MichalWurm.com » Social Media

Amazing internet statistics marketers should know

Michal Wurm — Mon, 08 Aug 2011 10:01:01 +0000

Why should your business have an active online presence? Here are a few amazing statistics I came across in the past year. These numbers really speak for themselves, don’t you think?

80% of all small businesses use internet to conduct business activities.

Source: OPEN: The Small Business Network

There are over 2 billion videos viewed every single day on YouTube.

That’s nearly double the prime-time audience of all three major US broadcast networks combined.

Source: YouTube / Mashable.com

Average person spends 15 minutes a day on YouTube

Source: YouTube / Mashable.com

There are over 750 million of users on Facebook.

If Facebook was a country it would be the third largest in the world, more than twice the population of entire United States.

Source: Facebook

Offering e-commerce functionality on your web site means it will be percieved as more credible by internet surfers.

Source: WebCredibility.org

77% of all businesses believe that a web presence makes them more competitive.

Source: OPEN: The Small Business Network

More and more consumers are shifting their consumer spending from bricks and mortar stores to online stores.

Source: eMarketer

Small businesses who use the internet have grown 46% faster than those that do not.

Source: American Business City Journals

Small businesses that blog get 55% more website visitors.

Source: HubSpot.com

How to link RSS feeds to Twitter or Facebook

Michal Wurm — Thu, 20 Jan 2011 11:36:12 +0000

Here is a little tip for Twitter and Facebook users. In this post I’ll show you how you can easily setup an RSS feed to post updates automatically to your Twitter account and Facebook pages or profile.

This is very handy if you want to:

Instantly post links to your latest blog posts to Twitter or Facebook without even having to think about it.
or
Setup an RSS feeds to automatically post links to your favourite news sources and blogs whenever they are updated.

Twitterfeed Homepage

If you’re anything like me, you use Twitter not only to connect with people, but also to find new interesting articles and websites that people you follow recommend. By linking an quality RSS feed to your Twitter account, you can “give back” some of that goodness and suggest content to your followers, without having to do anything. It’s all done automatically.

Sure, you should only do this with a quality RSS feed that you are certain your followers will find interesting so you don’t overdo it.

But let’s get to it.

Here is how to link an RSS feed to Twitter or Facebook:

1Go to www.twitterfeed.com

2Create your new account and login

3Create New Feed by clicking the button in top right corner of the screen

4Define your source RSS Feed – enter the name and RSS URL.

Setting up a RSS feed

You can open the advanced options panel to specify frequency, post content, prefix and suffix, as well as a keyword filter.

Here are the options explained further:

Post frequency – specifies how often should twitterfeed look for new updates. You can also limit the number of updates posted at a time.
Post content – defines what will be posted in your updates. Only the post title (with link), Title and Description or Description only. Since Twitter only allows 140 characters in a post, it’s a good idea to limit this to “Title only” when linking an RSS feed to Twitter. If you’re linking the feed to Facebook, you can use the “Title and Description” to give your fans a bit more info about the link.

Twitterfeed Dashboard

Prefix – text that is displayed before the link (ie ”Breaking news” or “Quick tip”).
Suffix – text displayed after the link and title (ie “Source: Mashable”).
Keywords – you can limit the posting to titles containing only specific keywords to minimize the about of updates posted to your profile.

5Go to “Step two” – connect the RSS feed to your services. At the time of writing this article, you can link RSS feeds to Twitter, Facebook, Statusnet and Hellotxt.

6All done. You now have an RSS feed linked to your Twitter or Facebook account and it will post new updates as they come in. You can also check how many people clicked on your links from the Twitterfeed dashboard.

Examples of how I used Twitterfeed service:

Airways Magazine:

Airways Magazine is a great publication about commercial aviation. I setup automatic Twitter updates with industry news from several sources. Now every time new story about aviation breaks out, Airways posts a link to their Twitter account. Their followers love it because they get all the updates from one single source as soon as it is published. Follow @AirwaysMagazine on Twitter.

All About Hawke’s Bay:

All About Hawke’s Bay is a regional website with news and information about Hawke’s Bay, New Zealand for locals and tourists. I helped them setup a Facebook fan page and link local news RSS feed to it. Now all their fans can get local updates straight on Facebook – a website where many users spend most of their online time these days. Visit All About Hawke’s Bay on Facebook

5 Awesome Social Media Infographics

Michal Wurm — Mon, 05 Apr 2010 08:06:39 +0000

Would you like to use social media to work for your business, but struggle to find the right information what social network would be the best starting point for you? Here are five outstanding social media infographics that put the key data into wonderful visualizations to get the message across in easy to understand format.

Thanks to all the respective authors who put these charts together and to Brian Wallace from NowSourcing.com who collected these in his original post here.

1 – Make Social Media Work For Your Business

Here is a great visualization showing what social media strategies are best suited for different sections of your business.

Click here for full size image

2 – Age Distribution on Social Network Sites

Wondering what social network is more likely to be used by your prospects? Pingdom.com put together an excellent users’ age overview by social network:

3 – The Conversation Prism

No social media infographic collection would be complete without Brian Solis’ Conversation Prism:

Click here for full size image

4 – The Boom of Social Sites

Focus.com put together an outstanding visual showing both the size and timeline of social communities:

Click here for full size image

5 -Visualizing 6 Years of Facebook

And last but not least – my favourite infographic celebrating Facebook’s recent 6th anniversary – Muhammad Saleem put together this excellent infographic over at Mashable:

Click here for full size image