Social Media Strategies for Startups

WeMakeWebsites’ long term friend and social marketing guru Adele Barlow is speaking this Wednesday on social media strategy and management, specifically for startups. This class will cut through the hype to help you understand how you can realistically and effectively use social media to grow your venture. By outlining common best practices and case studies from startups like airbnb to corporate campaigns like Red Bull and Starbucks, this class will cover:

- The best tools available for management, tracking and analytics
- Understanding your cost-per-acquisition and ROI
- The importance of storytelling and putting your users first
- Evaluating average vs. excellent social presence.

It’s sure to be useful and entertaining too. More details here.

5 things you don’t want to miss this 2012.

Econsultancy.com discussed how our economy, technology industry and marketing will take part in 2012, here’s our summary:

Continued Economy Tech Growth. The Technology industry will continue to grow strongly despite of the uncertainties of global economy and some speculations about the complete fall down of the European market.

New Consumer Internet Trends. Significant 2012 trends include continued increasing connectivity (via mobile phones), more social media influence on news reporting and more easy to use cloud services.

Patent Wars. More and more companies are spending time and effort in strategic patent wars to only become more prominent to consumers.

The Enterprise Cloud. Larry Ellison of Oracle has been pushing his company into the enterprise cloud and SAP are shelling out billions for cloud HR solutions provider, SuccessFactors. Cloud technology will surely grow more in 2012 and targeting enterprise, not just startups.

Online taxes. A much talked-about discussion has been trending over Internet websites that companies are pushing for a nationwide online sales tax law, including Amazon and other retail market websites especially in United States, wherein it is the world’s largest online retail market. This could radically change the rules for online retailers.

Image credit : smallbizbee.com

Revisited: Econsultancy's Mind-blowing Social Media Statistics

Last March 2011, Econsultancy listed 20+ facts about leading social media platforms: Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, Flickr, YouTube and more. Can you roughly guess the statistics after a year? We’ll wait for Econsultancy’s post on the first quarter of 2012.

To us, the most impressive concerned Facebook, here are our favourites from their list:

2010: Facebook has 350 million active users on global basis.
2011: Facebook officially hit the half-billion member mark last year. According to figures from Socialbakers, there are now some 640m Facebook users worldwide.

2010: 50% of active users log into Facebook each day. This means at least 175m users every 24 hours.
2011: Still citing the 50% active rate, using the official 500m figure, this means at least 250m users every 24 hours. This is more than a 40% increase in 12 months.

2010: 65m users access Facebook through mobile-based devices.
2011: It may well be the year of mobile… for Facebook. Facebook users accessing the site through mobile devices now top 200m - an enormous 200% increase in around a twelve-month period.

Finally, on average each Facebook user creates 90 pieces of content each month.

The full post is here.

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