increase next week on November 12, so do it now!

PS: Interested in sending the whole team? You save an additional 10-20% when registering three or more people. Check out our attractive group registration rates.

For example, if we submitted this very post to StumbleUpon Paid Discovery, the best option available might be the ‘marketing’ category:

Without the “interest optimization” feature, this post would only show up in the marketing category.  With this new optimization tool, additional categories will be targeted that are deemed relevant.  Instead of just ‘marketing,’ this post may show up in ‘social media marketing’ or ‘social media ads’ categories that users are unable to target specifically in Paid Discovery.

Don’t want interest optimization in your campaigns?  No problem.  Make sure you are using manual campaigns and then click the “Strictly limit my campaign to only the topics selected below” button and you can bypass interest optimization completely:

This new feature should allow more specific targeting, a wider campaign reach and has already been rolled out for all Paid Discovery users.

Please take the survey here and we’ll share the results when you’re done.

Thanks!

American Social Network Usage

The study revealed that 76% of Americans use social network sites, a higher adoption rate than that of European countries’ 73%. To no surprise, Facebook topped the list of social networking sites with 70% usage in the United States. Some other staggering Facebook stats show that 58% of users also log in daily, and the average Facebook session is 37 minutes. The second most popular U.S. social site is LinkedIn (22% penetration) and Twitter is third (20% penetration). An interesting statistic about Twitter is that while 77% of Americans know about the site, only 20% use it.

European Social Network Usage

While 73% of Europeans engage with at least one social network, 50% choose to only participate on one network. The market split is a bit different in Europe as 62% of Europeans use Facebook, 16% are on Twitter and 12% are active on Vkontakte. Social media is a daily routine to many as 60% of Europeans log into their social accounts every day. Western Europe is lagging behind the rest of Europe with 66% of respondents active on a social network.

Social Media & Brands

The study found that the majority of American and European social media users actually like brands and choose to follow them: 57% of Americans follow at least one brand while 51% of Europeans follow a brand. Globally the numbers are lower. When factoring in all countries, the total number of respondents following a brand worldwide drops to 50%. The users who follow a brand don’t just listen, 42% have had a conversation with a brand on a social network.

Resistance To New Networks

One surprising fact in the report was the fact that 60% of respondents don’t want to partake in new social networks. Of the polled respondents, 93% are happy with the current networks they are active in. A penetration chart highlighting user intent also backs these facts up. The chart displays user intent about joining networks; the smaller the network, the less willing the respondents were to join. InSites Consulting concluded that “Big social networks will get bigger and small ones will get smaller.”

Employees & Social Media

Survey results showed that employed social media users typically have a positive feeling about their company. Of those polled (that were employed), 61% of are proud of the company they work for. Not only are users proud, but 19% talk about their company on social media. Again Americans led the way with 63% of respondents sporting positive feelings toward employers while Europeans are just behind with 61%.

In contrast, while many respondents have positive feelings toward their employer, only 4 out of 10 like their employers’ attitude toward social media. One main reason for this low number may be the fact that 33% of respondents could not access social media at work.

The full report can be seen here:

Attend SMX Social Media Marketing December 5-6 in Scottsdale, AZ and get expert insights and real-world-proven tactics that yield results instantly…and continue delivering for months and years to come. Register now and pay only $995 for 2 days of exceptional content and invaluable networking.

The SMX Social Media Marketing agenda features laser focused sessions on Facebook, Google, Twitter, viral marketing and location services. And we’ll tackle how to maximize your results and your resources with sessions on analytics/conversions and cross platform automation tools.

SMX Social Media Marketing is programmed by Search Engine Land editor-in-chief Danny Sullivan and executive editor Chris Sherman. They have been covering internet and search marketing for over a decade, and organizing events on those topics for marketers nearly as long. We’re so confident you’ll be satisfied with your investment in SMX, we guarantee it.

Register by October 8th and get the lowest rates offered. All Access pass are priced at just $995, and include two days of sessions, networking activities, and SMX conveniences like hot lunches, all day snacks and free WiFi.

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Want to send you team? Check out our group rates and save 10%-20% off Super Early Bird rates!

Register for SMX Social Media Marketing now and you’ll get the lowest available Super Early Bird rate, $500 off on-site registration! Register right now! Or keep reading to learn more.

What can you expect at SMX Social Media Marketing?

• Content You’ll Act On: You’ll leave SMX Social Media Marketing with actionable tactics and best practices to maximize your social media marketing efforts.
• Qualified Speakers: SMX Social Media Marketing speakers are selected based on ability AND willingness to share the tips and strategies that made them successful. Presenters routinely summarize key takeaways and provide their presentations, so you’ll get the most out of sessions. Our unbiased selection process means you’ll see a mix of recognizable internet marketing experts and the industry’s rising stars.
• Many Viewpoints: Marketing is science and art. Many SMX sessions feature several presenters, so you’ll get a variety of views. You’ll also get answers to your questions in extended Q&A and discussion periods.
• Satisfaction Guarantee: Delivering quality programming is our number one priority. You’ll be satisfied with the SMX Social Media Marketing experience. We guarantee it.

Why Register Today?

Get it all for just $995! You’ll get two days of tactic-rich content, indispensable industry connections, and a productive and comfortable venue featuring hot lunches, all day snacks and beverages, and free WiFi.

Register before October 8th to qualify for Super Early Bird rates, the lowest available for SMX Social Media Marketing.

Want to send your team? Save 10-20% with our Group Registration packs.

What Social Media Analytics Includes … And Excludes

The purpose of social media is to interact with people, thus building relationships. From a business perspective, there are many reasons to do that, chiefly that people buy from people they know and like and because it opens opportunities – hence social “networking” – you’re getting the same benefits as networking, just online. (That’s the ROI on social media.)

If we manage and optimize our use of social media, we need to measure results.

Q: What should we measure?

A: The paradigm for how social analytics should measure relationships is described in The 7 Habits Of Highly Effective Teens; relationships are bank accounts whose balances change as we interact with others. By tracking our interactions, we can understand what our bank balance is.

Q: What might that look like?

A: Aldon Hynes did a good job articulating what information social media analytics should give users:

“I want to know when I’ve actually contacted someone in my online social media meta network. When did I last sent them a tweet, retweet something they wrote, write on their Facebook wall, send them a message or give them a call? Whom haven’t I contacted recently that I really should contact? Do I have other notes about them that are important? Who are their friends and relatives online? When are their birthdays? How do they fit into whatever my goals are in using social networks?

“To push it even more, I would like to add information such as whether I’ve visited or commented on their blog recently, or whether they’ve shown up on my blog, as noted by tools like dropping EntreCards, or showing up in recent readers lists like those provided by MyBlogLog or BlogCatalog.”

The following are a sample of tools currently on the market for social media analytics, which get at this kind of functionality.*

These tools measure your interactions with contacts on social media. The value in using them is that you can tell at a glance how strong your relationship is, and take action to strengthen it or ask for their help, accordingly.

Buzzstream

Provides two versions of its tool: originally a link building CRM (Customer Relationship Management tool), the company now also offers a social media CRM.

Buzzstream's contact profile view shows and allows editing of tasks, contact info, notes and history.

Both versions of the tool integrate with your email and Twitter accounts.

Under the heading “IMAP” on the settings page you can connect your email to Buzzstream. BuzzStream will then automatically associate new emails with your contact records, updated hourly. As well, it currently retrieves emails with any contacts going back 14 days.

Alternately, by BCC’ing a Buzzstream email address unique to your Buzzstream account, your email with a contact is directly imported into that contact’s history in Buzzstream.

With regards to Twitter, just add your account and your contacts’ accounts into their profiles on Buzzstream and your relationship’s tweets will automatically be imported to Buzzstream from then onwards. It should be noted that previous conversations aren’t imported.

Buzzstream History View shows tweets and email (not shown) from both parties, as opposed to just your own messages, but only from the moment of adding a contact onwards.

A related function is the auto-discovery of contact information by crawling contacts’ sites, once imported.

Finally, Buzzstream offers the ability to add notes to a contact, which means you can keep track [albeit manually] of offline interactions, phone calls and social networks not tracked by Buzzstream.

Starts at $19/month. 

Pros:

• Integrates link building metrics and buzz measurement tools.
• Shows both sides of a conversation so you tell what your contacts said and make sense of your response.
• Scrapes sites for contact information which helps build richer profiles.

Cons:

• As of now, no automated contact import from email or social media – requires more data entry.
• Limited to Twitter for now; no support for other social networks.

ConnectedHQ

It’s interesting that ConnectedHQ doesn’t describe itself as a CRM tool, but as a contact manager.

Connected HQ - Contact View shows interaction history for a quick overview of the most recent interaction.

Accordingly, ConnectedHQ brings together all your contacts into one system, integrating with Gmail, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Outlook Contacts, Mac Address Book, Google Contacts, Google Calendar, Google Voice and Evernote.

ConnectedHQ auto-imports contacts, including your history with them and also imports and displays their recent Tweets, immediately. Over the next few days, the service imports the history of your relationship going back about 18 months.

One feature I’m particularly appreciative of is that Connected sends me weekly emails (ironically called the Connected Daily) with tips on who’s changed jobs, based on LinkedIn information. This is like birthday notifications in Facebook – it enables you to make a little investment in the given relationship.

Starts at $10/month. 

Pros:

• Auto-import is a huge time saver.
• Sync between email and social media profiles is another big time saver and quite useful.
• Full contact histories.
• Integrates with multiple social networks including Facebook and LinkedIn.

Cons:

• Only shows your own messages to a contact, which is like watching a sitcom where half the dialogue is muted out.
• Doesn’t integrate SEO metrics or other tools.

Related Tools

The following tools also show you contact information while you’re logged into Gmail, which helps craft better emails and perhaps refresh your memory where the relationship is at. But they’re more neat assistants to building relationships than social media analytics tools.

Rapportive

“Rapportive shows you everything about your contacts right inside your inbox.”

You can immediately see what people look like, where they’re based, and what they do. You can establish rapport by mentioning shared interests. You can grow your network by connecting on LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook and more. And you can record thoughts for later by leaving notes.

They also recently integrated with Aweber and have a MailChimp integration, which helps email marketers know about the person who they’re replying to, what lists they’re on, and other info that may be in your email marketing software.

Starts at free.  

CureCRM

CureCRM’s Magnify for Gmail does roughly the same. In their words:

“Need to create Salesforce Leads or Contacts from Gmail? CureCRM has a solution for Gmail and Google Apps email to show recent sales conversations and optionally create Contact entries as you send your sales emails.

“View social data from Gravatar, LinkedIn, Facebook, etc as you navigate Gmail. “View conversation history with your sales customers.”

Starts at free. 

Finally, here are three rejected possibilities for social media analytics.

1. Since FriendFeed aggregates our social media lives into one site, shouldn’t that be enough?

No, FriendFeed is sadly insufficient. While the site makes it easy to find content friends are enjoying, and thus, might be a meta-index of social media links to rival in quality the [non-social] web’s link index – FriendFeed doesn’t organize the data by contact, an essential feature if you’re to measure any given relationship.

2. Can you do-it-yourself and create your own a dashboard? Sites like DoshDosh (no longer online) have suggested organizing blogs’ RSS subscriptions into folders according to the quality of a relationship, and then interacting with a blogger accordingly.

But this moderately useful technique is limited to interacting with bloggers (as opposed to non-bloggers who tweet, facebook etc) and requires complementary or manual tracking. Creating Facebook and Twitter lists according to relationship may be helpful, but they’ll always be limited to very recent timeframes.

3. Gist from Blackberry and CoTweet from Exact Target integrate with Twitter and have been touted in some blog posts for purposes similar to ours, but they don’t let you see tweets by relationship, instead showing you a contact’s latest tweets. That’s basic functionality lacking for a social media analytics tool.

Conclusion

The field is still in its infancy, but already the tools are making big strides towards showing the current status of the relationship and doing so across multiple communication methods.

In the future, I hope that we’ll see greater use of automated contact imports, and wider integrations with older social media networks like Digg and StumbleUpon (useful for linkbaiters).

Perhaps we’ll even see tie-ins with instant messaging systems and VOIP (ex. Skype). Some status bars on overall relationship health (think PageRank bar but indicative of frequency/quality of interactions) would be very useful, as would the ability to group contacts.

From my personal experience, both companies (Buzzstream and ConnectedHQ) are very receptive to feedback and are frequently tweaking and improving their services. So if you’re interested in particular features and in helping shape the future of social media analytics, go ahead and reach out to them!

Footnote:

*I’ve deliberately ignored social media buzztracking tools because they measure brand awareness, and while brands are the collective relationship the public has with a company, my focus and interest here is in tools that measure 1-on-1 relationships, not a collective average. The tools in this article measure relationships as they’ve been built to this point, and as they’re built into the future.

Also excluded is a new sort of Facebook fanpage analytics tool, currently under development by BlitzLocal. It shows the percentage of people interacting with wall posts and related time-based metrics, as well as fans’ most common interests, which helps target further Facebook ad buys to grow the fan base even more.

The functionality is related to relationship building and does measure social media, but it’s not on a 1-to-1 scale like the above tools and provides specialized functionality placing it in a separate category.

Attend SMX Social Media Marketing, a two-day, tactic-rich conference that tackles key social media marketing issues. Register by October 8th and save with Super Early Bird rates, the lowest offered.

Sessions will cover both free and paid marketing strategies across multiple platforms including Facebook, Twitter, Google+, LinkedIn and more. We’ll dive deep into best practices for driving traffic, analyzing results and fine tuning conversions.

SMX Social Media Marketing is programmed by Search Engine Land editor-in-chief Danny Sullivan and executive editor Chris Sherman. They have been covering internet and search marketing for over a decade, and organizing events on those topics for marketers nearly as long. We’re confident you’ll value the SMX Social Media Marketing experience; we guarantee it!

SMX Social Media Marketing will be held at the Westin Kierland Resort & Spa in Scottsdale, AZ, an AAA Diamond resort featuring 27 holes of golf, a full-service spa, a water park, and easy walking access to dining, entertainment and upscale shopping. It’s the perfect location for learning and networking!

Register by October 8 for Lowest Rates

Super early bird rates are now available for SMX Social Media Marketing. Register by October 8th and you’ll pay only $995 for your two-day All Access pass which includes access to all sessions, networking events, breakfast and lunches, and other SMX conveniences such as free WiFi in session rooms.

Get the most out of social media networks, whether you’re tasked with driving organic traffic, managing paid campaigns, or overseeing your company’s brand with online reputation management and customer service. Register today!