Posts Tagged ‘facebook’

I just launched the Hawaii Picture of the Day website. I’m particularly pleased with the widget and iGoogle gadget I wrote so people can add it to their own sites.

Here’s how the site widget looks in real time:

The site concept is simple: post good pictures of Hawaii to help people discover, be inspired, and be refreshed–daily.

The site is built on WordPress and integrates tightly with MailChimp for e-newsletter subscribing and sending. Just publish a new post and an email with the post’s content is automatically generated and sent to the list.

The site is also integrated with Facebook so that new posts automatically create a status update to the site’s companion Facebook page. Additionally, all posts can be “liked.”

I hope you enjoy it!

Small companies and businesses can sometimes feel overwhelmed at the idea of competing against big companies and their huge war chests of marketing monies. They wish there was a way to even the playing field a bit.

Enter social media.

Social media gives companies a way to reach customers cost-effectively. Instead of designing a mailer and paying postage to 10,000 customers at a cost of about $6,000, or printing a newspaper insert at a typical cost of $1000′s, a business can open a free Facebook or Twitter account, type a message and press the send button.

All you need is to know your audience, have some creativity, and make good offers.

A recent look at the number of Twitter followers and Facebook Fans of grocery stores by Pace Communications is a fun example. (see the chart at the bottom of this post)

In the grocery store battles, Walmart, Target, and Whole Foods have the most fans and followers by a large margin. We’d expect that, right? They’re big stores with big budgets able to hire the best and pay for the goods.

But I wondered about the number of fans or followers by grocer size. What if a smaller grocer is gathering a huge fan base while a much larger chain is not. If so, maybe the smaller chain is the one to watch for innovate, effective use of social media.

So, I took the liberty of tabulating Facebook fans per store and Twitter followers per store to get a feel for who is building an audience well. (see the full table below)

Per store, Wegmans (75 stores, 1,066 Facebook fans per store, 119 Twitter followers) is beating Walmart (2,906 stores) almost 2 to 1 in Facebook fans and 10 to 1 in Twitter followers.

Meanwhile, Whole Foods (279 stores) beats out every other grocer measured by more than 50 to 1 in Twitter followers per store. This includes beating out Walmart (2,906 stores), Safeway (1,486 stores), Kroger (2,470), everybody.

Whole Foods is attracting, on average, nearly 6,500 customers per store. That has got to help save on ad costs and bring in new business. Maybe there’s something we should pay attention to there.

So take heart smaller companies, social media may level the playing field. The continuing question is, how to use it well.

Social media use by older adults has nearly doubled in the last year.

Pew Research Center’s Internet and American Life Project just released a brief report on Older Adults and Social Media. One of the key findings was the huge uptick in the number of those 50 years or more using the social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter.

“While social media use has grown dramatically across all age groups, older users have been especially enthusiastic over the past year about embracing new networking tools. Social networking use among internet users ages 50 and older nearly doubled—from 22% in April 2009 to 42% in May 2010.”

A few questions that come to mind for me:

• Are our social media sources set up to accommodate the needs and desires of 50+ users?
• Are the social media needs and desires of older adults different from younger users?
• How does this compare with older adults use of the Internet in general?
• Does this further indicate opportunities that were previously considered a waste of time, like with baby boomers?

What comes to mind for you?

The report was authored by Mary Madden of the Pew Internet & American Life Project, was posted online 8/27/2010, and can be found at http://www.pewinternet.org/Reports/2010/Older-Adults-and-Social-Media.aspx.