Just the other day, I was giving a presentation few the Gilbert Small Business Alliance networking group that I’m a part of. The presentation was based on Linwright Design, and why it’s imperative that you have an online presence these days. Below are some social media and search engine statistics and numbers that I pulled for the presentation.

Social media platforms such as Facebook and Twitter have a huge influence on consumers. Studies are being done every day showing that traditional advertising just doesn’t cut it anymore. Corporations are learning to think out of the box to keep up with the next generation of consumers, and social media creates a wonderful opportunity for potential customers.

Social Media Influence

• Being earnest, or sincere, in your efforts to provide content to your customers is perhaps your most important task. Until recent years, your “content” was advertisements, flyers, coupons and other promotional materials. Outstanding content today requires a new mindset and intent. You’re not selling your customers with your content, be it that from a blog, an email newsletter or a posting on a social network, but instead you are providing them with value. – Social Media Today

• 91% says consumer content is #1 aid to a buying decision
• 87% trust a friend’s recommendation over a critic review
• Social network users are 3 times more likely to trust peer opinions over advertising
• 1 word-of-mouth conversation has the impact of 200 tv commercials
• 28% of Christmas shoppers in 2009 said social media influenced their buying decisions (13% of that influence came from blogs)

Like many in the beginning, I was skeptic about social media. MySpace was the new way to keep in touch with friends and customers, and I wasn’t having it. After a year of pushing and pleading, my circle finally talked me into setting up a profile. And, as the story goes, the rest is history.

Businesses of all sizes should get involved with Facebook and Twitter for the simple purpose of customer service. While MySpace has sold out and is falling swiftly off a cliff, Facebook and Twitter are still growing by leaps and bounds, which means your customers are probably on at least one of these networks. If your customers are on them, then you should be too.

Big businesses should integrate social media into their marketing to stay fresh and act like a small business by communicating with their customers. Small businesses should integrate social media to keep their customers happy and informed.

Big Businesses and Social Media

In my personal opinion, big businesses tend to get boring after a while. They shut-off connections with the real world, block the websites that keep their marketers informed of what’s trending online, and drain employees with small offices and bad lighting. If you’re a big business that has thick protections against any sort of social media while at work, you’re probably only doing yourself harm.

Twitter and Facebook allows for big businesses to be fresh and current with what their customers want. Sure, marketers take stats and polls and understand their customers in many ways, but understanding your customers on a social level adds another layer to your marketing plan. And what’s wrong with knowing your customers better.

Many big businesses, like Starbucks and Hewlett Packard, use Twitter efficiently to communicate with their customers. These are big businesses who know how to market to their customers. They offer specials, news, and interaction focused on customer satisfaction.

Small Businesses and Social Media

Small businesses tend to communicate with their customers better than big businesses, simply because they see them more on a face-to-face basis. That doesn’t mean social media isn’t for you. By having a Facebook and Twitter profile, you are only stretching your reach to your customers. Offer specials, discounts, promotions, and company updates to keep your customers involved and informed.

When you send out newsletters or update your blog, invite your customers to continue the conversation on Twitter or Facebook. The more that you can get people to talk, the more your company will grow. Conversation on social networks is the key to spreading your brand like wildfire, and all you have to do is get people talking.

There is not one good reason to not have a social media marketing plan. Whether you’re a big business trying to connect and understand your customers, or a small business looking to simply ‘keep in touch,’ Facebook and Twitter are the best ways to do this. You need to always be thinking of what will take a conversation to the next level, and what will spark your customers’ interests. Record what works and what doesn’t, rinse and repeat.

Remember, ROI is not always measured in initial traffic to your website, but the amount of influence you have throughout social media and the impressions that you make on your customers. If you can keep them happy by offering information and promotions to only your friends on Facebook and Twitter, you will make them feel like VIP’s and create wonderful relationships.

Tracking your social statistics is definitely not the easiest thing in the world. It’s tough to prove to a potential client that social media should always be a part of the package, and building a website without integrating any kind of social aspects is almost worthless. Well, ok, maybe not worthless, but an effective small business owner will more than likely see the potential in integrating some sort of social options to their websites.

Getting accurate and conclusive statistics regarding Facebook pageviews, Twitter clickthroughs, or simple blog visits is tougher than you might think. Sure, you can enlist Google Analytics, try bit.ly or su.pr, attempt PostRank, or jump on TweetStats, but if you were to compare all of those numbers to each other, they will never add up.

If your Twitter shortener (the platform that you use to shorten your links for Twitter’s 140 characters) says that you received 115 clicks from a certain link, your Google Analytics will no-doubt show far less than that for the amount of people that actually viewed the page. Sounds confusing, right? Here’s the visual.

See what I mean. I used to use bit.ly for my Twitter shortener, until the numbers really went haywire and didn’t match in the slightest to what the other analytics stats were saying. So, I did some research and decided to give su.pr a try. Su.pr is owned and operated by StumbleUpon, which gives your blog post an added boost. When you shorten the link, su.pr will automatically post it to StumbleUpon. I also heard that su.pr is more accurate than bit.ly because it weeds out the bots. But, as you can see from the visual above, it’s still hard to tell exactly which numbers are correct.

So, in some more research for accurate social media statistics I heard about PostRank, a brand new analytics program that combines Google Analytics with social tools like Twitter. It takes the numbers from Google Analytics, and from my  understanding, compares those numbers with the amount of interaction that happened on Twitter concurrent to a specific blog post. Than it takes the blog visits, combined with the Twitter conversations, and creates a interaction score.

Pretty sweet sounding, right? Well, after getting truly excited about something that might actually be accurate, I decided to give it a few weeks. As you can see below, it’s still not entirely accurate. Not only are the followers numbers off, the numbers pulled over from Google Analytics don’t always match up, nor does the amount of Twitter conversations or the social bookmarking stats.

I give PostRank a lot of credit, however, for attempting such a feat. Being able to accurately track social media numbers is incredibly crucial in this field, and finding a system that works will probably make millions for the creator. I’m still waiting for that day.

Until then, I simply use a variety of analytics including Google and su.pr. I continue to switch it up every couple of months to try and find the most accurate program, every time wishing that the perfect social analytics tool is out there. If anyone has any suggestions I’d love to hear them!

Update: As I was going through my feeds this morning, I came across an article from Social Media Today regarding this exact subject. This is the section that I found most interesting:

Unlike traditional forms of gathering consumer insight, online tools are often cheaper, based on much larger sample sizes, and are quicker to deliver results.  For the past few years the value of search engine marketing (SEM) are measured largely by ad impressions, page views and click through rates.  However, as internet users are more willing to input additional data online, companies are now looking to measure key metrics of engagement on a person-level.

According to a recent comScore and Starcom USA’s study on how U.S. Internet users click on display ads, “Only 8% of internet users now account for 85% of all clicks… The results underscore the notion that, for most display ad campaigns, the click-through is not the most appropriate metric for evaluating campaign performance. Rather, advertisers should consider evaluating campaigns based on their view-through impact.”

That’s just one of the examples that web analytics can be misleading.  It will continue to be challenging for marketers to abstract reliable data as social media adds another pile of data to the media measurement mix.  The future trend to measure more accurately will be to combine technical web analytics (server logs) with a sampling of user surveys (opt-in by visitors) that visits the site.  Although there will be sampling errors, it certainly beats making assumptions that doesn’t reflect real user behaviors.

From SEOMoz, we now have some new numbers! These numbers show just how many people around the world are using social media, what the most popular social sites are, and thus which ones your small business should be engaging in.