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Although Google Plus and LinkedIn drive the fewest social referrals, they bring in some of the best visitors: Google Plus users, on average, find themselves spending north of three minutes diving into things shared by connections in their circles. They also visit 2.45 pages during each visit, and bounce only 50.63 percent of the time. LinkedIn users generally spend 2 minutes and 13 seconds on each link they click, viewing 2.23 pages with each visit and bouncing 51.28 percent of the time. Although many sites see minimal traffic from both Google Plus and LinkedIn, now may be the time to invest in building communities within those networks if engagement really matters to your business.

A referral from Twitter is as good as a referral from Facebook — at least, in terms of bounce rate, pages per visit, and time on site

Pinterest isn’t exactly the social media golden child we all play it up to be: Coming in sixth, pinners bounce as often as Facebook users and tweeps do, but view fewer pages per visit (1.71), and they spend considerably less time on site (64.67 seconds) than almost all of its counterparts, with the exception of StumbleUpon.

StumbleUpon drives the least engaged referrals: Post-click, users view a meager 1.5 pages per visit and spend 54.09 seconds on site. It would appear that StumbleUpon’s click-heavy — to “stumble,” “like,” or “dislike” — focus makes users trigger-happy to a fault. Users stumble onto the next thing rather than immersing themselves in the webpage StumbleUpon recommends.

Twitter — despite the different services that it has launched to increase engagement like Twitter Music other discovery services; and despite the increased attention around its IPO — has only grown by two percentage points to 18%. Hot on its heels is Instagram at 17%. Google+ does not make it into the top-five mix — not because of its lack of popularity; but because Pew says it did not include it in its survey questions.

when it comes to frequency of use, the rankings change. Facebook continues to remain at the top in the daily rankings, with 63% of people accessing it on a daily basis. Instagram — last in the general rankings — is not far off and in second place, with a 57% daily use. Similarly, its weekly and “less often” rates are also close, respectively at 22%/20% and 14%/22%. (

Twitter may overall be seeing less usage in general than Pinterest but those who are on it appear more engaged: some 46% of Twitter users are on it daily for their quick fix of quips made and received. Pinterest, in contrast, has a fairly low rate of daily usage, with 23% of its users visiting on a daily basis. Facebook, Instagram and Twitter also are generating a significant amount of mulitple-times-per-day use, with 40% at Facebook, 35% at Instagram and 29% at Twitter, Pew says. LinkedIn, meanwhile, has a lot of work to do, with only 13% of its users going there daily.

Pew notes that for now it looks like Facebook is partly winning because of how it has managed to appeal to a wide range of users — a pretty impressive turn for widening its reach, considering that it started out as a network restricted only to university networks. The demographic data for other networks stands in contrast to this: Pinterest “holds particular appeal to female users”, with women four times more likely as men to be Pinterest users; LinkedIn is “especially” popular among college graduates and internet users in higher income households. Twitter and Instagram resonate with urbanites and younger adults, and non-whites. (Facebook has over 70% usage among whites, Hispanics and black users, Pew notes.) All of them, excepting LinkedIn, has its highest proportion of users in the 18-29 age bracket; LinkedIn is more popular with the 30-49 group. Among those who say they use only one social networking site, Facebook is a clear winner with 84% selecting it as their sole site, with the others lagging behind by a very far stretch: 8% solely use LinkedIn, 4% solely use Pinterest, and Instagram and Twitter each picked up only 2%

Corporate websites perhaps have a key reputational role to play in the marketing mix, supplementing and underpining social media marketing spending — by providing reassurance of a brand’s professionalism where a Facebook page can provide evidence of user engagement/approval (or otherwise).

The results indicate that corporate websites still have a key role to play when it comes to marketing a company’s offerings, despite the big role also played by social media. It’s also notable that mobile marketing is still relatively low down the priorities list, with an aggregated percentage of 24%. It’s still far better than the poor unloved (and doubtless rarely updated) company blog, though, with just 6%.

The survey asked respondents to rank different marketing activities first, second and third in importance, collating all three preferences to get the overall percentage. On first place preference, corporate websites came out joint top with online advertising, cited by 18% apiece as the most important activity. Social media slumped in importance on this measure — cited by just six per cent of respondents as the most important activity (and second only to the company blog):

The top priorities for increased budgets in 2013 are commerce experiences, social and mobile marketing, and content creation and management

Ask Them What They Want to Hear

Be Human Find ways to incentivize without blatant self-promotion and don’t shy away from humor.

Niche players often manage to initially attract a devoted audience, only to lose them later to a larger competitor that moves into the market. That's because the community usually moves to where there are more people. And Facebook has 800 million people.

189 million of Facebook’s users are ‘mobile only’

It’s worth considering how your content displays on mobile devices and smaller screens before posting it, particularly if your target market is full of mobile users. Of course, make sure to make sharing to social media from mobile more straight forward.

YouTube reaches more U.S. adults aged 18–34 than any cable network

Every second 2 new members join LinkedIn

Social Media has overtaken porn as the #1 activity on the web

LinkedIn has a lower percentage of active users than Pinterest, Google+, Twitter and Facebook

Even though 62% of marketers blog or plan to blog in 2013, only 9% of US marketing companies employ a full-time blogger