The 3 Marketing Stats That Matter Most Now.

May 15, 2013

Blog Out Loud…

In 2010, Facebook had 500 million users. Today, it lists more than 1.6 billion active users, roughly half of which access the social media site via their mobile phones. In 2010, Twitter – then only four years old – underwent its first major makeover, while users were posting 50 million tweets per day. In December 2012, Twitter announced it had surpassed 200 million active monthly users. In 2010, Instagram, Pinterest and Vine were either in infancy or did not exist. Today, a day doesn’t pass without a forward-thinking brand making waves for their creative use of one of these tools. If there is a marketing takeaway here, it is that the online world is changing faster than we could’ve anticipated, and my Vertical Marketing Network colleagues predict that pace will only accelerate. So as marketers, we are constantly faced with the challenge not of keeping up, but of staying ahead. With that, here are 3 marketing trends worth your attention now:

1. Are you listening to the Vine? A recent study from New York-based Unruly Media found that branded Vines – those 6-second video clips sweeping the Smartphone landscape – are shared 4 times more than branded Internet videos. Five Vines are shared every second on Twitter, Vine’s parent company, and 4% of the top 100 shared Vines come from brands. Comparatively, 1% of Top 100 viral online videos are from brands.

2. Is YouTube your tube? After much ado, YouTube launched its paid channels last week, enabling its 1 million content partners the ability to both charge for subscriptions and take on advertisers. Last month, Nielsen Co. announced there are 5 million “Zero TV” households in the United States, up from 2 million in 2007. Will YouTube and the like one day replace traditional TV programming?

3. Does the future have a privacy clause? Most likely not. Last week, Dennis Crowley, co-founder of Foursquare, said that in a few years time, the location-based networking site wouldn’t wait for users to “check-in”; it would do the work for them. Foursquare logs some 20 million active users, and really, it served as inspiration for Facebook’s Places feature and apps like Sonar. With consumers increasingly confused by and reacting to privacy clauses, marketers will be newly challenged to assuage future fears in the very un-private world of the Internet.

Three years ago, I could not have imagined a world in which my iPhone mattered more than my laptop, or a world in which the majority of my reading content was delivered to my tablet. Nor could I have imagined reaching the end of my time with Vertical Marketing Network. But as we’ve learned, the world is fast-turning and thus, new opportunities arise.