Online Marketing Blog

YouTube Gen C Stats Show Cross-Device Connectivity as Video Giant Reaches 1 Billion Monthly Users

YouTube made two interesting announcements this week, one each on the YouTube Global and Google Agency blogs. In a study of  Generation C multiscreen behavior, Google researchers found:

• 47% of Gen C users interact with YouTube as a destination site by actively searching for videos.
• The amount of time Gen C spends watching YouTube on their smartphones is up 74% from last year, when the number of Gen C viewers who regularly watch YouTube on smartphones caught up to the number of viewers tuning in on their PCs.
• 67% of Gen C watch YouTube on two devices or more, compared to 53% of the general population.

Google Wants You to Understand How Search Works

Google has released an interactive, next-generation infographic to explain how search works. Viewers are guided down the page, with clickable areas to pop-up text explanations of their visual points. The infographic walks readers through crawling and indexing, algorithms and fighting spam (they fight spam 24/7, it proclaims). Behind your simple page of results is a complex system, carefully crafted and tested, to support more than one-hundred billion searches each month, according to Google.

Pinterest Launches Web Analytics to Allow Marketers to See Referrals to Site

Pinterest is rolling out their new web analytics tool. It shows data on how many people have pinned from a site, the number of views each pin has, and how many users have visited a site from Pinterest. The tool is free starting today for companies with a verified Web site, making good on their 2012 promise to businesses to introduce data analytic tools for companies to track Pinterest traffic.

Oprah, Rupert Murdoch Most Influential CEOs in Social Media (or Infographics: This Is How You Do It)

In a brilliant display of content marketing prowess, TopManagementDegrees.com has released a caricature infographic illustrating the 40 CEOs most influential in social media. Oprah tops the list with a Klout score of 92, followed closely by Rupert Murdoch at 91, which just goes to show that social influence is not a popularity contest.

Virgin’s Richard Branson, HDNet’s Mark Cuban, and Jack Dorsey of Square round out the top 5. The top 40 is rife with the usual suspects; tech and marketing CEOs from Twitter, Salesforce, Foursquare, Dell, LinkedIn, etc. One surprising find: Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg failed to break the top 50.

As a business journalist, I looked forward to information from a handful of specific sources each quarter. In fact, my quarterly e-commerce reports would wait until each of these select few companies, from whom I had come to expect great information, released their data. I relied on these sources for fantastic written and visual content our readers appreciated.

Now, when you have journalists and readers actually waiting on and looking forward to your content, isn’t that a massive win for your brand?

This is the power of sequenced content. Your audience comes to expect a certain type of product from you with each new installment. They subscribe to your RSS feed so they won’t miss it. They follow you in social channels to catch that first tweet once it’s released. They absolutely cannot wait to see what you’re coming up with next!

Marketing with infographics is a hit with online marketers this year and as more companies hire designers to artfully represent data in creative and engaging ways, many fall short when it comes to infographic promotion. It’s the old “great content will attract it’s own audience” scenario. As I’ve always said, “Content isn’t great until someone shares it.”

While there are many other smart posts about creating compelling infographics to attract attention, links and traffic, the information on promoting that type of content seems a bit light. If you’ve invested in creating great infographic content and need advice on how to promote, here are a few ideas:

1. Involve credible sources in the data collection and then encourage those sources to help you promote the resulting graphic.

It’s a persistent question: Is social media and networking appropriate for B2B marketing?  There are many ways to answer that question and one of the most engaging is through statistics and information presented as an infographic. My team knows I’m a big fan of using visual assets to persuade and I’ve been a fan of information graphics since XPLANE’s amazing work started appearing in popular business magazines years ago.

Besides using infographics to explain social media in the B2B space, there are a growing number of B2B marketers using infographics in their mix, such as this case study about Cisco.

Here are 5 useful B2B social media marketing infographics that help tell the tale of social media and B2B marketing working together. Click on each image for the large version.