Facebook will hit the boards this week in the U.S, with their float on the stock market crowning Mark Zuckerberg as one of the richest 28 year olds on the planet, if not in Earth’s history.

Congratulations to Mark on this, but if you’re  looking to buy Facebook stock post IPO you might be wondering: how is Facebook travelling here in Australia?

Well, if size counts, they’re huge. With more than 479 million Total Visits in April 2012, they’re the number 2 site in the country, a position they’ve held for more than three years.

Holding court in the Hitwise Social Networking category, they’ve been ranked first for 36 of the last 36 months. In Australia right now, it’s only Google that see more of us on a daily basis.

In April, Google saw 623,491,085 Total Visits, Facebook 479,897,966. Big figures and hard to make sense of – until you bring Australia’s internet population into account.

Australians were 30% more likely to visit Google than Facebook on any given day

Estimating the current internet using population at 19 million, this suggests Australians were 30% more likely to visit Google than Facebook on any given day, 1.1 visits per day for Google to 0.84 for Facebook.

However, given their different offerings, it’s not the frequency that might help you decide to buy Shares, but the future. We can’t predict the future, but we can look at the trends and behaviours in historical data.

Over the past twelve months, Google usage has trended up, wherease Facebook usage has trended down.

Combine this with the congestion that new players such as Pinterest have created and Facebook have actually under performed their sector, as seen below. Hitwise’s Social Networking & Forums category grew by 5.57% in April 2012 relative to April 2011 – but Facebook shrunk 6.28% in the same period, for almost a 12 point spread.

Also, the Tyranny of Distance appears to be still affecting Australia, although it’s unlikely Professor Blainey had this in mind when he wrote his book .

Viewing Facebook usage by States, it’s intuitively those with the largest population with the lion’s share.

However, if you index this to the population, we see that Victoria and the ACT are under represented. Victoria is under by almost 10% and ACT almost 20%.

Furthermore, both Victoria and the ACT have the highest population densities in the country, 23.87 and 137.53 people p/sq km respectively. At least in Australia, the denser the population, the less they’re using Facebook.

So, should you buy shares? That’s entirely up to you. But you might want to consider the growth opportunities on one hand with a population chart in the other.

Experian Hitwise. Now you know.

In recent years consumers have become more discerning about how they choose to engage with brands. This means that marketers are coming under increasing pressure to connect with their customers across multiple channels and in meaningful ways. Yet do customers value these new forms of brand communication, and do they generate the desired results?

We commissioned some research at the end of last year to answer these questions and test how marketers were approaching their campaigns in 2012 and what consumers were looking for.

The findings supported our own experiences.

Five Step Plan: What marketers should be doing now

We put a five Step Plan together based on the research and what we’ve found from talking with customers this year

1.)     Design a multichannel strategy

Multichannel marketing is not about pushing the same message out across all mediums. It requires thought and strategy to ensure that the right messages are delivered to the right customers, at the right time, via the right medium.

2.)    Become data-savvy

Collect, measure and analyse data from all channels and interactions with customers. If the resources are lacking in-house, then look to outsource this process to achieve higher cut through with marketing campaigns.

3.)    Embrace new technologyand befriend IT

Marketers need to understand the latest digital developments, and be able to adopt new technologies quickly and effectively. To achieve this, marketing needs to work closely with IT, whose skills and knowledge will prove invaluable in building a long-term marketing strategy.

4.)     Do more with the same budget

Marketers need to make better use of channels without increasing budgets – which means being smarter about using fewer, more targeted pieces of communications.

5.)     Start a dialogue

Move away from the practice of ‘pushing’ marketing messages to the practice of starting a two-way dialogue, to pave the way for consumers to start exchanging views and opinions. This will provide marketers with greater ROI in the longer term.

If you would like more information download the full Multichannel Marketer report here

Search, Social and Email are critical to a successful multi-channel strategy, but it needn’t stop there.

The Hitwise tool can help bring to light unfamiliar sites that you haven’t considered in your digital strategy.

Recently, I looked at sites that dramatically increased in Total Visits over the past year, creating the below list of potential channels to highlight the opportunity they represent.

If you haven’t explored these channels, it may be worth spending time this week playing with some terrific, innovative sites – I’m already a fan of several!

Site	Visits	Purpose of site	Opportunity
	March 2012 11.3 million (March 2011 0.9 million)	Users are served random websites based on their interests, which they  rate and recommend to peers	Post your own websites and allow a wide range of consumers to literally ‘stumble’ across your products. While this is a soft sell approach, links back to your product pages may result in conversions
	March 2102 8.7 million (March 2011 5.0 million)	A blog publishing tool	Identify influential writers posting about your industry and explore ways to partner with them to leverage an alternative, ‘word-of-mouth’ channel that engages more directly with consumers
	March 2012 6.7 million (March 2011 4.1 million)	Similar to YouTube, provides video clips across a range of subjects	Tap into a global client base with short films, newscasts, commercials etc or leverage the various advertising opportunities they offer
	March 2012 3.6 million (March 2011 0)	Users pin photos on particular topics and connect and share with other users	Earn the trust and praise of consumers by contributing quality pins. Include links to your website to enable conversions. Identify influential ‘pinners’ and use them as an alternative communications channel
	March 2012 3.5 million (March 2011 0)	This site features the iPhone application that allows users to share photos	Instagram sells its data to companies, enabling them to identify what products/models should be promoted most heavily and how to optimise window displays, search campaigns etc. Great for promotional campaigns
	March 2012 2.7 million (March 2011 1.3 million)	Reddit identifies what’s popular online by encouraging users to vote on existing links	Post photos, videos etc or ask for help and suggestions from consumers on what they would like to see from your product offering. Identify the topics relevant to consumers and craft your offering around those opinions

Be open to new channels that allow you to talk to consumers about your brand. Before launching into your own campaigns, it costs nothing to listen and learn from how consumers behave on the site.

Australian businesses are continuing to embrace the online sphere. Even companies such as David Jones are now expanding their online offerings to mitigate the risk posed by international entrants into the Australian market.

The NAB Online Sales Index provides insight into retail online spending in Australia. It revealed that while local online sales rose by 25% last year, international sales increased by 40%. Some of these sales were for international online retailers such as ASOS and StyleTread.

With Experian Hitwise you can keep an eye on competitors entering the marketplace that you haven’t even heard of. TheIconic is a great example of an international site that has grown in recent months, jumping from 199th in November 2011 to 12th last month. The majority of their increased traffic has come from Social Networking and Search Engine sites.

The Search terms driving users to these websites can be insightful in terms of identifying the products that are key to their attraction strategies.

For example, while branded terms (eg ‘theIconic’) are part of TheIconic’s Search Terms, there is an extensive list of product-based Searches such as ‘doc martens’, ‘shoes online’ and ‘lipstick shoes’. This should be of interest to anyone selling shoes online. It’s also worth noting the Paid Rates for these terms.

International entrants will continue pose a threat to many markets. As a player in the online space, it’s important to monitor these threats and ensure you’re positioning yourself to effectively mitigate the risks associated with these entrants.

At the end of January, Tim Lovitt wrote about the newest craze hitting our Social Networks – the wonder that is Pinterest!

Digital news sites have been buzzing about how companies could leverage Pinterest to grab greater market share, so to help you out, here are the top ten things you should know if you’re considering this new, happening channel.

1 ) Since Tim’s post, Total Visits to Pinterest have increased from 358,000 to 500,000 per week, 0.22% of all Visits to Social Networking sites.

2 ) Pinterest referred high volumes of traffic to three sites in particular last month – Etsy, Martha Stewart and Better Homes and Gardens. Triple J also used the site for the latest Hottest 100. The above sites relied on Pinterest for 1.66%, 3.30% and 4.25% of their traffic respectively – that’s over 60,000 Visits!

3 ) Of all searches performed after leaving Pinterest, 0.2% were for the Term ‘etsy’, and 0.1% were for ‘ikea’ (see below).

4 ) Pinterest ranks number 1 in Google for the search terms ‘diy valentines gifts’, ‘retro mermaid’ and ‘fairies in a jar’. (N.B. our SERPs tool told me this, I didn’t randomly search these terms myself, see below…)

5 ) Women dominate the site, with 60% of visitors being female.

6 ) People aged 25-34 dominate the Pinterest site, with a representation of 165 (where 100 equates to an even representation of the Australian internet using population).

7 ) Queenslanders are also over-represented, at 117.

8 ) Pinterest is a great way to reach people of higher incomes, with over-representations for A – Privileged Prosperity (119) and C – Young Ambition (114).

9 ) In the Shopping and Classifieds category, Etsy has the most similar audience to Pinterest, followed by Taste.com.au, Fishpond and Booktopia.

10 ) If Pinterest continues to grow at its current rate, it looks likely to hit 1,000,000 weekly Visits in just 11 weeks!

The relationship between consumers and marketers is evolving constantly. The highly connected and mobile consumer of today is vastly different to that of consumers five years ago. Communication channels have become more varied and the way individual consumers interact with them differs from person to person.

Our recent research into the future of multi-channel marketing allowed us to delve deeply into the preferences of consumers today and is helping us answer the million dollar question – how do we best engage with this new switched on and tough to reach breed of consumers?

We have learnt that consumers all battle information overload and close to three in ten consumers (27%) admitted to creating a separate email address to avoid being inundated by brands. In fact, generic and mass communication seems to be a significant frustration for consumers with 30 per cent of consumers naming the ‘inability to unsubscribe from unwanted communication (email newsletters, SMS alerts and direct mail’) as their number one frustration.

Our research has enabled us to explore new concepts of engagement to better understand what consumers want and the results are a good guide for the future. For example, by a large majority, 70 per cent of consumers rank giveaways or incentives to purchase as one of their top three ways for brands to engage with them. Communication via email newsletters was named by 46 per cent of consumers as one of their top three ways for brands to connect with them with advertising cited as the third most preferred way, named by 42 per cent of consumers.

Marketers are working hard to engage with their customers. But for a company’s multichannel marketing strategy to be successful, it needs to work smarter, not harder. The big opportunity over the coming year is to apply the clever consumer segmentation that is already being used, to create tailored social media campaigns which talk to the needs of their customers.

Success lies in the strategic use of multiple channels to start the dialogue because as the old adage states, no one size – or communication channel – fits all. Talking to consumers and asking for feedback should be the backbone of a brands marketing communication strategy if marketers are to stay ahead of the curve.

Download the full research report on multichannel marketing here

Paywalls are in the news again, with the announcement last week that the Herald Sun is to introduce a paywall , restricting some areas of online content to subscribers.

Having instituted one for sister title The Australian last October, covered here, we thought it might be time to take a look at what happened when the Australian paywall went up, in October 2011.

Firstly, The Australian shed Visits, dropping 20.37% in their post-paywall averages. Over a three month average they totalled 4.3 million Visits, compared to 5.4million the pre-paywall.

The Australian also lost Market Share, as represented by Rank in the Experian Hitwise News & Media – Print category, dropping to 8th nationally, their lowest for 36 months.

However, was the drop consistent or was it only sections of the population not handing over credit cards?

Who didn’t want to pay?

Nationally, there’s no great change on a State by State level, so the Australian still is, Australian.

Shifts appeared at a sociographic level and appear to be centred around location: the further you were from a city centre, the more likely you were to continue using the Australian website, most likely paying to do so. I will note here that App usage is not included in this data,  as it is likely that some users have migrated to a tablet friendly version.

MOSAIC Groups A, B, C, E & F dropped in Visit Share over the 12 week period, whilst outer suburban to rural Groups D, H, I, J & K held or grew.

As seen below, the Herald Sun has group E & F as two of it’s largest contributing segments, over indexed for both. Given these dropped in Share for the Australian, the impact of the paywall is going to be interesting.

Experian Hitwise. Now you know.

Understanding changing consumer behaviour and the impact it has on brand communications is at the heart of what we do. We thrive on the identification of a new trend and are fascinated by the ways in which marketing communications evolves – particularly in today’s age of the connected, highly mobile consumer. So towards the end of last year we conducted a study to understand the perceptions of marketers and consumers towards brand communications and discovered a startling disconnect between the two audiences.

The results showed that approximately six out of ten consumers (59%) have completely stopped engaging with four or more brands as a result of poorly targeted communications. We also noticed an apparent wariness consumers had towards brand communications on social media sites; almost three in 10 (29%) of consumers ranked social media as among the three marketing channels they trusted least when receiving information about a brand.Yet to some extent this is very similar to the trend we saw when corporate emails and EDMs were issued five years ago. It takes time for consumers to become accustomed to a new method of communication.

However it’s not all doom and gloom and there is a lot that marketers are doing well. For example, we found that 89 per cent of marketers are using customer segmentation strategy. In fact, 69 per cent of marketers say they are becoming more selective in choosing channels that most effectively engage with customers.

But the key challenge identified by half (50%) of Australian marketers lies in cutting through the white-noise to get messages through to the consumer as information overload remains a roadblock for the industry.

As we continue to move deeper into an era of multichannel marketing, marketers need to be more selective in their communications and deliver them in a way that is personally relevant to the audiences they are targeting.

There is no doubt that marketers are vying for the attention of consumers and are working hard to ensure their messages are heard. Standing out from the crowd today requires a deep understanding of how and when consumers want to engage across all channels, including social media. If you can invest the time here, the results and impact it has on your overall brand performance should speak for themselves.

Download the full research report here.

Reality TV continues to dominate our television screens, with food preparation, renovations and weight loss fluctuating in terms of retaining Australian viewers. Last Monday, My Kitchen Rules cooked up a storm as it topped 1.56 million viewers, while Biggest Loser flopped and Excess Baggage went belly up.

If you were an executive at Channel Nine, could you have used your Experian Hitwise subscription to act before Excess Baggage fat hit the fan? Of course you could.

The chart below shows the variations of ‘biggest loser’ Searches compared with ‘excess baggage’ over the past 12 weeks.

The first takeaway for the Channel Nine executive is the small volume of Australian Consumer Searches in the lead up to the release of Excess Baggage in the week of the 28th January. Granted, Biggest Loser has an established brand name, but Nine promoted Excess Baggage extensively, plastering K-Fed etc all over the TV screens at my gym (interesting that fitness fanatics should be the target market given the subject matter of the show!). There was also an extensive outdoor campaign, as well as a new one with the recent shift of Excess Baggage to GO.

Note also the increasing peaks in Searches for ‘biggest loser’ terms in the weeks of the 7th and the 21st which interestingly were similar in volume to Searches of ‘My Kitchen Rules’. Meanwhile Excess Baggage actually shed consumer Searches before it shed a kilo.

Television viewer figures are a terrific indication of a show’s success – supplementing viewer results with Market Share of Searches would have demonstrated immediately where the loyalties of the Australian audience lay. Perhaps Channel Nine would have been able to react more quickly to ensure the biggest loss wouldn’t be in its overall Market Share.