We Are Social: Tuesday Tune-Up #25

Tuneup
dan.goodswen

Welcome to our weekly super bowl of the top plays in social media, racking up the yards in activations, engagement and statistics from all over the web.

So get practising your end zone dance, because here comes the touchdown pass – the Top 10 stories in social media this week;

1. Companies boosting digital marketing budgets
According to Econsultancy’s Marketing Budgets 2012 Report, companies are looking to boost budgets for their 2012 digital marketing strategies. The growth is fairly significant with 68% are increasing their digital budgets in 2012 compared to compared to 45% of companies increasing overall marketing budgets.

2. Corporate blogging declines as newer tools rule
A study on the usage of social media in Inc. 500 corporations shows fewer of them are using blogging, message/bulletin boards, online video, podcasting and MySpace and more are using Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube and Foursquare.

The platform most utilized by the Inc. 500 is Facebook, with 74% of companies using it. Virtually tied at 73% is the adoption of the professional network, LinkedIn.

The use of corporate blogs dropped to 37% from 50% in 2010, as this mature tool evolves into other forms or is replaced by communication through Facebook or Twitter.

Social media tools are seen as important for company goals. Ninety percent of responding executives report that social media tools are important for brand awareness and company reputation.

Eighty-eight percent see these tools as important for generating web traffic while 81% find them important for lead generation. Seventy-three percent say that social media tools are important for customer support programs.

3. India is Now Facebook’s No. 2 Nation Behind the U.S.
India moved from sixth to second place on the global leaderboard for total number of Facebook users in January, though the world’s second most populated country has still got a considerable way to go to overthrow the world’s largest Facebook nation; the US.

Colombia was measured as having the fastest user growth on Facebook and Brazil and Indonesia, alongside India, were marked as countries to watch.

Looking to Europe, in one month alone Germany and Poland grew a respective 500k and 300k users and they’ve got even more room to grow. Japan have also had strong growth this month.

4. Facebook Files for IPO; Reveals $1 Billion in 2011 Profit
Facebook’s IPO filing this week has revealed:

5. Facebook ‘likely to roll out mobile ads in weeks’
Given recent IPO filing admitting it was weak on mobile advertising, its unsurprising that its plan is to bring out mobile ads within the next couple of weeks in order to generate advertising revenues.

January 2012 saw featured stories within users’ news feeds for the first time so it makes sense that mobile ads would be the next logical step forward.

In December it claimed to have 425 million monthly active users using its mobile products, which is around half of its total monthly active users, and 21% growth from September’s 300 million figure.

7. Top 20 countries on Twitter
Semiocast have relased detailed statistics on global twitter usage:

The Next Web highlighted the interesting takeaways from the report – namely, how different countries use Twitter:

In the period from September 1st to November 30th, 30% of Japanese accounts posted at least once, while in Brazil the number slipped to 25%.

For both countries, the number is surprisingly low, meaning that at least 70% of those millions of accounts were dormant for at least 3 months, if not more.

The country with the highest percentage of active accounts is the Netherlands, with 33% of the accounts posting in the 3 month period.

The most active countries on Twitter include Spain, the US and Indonesia.

8. Google+ passes 100 million users
Paul Allen has been doing his usual research into Google+ user figures, and according to him, the site has grown by more than 10% between January 19th and February 1st, passing 100 million users.

If these growth rates continues, marketers will be unable to ignore Google+.

9. Pinterest drives incredible referral traffic
According to Shareaholic, Pinterest drives more referral traffic than Google Plus, YouTube and LinkedIn combined, and is also showing impressive growth month-on-month:

10. Superbowl hits record for Tweets per second
Last night’s Superbowl broke a record for the most Tweets per second (TPS) for a sporting event. According to Twitter, the average TPS was 10,000, with the peak hit at 12,333 TPS.

The way records like these keep on falling, we can only speculate what, say, the 2014 World Cup final will be like.

The Week According To The Internets;