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welcome to
our world...

social
engagement
Creating the Buzz...

www.redant.co.uk
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Social Engagement - Creating the Buzz... www.redant.co.uk

Why Become Social

Like many trends in the Internet sphere, social networking has surrounded itself in hyperbole, wild
claims and more than just a pinch of oblique technical terms. From initial inception it has been the
realm of geeks and technophiles and has been seen by business at best as a toy and at worst a
productivity destroying menace. Through increasing maturity of social networking tools and adoption
by wider non-geek audiences, it is now likely that your client base is socially networked in some form,
is spending more time in these social environments than any level of engagement you can achieve
directly through your website or broadcast e-mail and is learning about competitors/alternate services
through these tools and through linked “friends” that share a common interest.

Social Engagement encourages the promotion of brands and services through social networking
tools. In its most basic form Social Engagement pushes the persona of your company and/or brand
directly in-front of your target audience in the places where they are currently visiting online, rather
than forcing all digital traffic through the single channel of your website. However, Social
Engagement of your company/brand should push further into the consciousness of your audience
and become not just a booming authoritarian voice, but rather the ears to listen to your audience
and to engage in open discussion with your audience. By engaging with your audience and
encouraging participation and promotion of your company/brand the engagement with your
audience is both prolonged from minutes (normal time spent on any website from e-mail campaign),
to days, months and potentially (since this is a young environment), years.

Social networking tools are plentiful and hopefully the remainder of this report will allow you to
identify those that best suit your audience and the next steps you should be taking to further your
company/brand through Social Engagement.

Social network sites such as Facebook and MySpace are

now more popular than personal e-mail...

The Nielsen survey of users' habits found that 67% of all those going online were spending time at
social network and blogging sites.

In the UK one in every six minutes of the average web user is spent at a social site, it found.

"Social networking has become a fundamental part of the global online experience," said John
Burbank, chief executive of Nielsen Online; he continues "Social networking will continue to alter not
just the global online landscape, but the consumer experience at large...".

Nielsen measures interest in categories by the percentage of the web audience that regularly visit

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such sites. The latest statistics suggest that 65.1% of web users use web e-mail but 66.8% are turning
up at social network sites.

This means, said Nielsen, that about one in every 11 minutes a web user is online is spent at one of
the sites Nielsen counts in its "Member Communities" category which includes both blogs and social
network sites.

Of these sites, Facebook has highest average time per user, found Nielsen.

The researchers also found that social networking sites are managing to reach a very broad swathe of
web users. The fastest growing segment of users turning up and using social sites over the last year
was among 35-49 year olds.

In particular, the report noted, almost a quarter of Facebook's users were known to be over 50 years
old.

More and more people want to get at their favourite social network site and update via mobile,
found Nielsen. In the UK the numbers of Britons looking at a social site via their phone was up 249%,
helped no doubt by native Twitter clients.

Facebook

Currently the most engaging social network, Facebook, has seen large growth in alternate
online demographics for social networking with a more mature user base.

Country Age Range Active Users

UK 18-30 9,722,100
Sweden 18-30 1,190,400
Germany 18-30 1,047,260
Total 11,959,760

Spain 18-25 1,115,780

Italy 18-25 2,858,820
Germany 18-25 3,892,360
Total 7,866,960

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The UK Landscape: Dec 08 (ComScore)

Facebook is a major player in the UK online market: Users and Engagement

Note: Size of bubble represents total time monthly (UK)

Google:
16 • 85% reach of internet
• 2bn Total Monthly Mins
• Average 12 days per visitor/month
14 Facebook:
• 55% reach of internet
• 5bn Total Monthly Mins
12 Facebook
Average usage days per visitor

• Average 9 days per visitor/month

10 Google.co.uk
MSN.co.uk
8
Yahoo
AOL.co.uk
6
BBC.co.uk
4 Bebo
Sky MySpace Ebay
2
ASK
ITV.com
0
0 10 20 30 40 50 60 70 80 90

Reach (%)

Myspace
Myspace is still number one among a broad collection of international networks with a 32% weekly
reach. Its position has been maintained by its focus on music and commercial content, rather than
connecting friends.
300 million accounts
110 million monthly active users
In the UK it is as common to have a MySpace page as it is a dog
14 Billion comments on the site
20 Billion mails on the site total
50 Million mails per day (more than Yahoo, Hotmail,or Google)
10 Billion friend relationships
1.5 Billion images
8 Million images being uploaded per day
60,000 new videos being upload to MySpaceTV each day
More than 8 million artists and bands on MySpace Music

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Bebo
Constituted primarily of teenagers and young adults Bebo concentrates its efforts at this youth
market offering games, quizzes mixed in with gossip and music.
2nd largest social network in the U.K. (its largest market) after Facebook.
22 million unique visitors
11 billion page views
Feb 2008: 22.9 million unique visitors and 10.3 billion pageviews (per comScore)
Users spend an average of 40 minutes a day on the site
The company claims 40 million users.
In February 2007, Bebo received 2.25 million unique visitors in the US
Bought by AOL for $850 million in March 2008.

Orange mobile stats for social networking :

Orange users access a staggering 166 million pages of social networking websites on their mobiles
every month.

Twitter
Twitter recently acquired main stream press in the US from its adoption by Barack Obama during the
presidential elections; in the UK its chief advocate is Stephen Fry. Twitter concentrates on dialogue
through micro-blogging (posts of 140 characters or less), that are accessible publicly, or through the
users social network. You can follow us on Twitter at http://twitter.com/red_ant
3 million confirmed users September 2008
8 million estimated users January 2009
Open APIs and 3rd party tools
Open search results and landing pages

Social Bookmarking
Social Bookmarking allows people to bookmark web pages of interest and place tags (meta-data),
against the web page for categorisation. The more people that bookmark the page the greater the
prominence that web page is given in onsite searches and suggestions. Examples of Social
Bookmarking services are:
Delicious
Digg
Furl
Newsvine
Reddit
StumbleUpon
Windows Live Favorites

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Simple Steps to Social Engagement

To build a full programme of Social Engagement is a time consuming and potentially costly task.
However there are some simple steps that you can undertake to start your company/brand
promotion in the social networking sphere.

Social Ring Fencing

In the same way that you would normally register various variants of your company internet domain
name to avoid competitors purchasing them and driving traffic to their sites, it is good practice to
stake your company/brand presence online with the major social tools. Creating company/brand
tied accounts in social tools such as Bebo, Facebook, Flickr, MySpace, Twitter and YouTube allow you
to stake a claim for you brand within their environments for potential future use.

Promotion in the right areas

Once registered with various social tools the next step is to establish your presence within them,
monitor what works (drives traffic and conversions to your website), and amend focus accordingly. In
Facebook such promotion would take the form of profile and page production – these can range from
the simple logo, address, forum to full blown applications within the Facebook environment.
MySpace and Bebo run with similar profile pages, whilst Twitter uses a stream of thoughts (micro-
blogs with a maximum length of 140 characters), that should be added to on a semi-regular basis
and a page listing all of them out that can be tailored to your company/brand.

In each instance there are two key facts to remember, social networking is opt-in by your audience
and normally generated through recommendation, it is highly unlikely that you will see thousands of
connections from day one. To use these social tools to the fullest the approach must be social, you
are promoting your company/brand in your audiences chosen arena; brash marketing messages,
posts of little worth will be considered annoying and will encourage your audience to opt-out of your
social endeavours.

Online Personas
In maintaining your social presence it is wise to adopt a company/brand persona. This will allow
multiple people to maintain the social presence and if correctly chosen will be a persona your
audience can identify with effectively and productively. In tools such as Twitter that are mainly on-
going public (and some private) conversations, persona adoption is key in establishing the
engagement with your audience and this persona can become powerful. Running as a sterile
announcements system will have people dropping off, if your persona cannot be enthusiastic about
the company/brand, then how can the audience?

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Make it Easy
Allow your audience to follow the path of least resistance. If you wish for users to place your website
in social bookmarking sites like Digg then allow them to do so at a click of a button by placing the
link on your site. If you maintain a presence in Facebook or Twitter make it clear from your site that
you do and link to the appropriate presence.

Connecting it all together

Perhaps not the easiest of steps is tying each of the different social channels you maintain together
into a cohesive identity that is available through each of the separate channels and through your
website. Skittles.com has recently given over its home page to a Twitter feed, to a lesser extent the
e-consultancy portal has allowed its community real estate on its site, again through Twitter, to build
content and drive discussion. Scalextric recently published the My Garage application on Facebook
allowing enthusiasts to build and share their Scalextric collections online, as well as posting a
selection of their online store directly through to Facebook with deep linking to purchase. Strong
social networks established by your brand allow your persona aligned audience to push and promote
your company/brand within their social sphere. By tying these together they can then push across
multiple spheres including your more traditional digital channels (e.g. your website).

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welcome to
our world...

If you would like to talk

further about Social Engagement or
require Red Ant to help you along this
path please feel free to contact us on:

01622 882 300

The Pump House, Forstal Road

Aylesford, Kent ME20 7AH
E: social@redant.co.uk

Twitter: http://twitter.com/red_ant www.redant.co.uk