Social sharing drives eCommerce sales, but all shares are not created equally.

Email still leads the way, and by some distance, with the average email share especially valuable as it’s almost always a one-to-one forward (from one friend directly to another), and leads to an average dollar conversation rate of eight times that of Facebook, and more than ten times that of Twitter.

Read more

Would you like to have 10,000 followers on Twitter? New followers?

I mean, who wouldn’t, right? Imagine what you could do with that pick-up. But what if I gave you a choice. What if I said that you could 10,000 new, relevant, fresh-off-the-presses Twitter followers… or a new car?

What would you choose then?

Read more

If you’re a financial professional, which social network do you reach for when you’re looking for the latest news and information in your space?

Perhaps unsurprisingly it’s LinkedIn, according to a new survey, which found that social media has an overall penetration rate of 90 percent amongst financial pros, and LinkedIn is used by one-third (33 percent) of this group for business purposes.

Twitter finished second in the business use poll, but commanded only a 3 percent usage rate, ahead of Facebook and blogs (both 2 percent).

Read more

Who on earth uses Google+?

Well, travellers, it appears, according to one study.

Read more

A new study has revealed how Twitter helps people stay in contact with friends, family and colleagues irrespective of where they are around the world.

Indeed, the further any two users are apart, the more likely it is that they will communicate with each other on a regular basis through Twitter.

Read more

New data has revealed that while Facebook still commands the lion’s share of the worldwide social sign-in space, it’s Google that has made the biggest gains over the past year, largely at Twitter’s expense.

While Facebook had a 54 percent share of all social sign-in buttons across websites in Q3 of 2012, it’s dipped back down to less than half (46 percent) in Q1 of 2013, reports Janrain in their April 2013 report.

Read more

When you’re fortunate enough to find yourself on vacation, how do you tell others about your trip?

Facebook? Text message? Skype?

Or perhaps you’d rather keep it to yourself. All of these options are, of course, popular (in varying degrees) in these heady days of 2013, but what about the good, old-fashioned postcard, that bastion of holiday communication since, well, 1840, according to Wikipedia?*

Read more

So you want a Twitter Profile for your business? And maybe a Facebook Page, too. Perhaps you’re thinking about doing something on Pinterest. And you keep hearing all this good stuff about Instagram.

So you set all of these up. Done. Finished. Ready. Good to go.

Now what? How do you go about actually engaging your audience?

Read more

Former British Prime Minster Margaret Thatcher, a polarising figure if ever there was one, died on April 8th, 2013, and last week we looked at interesting data that revealed that more than four in ten comments made on social media about Thatcher’s passing were negative.

Yesterday was the ex-PM’s state funeral, and both Twitter and Facebook were consumed by the public’s reaction to the day, which was rumoured to have cost a reported £10 million – a figure that many found unacceptable. Indeed, one study has suggested that almost two-thirds of all comments made on Twitter and Facebook about Thatcher’s funeral were negative.

Read more

Did you know that Twitter is the business to business (B2B) social media platform of choice, favoured by 85 percent of B2B brands, ahead of LinkedIn (82 percent), YouTube (77 percent) and Facebook (71 percent)?

These are the latest findings from B2B Marketing in their 2013 Social Media Benchmarking Report, which noted that while driving traffic to their website was the primary goal for B2B marketers using social media, almost two-thirds (61 percent) described their social marketing strategy as “ad-hoc”.

Read more