SMBs Allocate More Budget to Social Than Other Channels – BIA/Kelsey’s new study shows that small and medium businesses now use social more than any other media platform for business purposes. ClickZ
A Quarter of U.S. Teens use Twitter’s Vine [STUDY] – One in four (25 percent) of teenagers in the United States use Vine, Twitter’s short video sharing social network, reveals new data from GlobalWebIndex. AllTwitter
Pinterest and Instagram are Strongly Associated with Smartphone Addiction – A study from Baylor University on smartphone addiction found that certain activities — notably Pinterest and Instagram — “are associated significantly with cellphone addiction.” Interestingly, Internet use and gaming were not associated with addiction. SocialTimes
YouTube Converts More Customers Than All Other Social Networks [STUDY] – VentureBeat reports that, when it comes to paid advertising on social media platforms, YouTube is king. Search Engine Journal
Pinterest to Let Brands Target Their Existing Customers With Ads – Pinterest’s advertising product is only a few months old, but the social network isn’t wasting any time in trying to catch up to Facebook’s and Twitter’s more sophisticated ad businesses. AdAge
Organic Search Drives 51% of Traffic to Websites [Study] – SEO platform provider BrightEdge recently released a report showing the majority of websites studied within its Data Cube data set showed organic traffic was the largest source of traffic over paid search and social media across the sectors studied. Search Engine Watch
79% of Marketers Say Social Media is the Most Effective Channel for B2B [STUDY] – Almost four in five marketers believe that social media is the most effective channel for business to business brands, reveals a new study. AllTwitter
YouTube’s New Real-Time Analytics Offers Minute-By-Minute Video View Count – YouTube announced a major upgrade to its analytics dashboard that will provide video publishers a minute-by-minute look at how many people are watching their videos. Marketing Land
Study: Facebook Ads Outpacing Organic For Conversions – As more companies realize that advertising on Facebook is a necessity to reach fans and customers, a new study shows that ads play a huge role in gaining conversions through the social network. AllFacebook
Google Structured Snippets Officially Live In Search Results – Earlier this month, we caught Google testing a form of knowledge graph data within the search results snippet. This feature is now officially being confirmed by Google on the Google Research Blog. Search Engine Land
Facebook News Feed FYI: Showing More Timely Stories from Friends and Pages – Facebook has updated their news feed to show more timely stories and content being shared right now. How will this change how brands post? Facebook
YouTube Drives More Sales Than Other Social Media Platforms [Study] – A recent study of paid social media finds that YouTube is more effective at both introducing customers to products and converting sales than any other social platform. ClickZ
From our Online Marketing Community:
From 31 Predictions on the Future of B2B Marketing, Kostas Chiotis shared, “hanks Lee, A great collection of experts sharing their advice. I think I have to go with Ann Handley’s comments about the length of posts. Internet browsers have always been thought of as lazy and they would not scan through a long article, but now there is a definite shift towards longer content – providing that it is useful of course!”
In response to How to Get Executive Buy-In for Your B2B Influencer Marketing Program, Jack Holt said, “One tip I do have that’s worked wonders for our customers – segmenting your influencers and pushing the right kind of content for where their audience is in the buying cycle. We’re seeing b2b as a potential major segment of influencer marketing – they just “get it”. And yet, I see them less prepared internally to deal with influencer marketing as well as less amenable to an agency manager. All things to work on, which makes it more and more exciting for us.”
And Gary Preston commented “Great article Brooke. Surely one of the easiest ways to build and ROI case for influencer marketing is to align it to a business case for improved organic search positions and therefore leads / sales that will result from a strategically sound influencer campaign? In all my years of experience on big brand authentic SEO projects they all rely heavily on influencer marketing in some shape or form. The one consistent is the revenue potential model that is built right at the start that can help to size the level of investment that goes into influencer marketing.”
What were the top online and digital marketing news stories for you this week?
Thanks for reading and have a great weekend!
Infographic: ClickZ
