We will regularly update this page with research applicable to Reputation Management.
These are great to use when selling Reputation Management to your clients.
General Social Media Facts
Facebook, Blogspot followed by Myspace are the top sites visited by under 18s. [November 2010, Social Media Today]
An average user becomes a fan of 2 pages every month. [November 2010, Social Media Today]
25% of search results for the world’s top 20 brands are linked to user-generated content. [November 2010, Social Media Today]
In a sample survey of 2884 people across 14 countries,72% of participants of the internet population are active on at least 1 networking sites. [November 2010, Online Media Gazette]
In a sample survey of 2884 people across 14 countries, on an average, users log in twice a day to social networking sites and 9 times a month on professional websites. [November 2010, Online Media Gazette]
The popularity of social media is undeniable – three of the world’s most popular brands online are social-media related (Facebook, YouTube and Wikipedia) and the world now spends over 110 billion minutes on social networks and blog sites. This equates to 22 percent of all time online or one in every four and half minutes. For the first time ever, social network or blog sites are visited by three quarters of global consumers who go online, after the numbers of people visiting these sites increased by 24% over last year. The average visitor spends 66% more time on these sites than a year ago, almost 6 hours in April 2010 versus 3 hours, 31 minutes last year. [June 2010, Nielsen Wire]
46% of social media users have recommended or talked about a product or brand on Facebook and 44% have done the same on Twitter. [November 2009, Adweek]
Brands w/ highest “social media activity” (includes reviews) increased revenues by as much as 18%. [July 2009. Media Post News]
Specifically, 55.6 million adults – or just less than 1/3rd of the population – in the US now visit social networks at least monthly. [July 2009, Mashable]
Demographics of people engaging in social media – [image]
Social Media Advertising
In terms of the impact of social networks on advertising, word of mouth is the popular option with 78% of customers trust peer recommendations on sites. While, only 14% trust advertisements. [November 2010, Social Media Today]
Mobile
Mobile devices are used by 32% of consumers to browse or research products or services at least once a month.
[March 2010, ATG]
15% of consumers are completing transactions with their mobile devices monthly. [March 2010, ATG]
More people are using the mobile web to socialize (91%) compared to the 79% of desktop users who do the same. It appears that the mobile phone is actually a better platform for social networking than the PC.” [February 2010, Ruder Fin via Read Write Web]
Social media spending will leap by 34% by 2014, while mobile marketing will jump by 27%. [April 2009, Forrester Research)
Mobile user-generated content will generate $5.7 billion worldwide in 2012, up from $576 million in 2007. [October 2008, "Mobile Social Networking: Opportunities & Forecasts 2008-2013," Juniper Research]
Facebook Facts
50% of our active users log on to Facebook in any given day. [June 2011, Facebook Press Office]
Average user has 130 friends. [June 2011, Facebook Press Office]
People spend over 700 billion minutes per month on Facebook. [June 2011, Facebook Press Office]
Facebook has over 500 million users. [June 2011, Facebook Press Office]
If Facebook were a country, it would be the world’s 3rd largest country. [June 2011, Facebook Press Office]
An average Facebook user spends about 55 minutes a day on the site. [June 2011, Facebook Press Office]
Average user is connected to 80 community pages, groups and events. [June 2011, Facebook Press Office]
Average user creates 90 pieces of content each month. [June2011, Facebook Press Office]
More than 30 billion pieces of content (web links, news stories, blog posts, notes, photo albums, etc.) shared each month. [June 2011, Facebook Press Office]
More than 2.5 million websites have integrated with Facebook, including over 80 of comScore’s U.S. Top 100 websites and over half of comScore’s Global Top 100 websites. [June 2011, Facebook Press Office]
There are over 250 million active users accessing Facebook currently through their mobile devices. [June 2011, Facebook Press Office]
YouTube Facts
More than 13 million hours of video were uploaded during 2010 and 35 hours of video are uploaded every minute. [June 2011, YouTube Press Room]
70% of YouTube traffic comes from outside the US. [June 2011,YouTube Press Room]
YouTube is localized in 25 countries across 43 languages. [June 2011,YouTube Press Room]
YouTube’s demographic is broad: 18-54 years old. [June 2011,YouTube Press Room]
YouTube reached over 700 billion playbacks in 2010. [June 2011,YouTube Press Room]
YouTube mobile gets over 100 million views a day. [June 2011,YouTube Press Room]
The YouTube player is embedded across tens of millions of websites. [June 2011,YouTube Press Room]
Blogger Facts
There are over 181 million blogs. [November 2010, Social Media Today]
34% of bloggers post opinions about products and brands. [November 2010, Social Media Today]
The age group for 60% of bloggers is 18-44 years. [October 2009, Technorati’s State of the Blogosphere]
One in five bloggers updates their blogs every day. [October 2009, Technorati’s State of the Blogosphere]
Corporate blogging accounts for 14% of blogs. [October 2009, Technorati’s State of the Blogosphere]
Tweet Facts
There are 460,000 new sign-ups daily. [June 2011, Twitter.com]
155,000,000 Tweets per day. [June 2011, Twitter.com]
There are more than 200,000,000+ registered users. [June2011, Twitter.com]
54% of bloggers post content or tweet on a daily basis. [November 2010, Social Media Today]
80% of Twitter users use Twitter on mobile devices. [November 2010, Social Media Today]
There have been over 50 million tweets in 2010. [November 2010, Social Media Today]
LinkedIn Facts
80% companies use LinkedIn as a recruitment tool. [March 2011, LinkedIn.com]
Every second a new member joins LinkedIn. [March 2011, LinkedIn.com]
Almost 12 million unique visitors visit LinkedIn every day. [March 2011, LinkedIn.com]
LinkedIn has executives from all Fortune 500 companies. [March 2011, LinkedIn.com]
1-in-20 LinkedIn profiles are accounted by recruiter. [March 2011, LinkedIn.com]
Foursquare Facts
Has over 8 million users worldwide, adding around 35,000 new users each day. [April 2011, Foursquare.com]
Check-ins per day are over 2.5 million, with over half a billion check-ins in the last year. [April 2011, Foursquare.com]
Foursquare passed the 3 million users milestone in August 2010. [August 2010, Crunchbase]
Foursquare is growing 75% faster than Gowalla each day. [July 2010, Techcruch]
Local Search
70% of people have used the internet to find a local business in the last 12 months. [November 2010, Brightlocal.com]
Having used the internet once to find a business, most local consumers go on to use it more frequently. [Brightlocal.com, 2010]
Younger consumers use the internet more frequently to find local businesses than older consumers;
- 29% of people aged 55+ have never used internet to find a local business;
- 11% of people aged 16-34 use the internet almost every day to find a local business. [November 2010, Brightlocal.com]
SEO Importance
Cliick through traffic based upon the position that a page receives when entered into a search engine :
- The first ranking position in the search results receives 42.25% of all click-through traffic
- The second position receives 11.94%
- Third position on the first page obtains 8.47%
- The first ten results (page one ) received 89.71% of all click-through traffic. [July 2010, Jeff Bullas Blog]
More than 4 million business listings on Google have been claimed by business owners (using the Local Business Center, now Google Places). [April 2010, Fathom Online Marketing]
Google has nearly 50 million Place Pages covering all types of places ranging from businesses to parks. [April 2010, Fathom Online Marketing]
Google Place Pages are viewed millions of times each day. [April 2010, Fathom Online Marketing]
According to Google, 20 percent of all searches are related to location (have local intent). 14.3 billion searches were conducted through Google in March 2010, this means nearly 3 billion Google search queries contained local terms. [March 2010, comScore]
Nearly two-thirds of consumers (61%) use search engines to help them in their product research decisions leading up to purchase. [July 2009, Econsultancy]
Review Sites
84% of consumers say online customer reviews influence their decision to purchase a product or service. [November 2010, Brightlocal.com]
78% of people surveyed in a recent poll said they believe it is very important to look up information about people and/or businesses online before deciding to interact or do business with them. [December 2010, Marketing Pilgrim]
Over 60% of local searchers find ratings and reviews to be important. More specifically, 78% of social networkers and 71% of mobile users consider ratings and reviews extremely important. [December 2010, SearchPerspective]
The minimum number of online reviews for a local business to have is between 6-10 reviews. However the more reviews a business has the more trust a web user can place in the reputation of that business. Businesses with 50 or more reviews earn the trust of 29% more consumers than a business that has 6-10 reviews, but a business with 6-10 reviews has the trust of 71% of consumers.[November 2010, Brightlocal.com]
67% of local consumers have consulted online customer reviews of local businesses. [November 2010, Brightlocal.com]
58% of consumers trust a local business more having read positive online reviews. And 69% of local consumers trust online reviews as much as personal recommendations.[November 2010, Brightlocal.com]
The main business types which people read reviews for are Restaurants/Cafes, Hotels/B&Bs, Pubs/Bars. [November 2010, Brightlocal.com]
84% of consumers said they were more likely to check online for reviews prior to making a purchase compared to twelve months ago, according to a recent survey by Brand Reputation. (October 2009, Retail Bulletin)
A great article on how bad reviews can be good for business if you respond correctly: The Positives of Negative Review [January 2007, iMedia Connection]
Demographics of people using review sites
Volume of activity on Review sites
Yelp has over 50 million unique visitors a month. Yelpers have written more than 18 million reviews to date. [March 2010, Yelp.com]
There were nearly 116 million US user-generated content consumers in 2008, along with 82.5 million content creators. Both numbers are set to climb significantly by 2013. [January 2009, eMarketer]
The number of user-generated content creators will reach 114.5 million in 2013, up from 82.5 million in 2008. That will translate to 51.8% of US Internet users in 2013, up from 42.8% in 2008. [January 2009, eMarketer]
Review Sites and Purchasing Behaviour
By 2014, 53% of total retail sales will be affected by the Web (online and Web-influenced), as consumers increasingly use the Internet to research products before purchasing. [March 2010, Forrester Research]
90% of consumers online trust recommendations from people they know; 70% trust opinions of unknown users. [July 2009, Econsultancy]
By 2013, nearly 155 million US Internet users will consume some form of user-created content, up from almost 116 million in 2008. [January 2009, eMarketer]
Review Sites and Branding
82% of consumers in the U.S. said they’ve stopped doing business with a company due to a poor customer service experience. [October 2010, TechCrunch]
Almost everybody surveyed, a full 95%, said after a bad customer experience they would “take action.” 79% of U.S. consumers said they blabbed about their negative customer experiences in public and amongst friends. Of consumers who took to social media sites including Facebook and Twitter to publicly air a complaint, 58% expected a response from the company, 42% expected a response from a company within a day, but only 22% said they’d actually gotten a response as a result of griping there. [October 2010, TechCrunch]
74% said “After interacting with companies or brands via new media, I generally have a more positive impression of the company or brand.” [October 2009, Consumers Demand Brand Interaction]
By 2020, 84% of marketers agree that building customer trust will become marketing’s primary objective, and 82% agree that collaboration with customers will prevail over marketing. [April 2008, 1to1 Media survey of the 1to1 Xchange panel]
YP categories that have the most ratings and reviews
From Yelp.com
