14 essential stats from the latest UK social media research to help benchmark your planning

Using social media research to benchmark and define your planning

Whether you’re planning your tactical social media campaign or reengineering your business for the social consumer, social media research is invaluable in setting benchmarks.  They help you manage expectations, isolate priorities and best of all, define KPIs that set the evaluation bar.

But there is a dearth of UK and European focused research resources.  Apart from econsultancy’s marvellous internet stats compendium, it can be quite difficult to find individual studies without scouring Google for days!

So to make it easy, below are highlights of the latest social media research, with links to original studies. Better still, they are in 140 characters or less,  and very tweetable, if you fancy sharing a few insights.

1. During 2011 there were 228 billion UK Internet visits to websites and 28 billion hours spent online
Source: Experian Hitwise Dec 2011 http://bit.ly/uMRrri

2. 87% of UK businesses will invest more in social media in 2012
Source: Royal Bank Of Scotland (RBS), Dec 2011. Reported in The Scotsman http://bit.ly/th7heE

3. Almost two thirds (64%) of companies say they are now beyond the experimental phase compared to 54% a year ago
Source: econsultancy Nov 2011 http://bit.ly/to9Je7

4. Only 48% of UK companies use social media, compared to 72% in the US and 83% in China
Source: KPMG, May 2011 http://bit.ly/sD194p

5. Only 6% of business owners are monitoring social media to better understand their customers
Source: Sage UK Dec 2011 http://bit.ly/w0hXfS

6. 60% of organisations have not yet implemented internal social media training and governance models
Source: econsultancy Nov 2011 http://bit.ly/to9Je7

7. 25% of marketers regard social signals as ‘very important’ for search rankings, but 57% think it will be important in 3 years
Source: Quarterly Digital Intelligence Briefing Dec 2011 http://bit.ly/umrYAO

8. 43% of UK women agreed that they often find out about new breaking stories first via social networks; compared to 27% of men
Source: Ofcom Dec 2011 http://bit.ly/sIjKCm

And on the media front….

Benchmarking social media measurements with the latest social media research

9. MySpace slips out of top 10 of leading social networks in UK
Source: Metro http://bit.ly/rGT5Pa

10. 60% of UK online population now use Facebook more than once a day
Source: YouGov Dec 2011 http://bit.ly/uAhCm3

11. 71% with a social networking profile visit a networking sites at least once a day; 20% visit 5 times a day or more
Source: Ofcom Dec 2011 http://bit.ly/sIjKCm

12. The Daily Mail and the Guardian websites are the most popular newspaper websites in Europe
Source: Ofcom Dec 2011 http://bit.ly/sIjKCm

13. 2.6m people joined the top 20 Facebook retail pages in the last 6 months
Source: eDigitalResearch Dec 2011 http://bit.ly/uLhLwH

And just because…

14. Nearly half (47 per cent) of teenage smartphone users admitted using or answering their handset in the bathroom or toilet
Source: Ofcom Dec 2010 http://bit.ly/sbkdwd

If you would like to keep up with the latest social media research and stats then please do follow us on twitter


 
 
Images with thanks to:
Image: jannoon028 / FreeDigitalPhotos.net
Image: Nutdanai Apikhomboonwaroot / FreeDigitalPhotos.net

This entry was posted on Tuesday, January 3rd, 2012 at 1:07 pm by Katy and is filed under measurement, social business, Social Media, social media research, social media strategy, social search, with tags , , , , . You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

5 Responses to “14 essential stats from the latest UK social media research to help benchmark your planning”

  1. Hilda Smith Says:
    January 6th, 2012 at 11:30 am

    Really interesting Katy. Couple of interesting points for me, no.5 inspires us as business. Facebook’s continued growth in the UK will be interesting to see, are people starting to feel it’s no longer about them just sharing with their friends? The Daily Mail stat has got to be down to their gossip pages. Even my man friends admit to having to minimise when the boss walks over.

  2. Katy Says:
    January 6th, 2012 at 11:46 am

    Love your comment Matt, thanks. Whilt No.5 inspires, as a strategist, it terrifies me that so many companies are plainly unaware of what their customers say. Without scaremongering, to me the benefits of monitoring far outweigh the risk of just not knowing. Even basic online reputation management is impossible if you dont know the issues.

  3. Matt @ Hilda Smith Says:
    January 6th, 2012 at 12:23 pm

    Totally agree it is a massive worry, but an opportunity also. I don’t think the balance between firefighting day to day issues and actually using the issues to make business strategy changes has been achieved yet. Do you have an examples of people doing it well? There must be some in that 6%

  4. Katy Says:
    January 6th, 2012 at 12:29 pm

    There are definitely a few companies who understand the value of monitoring not just for issues alerts, but evaluating business opportunities. In my experience, there are not many. The biggest barrier is actually process integration. Silos and depertmant structures often become the biggest hurdles in the flow of information. It insight gleaned needs a structured pathway through an organisation – pushing the right buttons in each differing functionality – so it gains attention and business change can be inspired.

  5. Matt @ Hilda Smith Says:
    January 6th, 2012 at 1:01 pm

    Great point, hard to create insight when the community manager dealing with the every day problems probably doesn’t sit anywhere near any decision makers, might not even work for directly for the company. CEO’s and Marketing Directors to take the time to listen in, even respond to a few issues themselves, might be surprised to see how often the same things come up.

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