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A great example of a company removing registration friction for a business audience is the online media division of The Business Journals. Since deploying Janrain Engage Social Login in June, they have reported a 12% increase in site registrations across 40 online properties.

Will social media play an important role for B2B marketers in the near future? We believe so and are seeing a growing interest from technology solution providers and other organizations that want to add a social element to their B2B website and marketing efforts. In Forrester’s report: Market Overview: 2011 Social Media Platforms For B2B Tech Marketing, they indicate: Today, there is increased demand for social media platforms from B2B tech marketers that are using social media tactics to engage with business technology buyers.

we looked at four post types: link posts, video posts, photo posts and status updates. When paid media is applied to an organic post, it can significantly increase Facebook metrics – from impressions (obviously), to conversions – so we removed all posts with paid impressions from the analysis. For both time periods, we took the total reach for each post type and divided it by the total post count for that post type to get the average reach per post type for the given time frame.

As expected, the average reach per post on status updates decreased after the algorithm change. Significantly.

Photo and video posts had no discernible change in reach after the algorithm change as we would expect. This is good news for marketers who already regularly integrate rich media into their post strategies as it is well documented that images and video generate greater fan engagement – and from this research, it looks clear that they will continue to do so.

In fact, according to McKinsey, companies that adopt social technologies can see a 50% increase in customer satisfaction, 48% increase in business leads, and 24% increase in revenue.

Social business apps allow users to follow the people, data and documents that matter to them at any given time.

To be transformative, social can't be an add-on. Social must be a strategy that is integrated into business processes across the organisation.

As might be expected in a difficult economy, lead generation topped all digital budget categories with almost 27% followed by display/banner at just under 20% and search at almost 19%.   As to what is driving digital media investments in 2012, audience composition, ROI and measurement capabilities, audience reach, and data targeting were selected by more than three-quarters of the respondents.By a wide margin, click through rate is the most important factor in campaign success with cost-per-engagement and interaction rate almost equal in importance.

Content marketing, which includes white papers, case studies, videos, custom websites, video and white papers, is among tech marketers’ top five spending priorities for 2012.  Led by collateral at 71%, followed by webcasts/virtual events at 61%, videos at 59%, research at 55%, and articles/features at 54%, marketers are investing in a wide variety of content marketing or custom programs.  Agencies are much mo

s for social media, YouTube and Facebook lead all platforms with LinkedIn, Google+ and Twitter not as popular. Among BtoB respondents, 53% found social extremely/very valuable for finding relevant technology content on the Web, which is double the 2010 figure.  Not surprisingly, 18- to 34-year-olds are most active with social media.  According to all users in the IDG survey, 60% rely most on tech sites, 46% peers or colleagues, and 43% independent tech journalists/bloggers.

About 1 in 5 respondents said they have used Twitter in conjunction with a TV campaign. Promoted Tweets are the most popular of Twitter’s ad formats among respondents, used by about twice as many as promoted accounts, and by roughly three times as many as have used Twitter Amplify. Respondents’ primary goal for Twitter advertising is to build awareness and sentiment for their brand, with significantly fewer claiming as their main goal driving traffic to their websites, building followers, generating sales leads, selling products and staying in touch with customers.

58.6% share of respondents said that their Twitter budgets represent new spending. Those reallocating from other media are most commonly turning to offline (17.6%), online display (16.6%), email (12.3%), search (10.8%) and TV (9.9%) for funds. (Similar data concerning the constitution of online video and social media budgets can be found here and here.)

7 in 10 respondents – execs at marketers, agencies and media companies – use Twitter as a marketing channel, only a minority (46.5%) of those are spending on advertising on the platform. By comparison, a previous survey from Ad Age (covered here) found that of the 83% using Facebook, almost three-quarters were buying ads.

It is interesting that blog posts shared only on Twitter tended to have 63% more page views than those shared on Facebook and 117% more page views than those not shared at all. 

Sharing your blog posts also dramatically increases the number of inbound links a post will receive. Posts only shared on Twitter had 54% more inbound links than those shared just on Facebook, and 113% more than those not shared at all. 

That all makes sense given separate results from the same survey indicating that 71% of company marketers plan to increase their digital marketing budgets this year.

Content marketing edges SEO (65%) and email marketing for engagement/retention (also 65%) as the most popular digital channel tabbed for a budget increase.

Other digital channels and disciplines to get a budget hike this year include social media investment (for engagement/retention – 62%), mobile marketing (for acquisition – 61%), and social media investment (for acquisition – 61%).

Overall, the average viewer watched 21.7 hours of online video content in March 2012, according to comScore. On Google sites, people watched an average of 7.1 hours and on Hulu, 4.6 hours - the highest among the top 10 video content properties.

A comparison of comScore data for March 2011 versus March 2012 also showed that Yahoo's online video rankings had an 8 percent increase in unique viewers and a 72 percent increase in average minutes per viewer.

Ignite analysts reviewed 689 posts across 21 brand pages (all of significant size, across a variety of industries) and found that, in the week since December 1, organic reach and organic reach percentage have each declined by 44% on average, with some pages seeing declines as high as 88%. Only one page in the analysis had improved reach, which came in at 5.6%.

As reach declined, the raw number of engaged users plunged as well, falling on average by 35%. Some pages saw engaged users fall as much as 76%. Only one page in the data set had an increase in the number of engaged users, coming in at 0.7%.

To add salt to an open wound, current research from Forrester and Wildfire shows that engaged users are a brand’s best customers.  They are more likely to purchase, recommend and prefer brands when they are socially engaged with that brand.  With fewer engaged users (-35%), brands bottom line are further penalized by the recent changes.

Americans spent four hours and 43 minutes a day (!) watching live TV and shows on their DVRs in the third quarter of this year. That’s down from four hours and 46 minutes in Q3 2012.

Comcast, the country’s biggest pay TV provider, said 70 percent of its subscribers watch stuff on demand, and that TV shows account for 40 percent of its usage. (If you factor in pay-TV channels like HBO, the number jumps up to 60 percent.) So once you do factor in on-demand usage, you see a different story. Nielsen said that there has been a small increase in the number of people watching live TV, and a significant increase in the number of “timeshifted” TV watchers — people watching on either DVRs or VOD.

while Comcast, Nielsen and some of the TV networks are trying to figure out how to change this, right now timeshifted TV is much less valuable for them than live TV. (Hence the warm reception for Twitter’s “we’ll bring our viewers to live TV” pitch.)

What we found is that Twitter is viewed much like Facebook was in the summer of 2012: While many advertisers use it as a marketing channel, only a minority actually place ads there.

Among the respondents, 70% currently use Twitter as a marketing channel and 80% say they plan to use Twitter in the next 12 months. But only 46% say they've ever bought an ad on Twitter, whether a promoted tweet, trend, account or an "Amplify" TV deal.

In the coming year, 59.2% said they expect their Twitter advertising budget to "modestly increase" or "significantly increase."