2012’s Social Media winners: Pinterest, Social Care, TV and Mobile

The title of this blog post is somewhat deceptive but is actually based on Nielsen’s Social Media report released yesterday.

The document contains a number of interesting stats, and others that many experts would claim to have forecasted a year ago anyway.

You can find the full report here, but if you don’t feel like rummaging through the entire thing, I’ve taken what are in my opinion, key findings that marketers should be aware of:

• Pinterest has grown exponentially since its launch, in terms of users visited and time spent on the social network – which includes mobile usage. The demographic is still predominantly 70% female.

• Customer Service via Social Media (Social Care): one in three users say they prefer social media to contacting a company by phone, illustrating the importance of community management online and effective messaging.

• Social recommendations: a quarter of people said they would be more likely to pay attention to an ad shared by one of their social connections. Interesting, as Google+’s VP Bradley Horowitz recently spoke about how ads should be tailored around recommendations by friends, (social search) rather than pushed in your face based on personalised stats.

• Google+ sees an 80% increase in usage since the site went live in September 2011. This is interesting because in another one of my blog posts I highlight the growing importance of setting up Google+ for your brand (and you should be personally too for authorship authority).

• People are spending more time on PCs and smartphones (who would have guessed?) but importantly mobile app usage is up 120% from last year, with 76% of that app time used on social media – which reaffirms the growing need for brands to consider platform transition.

• Simultaneous mobile and TV usage is on the rise, with users inclined on commenting on what they watch while they do it becoming a growing trend

• Reddit and Tumblr usage continues to rise, with Reddit’s year-on-year change at a massive 342%

The stats presented by Nielsen are however largely representative of American users. They do cover Global consumer journeys (to an extent) and overall the report is well worth exploring on your own when you have the time. If you’re interested in local social networks specifically though, why not check out our whitepaper on the subject?

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