New and Amazing YouTube Numbers

The Official Google Blog has put out some pretty outstanding growth numbers for YouTube.

Yesterday, more than 48 hours worth of video (that is two days worth!) were uploaded to the YouTube every minute. That represents a 37% increase over the last six months and a 100% rise over the past year!

Think about that for a moment. That is a lot of video to watch.

And ... Over last weekend, YouTube viewers drove this Social Media monster past the 3 Billion (that is Billion, not million) views a day mark. That represents a 50% over last years.

Google happily provides the following information to put that 3 billion views in perspective:

That number of views is the equivalent of nearly half the worlds population watching a YouTube video every day, or its is equal to each and every citizen of the USA watching at least nine videos a day.

These are the kind of numbers that I find staggering.

Getting Started in Social Media Marketing

Just have a look at that photo to the right. It is filled with the labels of just some of the organizations, business and web sites that are involved in the Social Media Marketing world. Just some! And then they all have interconnections. Seem impossible? It did to me when I first started doing Social Media Marketing. But I took the time, approached the project step-by-step, and am in the process of mastering the challenge.

You can do that, or you can make your life simpler, focus on your business and hire me to do all that work for you. (Yup, that was a plug for me, it is my blog after all and this is what I do for a living, so I had to throw one of those in somewhere).

But whether you use my services or take the do it yourself route, you are going to have to break your Social Media Marketing campaign down into small, doable steps.

The first step may seem ridiculously simple, but taking the time to think about it now will save you grief later. That step is choosing your name.

The choice of your name is critical because what you choose to use as your name is going to represent your brand. It is going to be used on all of your Social Media Marketing platforms to tell the world who you are, what you are about and where you want to go with your viewer.

It is said that the first impression in business is made during your handshake and that you have only 5 seconds to make that impression good. The same applies to your brand name. In this day of information overload, your efforts are going to often be judged by your brand name. Does it reflect what the viewer wants to find? If it doesn't, they are moving on fast.

Sometimes your name is the best brand name. For my art and photography site, I use just www.bradrickerby.blogspot.com.  You might wish to use your name and a professional accreditation. My mother would love it if my brand were, say, www.drbradrickerby.com (alas for her, that brand does not exist). Or you might want a brand name that is memorable, perhaps silly or whimsical and talks a little about what your brand is about. I just opened http://muttsmuttsmutts.blogspot.com.  I'll bet you know what that one is about!

Your brand name should also be short (a rule I violate frequently) because a short brand name will be more memorable and easier to type. And you should be sure that your brand name is available across all the platforms you will be using (typically a blog, Facebook, Linkedin and Twitter).

It really is not as complicated as it sounds and you should be able to come up with a brand quickly. But is is important to give it just a little thought.

Next, you need to define the goal of your Social Media Marketing Campaign. I will go into that next.

Finding Twitter Followers

In Twitter there are a number of ways of finding people and of having them find you. First, there is the whole following dance, which will follow shortly. The second is through keywords, which are called hashtags (#) on Twitter. The use of hashtags is a fundamental formatting thing (one of the things I am going to write about in my Twitter usage guidelines. 


But for now ... after the message of your tweet you should put a number of keywords in that Tweet. These keywords are formatted so they read, #keyword, or #marketing, or #landscapephotography (Tweeter only reads the first word after the #, so two or more word keywords have to be compressed) or #Hypnosis or ... well, you get the idea. 


Twitter then takes all the hashtagged words and compiles a list of them. You can look up everyone who is tweeting about marketing or hypnosis or anyone of more interest to you, like everybody who has used a hashtag in your client demographic (we have to talk about client demographis one day soon). 

Knowledge

"To know that you do not know is the best. To pretend to know when you do not know is a disease". Lao Tzu.

9 Business Leaders in Social Media Marketing

The 9 top business Tweeters and Social Media Marketing users are all Fortune 500 companies. The following is a list of those companies (ranked in order of Twitter followers). This list was created by Fortune magazine and reported by www.cnnmoney.com with further research by me.

One of the main things to be taken from what follows is the level of use of Social Media Marketing platforms by corporate giants. If they are so committed to their use, these platforms should also be useful for much smaller businesses, professionals, artists and so on.

#1, not surprisingly, is Google. Google is #102 on the Fortune 500 list. They have 3,012,238 Twitter followers and 2,925,995 Facebook Fans.

#2 is Wholefoods. Wholefoods is 284 on the Fortune 500 list. They have 1,916,179 Twitter followers. They also have over 300 Twitters accounts and over 250 local stores with their own Twitter accounts. Wholefoods also has 575,020 Facebook fans on their main page and scores of local store and specialty pages on Facebook.

#3 a tip of the hat to Dell. They are the 38th largest company in the USA according to the Fortune 500 list. They have 1,584,837 Twitter followers, track over 25,000 conversations per day in 11 different languages and created the Social Media and Community University. Dell also has 549,525 Facebook fans.

#4 Southwest Airlines. SW air is #229 on the Fortune 500 list and have 1,107,156 followers on Twitter. This goes along with 1,390,581 Facebook fans. That is a lot of Social Media!

#5 Coca Cola  The 72 largest USA company according to the Fortune 500 list, Coca Cola has 254,618 followers and a whopping 26,466,498 fans on Facebook.

Coming in at #6 is another airline, Delta. They are the 84th largest USA corporation and have 180,000 followers on Twitter.

Number 7 is one of my favorite places to shop, Target. Target is #30 on the Fortune 500 list and has 126,563 Twitter followers. Target also has 4,321,438 Facebook fans.

#8 is American Express. At 88 on the Fortune 500 list they have 120,343 Twitter followers. On their main Facebook page they have 590,725 Fans. American Express also has a Facebook page called "Small Business Saturday" with 1,484,696 fans. Actually, that should be 1,484,697 as I just joined!

And finally, #9, we come to at last. McDonalds, the home of the Golden Arches and the Big Mac is ranked number 108 by Fortune and has 120,277 Twitter followers. McDonalds also has 8,155,792 Facebook fans.

All in all that is a lot of fans and following. Keeping in mind that there are over 100 million Twitter accounts and over 500 million Facebook accounts, there are a lot, literally hundreds of millions of reasons that both these corporate megaliths and you should be using Social Media Marketing.

By the way, the Fortune 500 listing is a list of the top 500 companies in America. It is put out annually by Fortune magazine and ranks the companies by revenues and profits. The total revenue for these 9 companies, in millions of $'s is $238,742. That number is too large for me to contemplate. The dollars in profit for these 9 companies, again in millions of $'s is $27,068. All I can say is that that is a lot of profit.