Infographic: The Rising King of Social Sales

April 26, 2013

When it comes to driving sales, Pinterest reigns supreme in the social kingdom. It's also growing in areas where other social networks are losing ground. According to the data gathered byRichRelevance, a personalized commerce provider that analyzed browser-based shopping sessions on U.S. websites using RichRelevance's retail recommendation software, while Facebook accounted for 92% of the surveyed websites' share of referrer traffic in mid-December, the social network's share of traffic rates plummeted to 69% the week before Easter. Contrastingly, Pinterest's started at a meager 6% in mid-December and shot up to 25% before the Easter holiday.

RichRelevance's data indicates that Facebook is also losing its crown when it comes to share of sales. Facebook boasted an impressive 89% share of sales in mid-December compared to Pinterest and Twitter; yet its share of sales figures fell to 78% by the time the candied eggs and Peeps rolled in. However, Pinterest's share of sales jumped from 10 to 21% within that same duration. Pinners also appear to spend more than Twitter followers and Facebook users alike. According to the data, Pinterest shoppers spend approximately $140 to $180 per order, while Facebook shoppers spend about $80 per order and Twitter shoppers ring up $60 orders. This difference in shopping carts was highlighted the week leading up to Easter, as Pinterest shoppers forked over an average of $194 per order compared to $84 and $35 for Facebook and Twitter, respectively.

But if Pinterest wants to hold onto its sales crown, it will need to enhance its share of referrals. While Pinterest's share of home and furnishings shopper referrals accounted for 60% of all social referrer traffic, its share of movie and TV referrals only accounted for 10%.

We know you love infographics. Check out some more Direct Marketing News originals.

20 Stats About How Social Media Influences Purchasing Decisions

November 2012

Social media influences purchasing decisions.

If you need to prove this point to your boss, upper management, customers or even your mother, here are 20 stats on the subject. Feel free to share them at the dinner table tomorrow.

1. Consumers are 71% more likely to make a purchase based on social media referrals(Hubspot)

2. Social networks influence nearly 50% of all IT decision makers (LinkedIn – learn more atTechConnect ’12)

3. Out of 53% of consumers who said they use Twitter to recommend companies or products in their Tweets, 48% bought that product or service (SproutSocial)

4. Twitter is the #1 online channel for influencing purchasing decisions surrounding electronics (Mashable)

5. 15,100,000 consumers go to social media channels before making purchase decisions(Knowledge Networks)

6. 49% of consumers use Facebook to search for restaurants (Mashable)

7. 74% of consumers rely on social networks to guide purchase decisions (SproutSocial)

8. 58% of Facebook users expect offers, events or promotions when they become fans(Hubspot)

9. Facebook is the most effective platform to get consumers talking about products (SproutSocial)

10. Facebook is the #1 online channel for influencing the purchase of baby products (Mashable)

11. 79% of consumers like a Facebook company page because it offers discounts and incentives (Forbes)

12. 44% of automotive consumers conduct research on forums (Mashable)

13. 38,000,000 13 to 80 year olds in the U.S. said their purchasing decisions were influenced by social media (Knowledge Networks)

14. 81% of US respondents indicated that friends’ social media posts directly influenced their purchase decision (Forbes)

15. As of June 2011, there were 213,000,000 fans of Facebook Pages (Mashable)

16. 32.5% of women say they’re influenced by special offers on Facebook vs 29% on Twitter (Business2Community)

17. 78% of respondents said that companies’ social media posts impact their purchases (Forbes)

18. Moms are 45% more likely than other women to say they made a purchase from a recommendation on social (MarketingProfs)

19. 70% of active online adult social networkers shop online, 12% more likely than the average adult internet user (Nielsen)

20. 44% of social media savvy women said their trusted/favorite blogger influences their purchasing decision (Business2Community)

Two Personas Every Marketer Should Care About, Even if They Never Buy

by Kieran Flanagan

April 30, 2013 at 12:30 PM

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At HubSpot we talk about personas a lot. That's because inbound marketing is really about creating persona-driven marketing that helps you engage with your dream customers in the channels they are most comfortable in. When discussing personas, we usually talk about buyer personas and how identifying them can help you create marketing people really love.

However, there are lots of other uses for personas, and two in particular come to mind that (for the purposes of this blog post, at least). Though they'll probably never become a customer, there are two personas to whom you should still always consider in your marketing. These people can help you generate more inbound links, social shares, and email forwards, and can help you gain clout and boost your thought leadership credibility. Here are the two otherpersonas all marketers should consider -- even if they'll never become your customer -- and how to think about them alongside your day-to-day marketing activities.

The Company Fan

Having fans that link to your content and share it on their social networks is an important part of any modern-day content strategy. In some markets, creating remarkable content for your buyer personas will naturally attract lots of links and social shares. For example, HubSpot creates lots of content for different types of marketers; many of these marketers also have the power to share that content with their networks or link to it from their blogs.

Now consider the situation of a website that is offering, say, plumbing services. It's a lot different, right? The people who buy their services probably won’t be the same people who will link to their site or share it on social media. Their buyer personas may not be as active online, have their own social media accounts, or a blog to link out from. Thus, they need to develop a persona for people they want to turn into fans.

Sample Company Fan Persona: George the Plumber

Let's call the first persona this company could target "George the Plumber." This persona is directed toward other plumbers who are using inbound marketing to generate awareness for their own company. These people are active online and have the resources to provide you with a link or share it with their network.

There are a lot’s of ways to develop this profile of your "Company Fan." You could interview other plumbers, conduct a group survey, do analysis of other plumbing websites to identify who links to them and, more importantly who they link out to. Another quick way to retrieve some information is through a tool called FollowerWonk. Here's what you do:

1) Visit FollowerWonk and search for your target persona. In this search we narrowed results to “New York,” but for personas that are not very active online, I would recommend not adding a location. For example, there are only 34 Twitter users in New York who have “plumber” in their bio. When you remove New York, there are over 4,000.

2) Copy the FollowerWonk search URL and paste it into TagCrowd. You will get back a list of other common words these people have in their Twitter bio. This could help you identify other interests that plumbers have, giving you things they may link to or share on Twitter.

There could be multiple “Company Fan” personas for any one business. For example, staying within the plumbing sector, here's a good example of a piece of content that is targeting a separate or sub-persona -- those who care about clean water. This piece of content has attracted over 343 unique links so far, and lots of social shares. Think of it as the long tail of persona targeting.

The purpose of content is to attract the right kind of visitors who will turn into happy and successful customers, so in most cases you want to create content for your buyer personas. But inbound marketers looking to widen and strengthen their online footprint should consider a separate persona for a "Company Fan" that will probably never purchase from you, but will help you spread your content and brand message. This focus will help you, over time, bring in more people that actually will become a future customer.

The Influencer

An influencer is another example of a persona that may not purchase a product from you, but can have a big impact on the success of your brand. They are the people in your market who can help get your content in front of a bigger audience with the click of a button, add social proof around your products, service, and content, and generally help grow your brand.

The first step is to identify some real-world influencers who you can base your persona on. To do this, I am going to use FollowerWonk and compare my followers with two other hubspotters,@DianaUrban & @Mallikarjunan:

There are 26 people who we all follow. These are people who are influencers to us. Clicking on that link will show me who they are:

You could then manually create a list for these and keep an eye on what type of content your influencers share, or if you're a HubSpot customer, you could automate the whole process using HubSpot's social media tool:

The next thing to do is segment your influencers into different categories and figure out how you can develop content they will actually care about. This is made easier when you have everything they are sharing in one handy list. One of the "Influencer" personas may look like this:

With these tweaks to your day-to-day marketing, you can now make influencer marketing part of the content mix you produce. Again, this may never get you direct sales from the influencers themselves, but will really help to get your brand name mentioned in the right circles and even get you indirect sales from that awareness.

The most important personas for your business are your buyer personas, but the same techniques can be used to create personas that will benefit the rest of your inbound marketing.

New report shows social media usage stats for Canada

April 29, 2013  |  Canadian Press  |  Comments

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One in three anglophone Canadians says not a single day goes by without checking into their social media feeds.
It’s one of many social networking statistics compiled in a new report by the Media Technology Monitor, based on surveys conducted in the fall with 4,001 anglophone Canadians.
Almost seven in 10 internet users said they were regular social media users, logging on at least once a month. That figure was up by about 6% compared to 2011.
Those growing numbers didn’t surprise Aimee Morrison, an associate professor at the University of Waterloo, who researches digital culture.
“It’s becoming a mainstream part of how we get the business of life accomplished and you’re at a disadvantage increasingly if you don’t do it,” said Morrison.
“I think social media is hitting a tipping point in a way that cellphones did in the later part of the 1990s, where we’ve moved from the stage where it was something that the early adopters did and then the hipsters did and then the kids did.”
About 63% of social media users said they read Facebook posts, tweets and/or LinkedIn updates every single day.
Facebook remains far and away the most popular social network. About 63% of Internet users and 93% of social media users said they’re on Facebook.
While Twitter gets a lot of media hype and is growing rapidly it’s not all that commonly used in Canada, according to MTM’s numbers.
Less than one in five Internet users said they were on Twitter in the last month, although those numbers had grown by 80% in a year, up from just 10% in 2011.
“Probably in the press it looks like more people are on Twitter than actually are on Twitter,” said Morrison, who noted the stats were in line with usage of the social network among her graduate students.
“They didn’t think it was relevant to them or some had concerns about privacy or the exposure they might face as young workers… They were worried it might be held against them if they did it wrong.”
Morrison pointed out that it can be difficult for new users “to know the right way to use Twitter and therefore it can be more alienating than something like Facebook.”
The business-oriented social network LinkedIn had similar usage numbers, although it grew slower since 2011. About 12% of Internet users said they used it at least once a month in 2011 and the figure was up to 18% in 2012.
“It’s a lot of work to do LinkedIn well, I imagine there’s a lot of begun and abandoned (accounts),” Morrison said.
“If you join because you think you’re supposed to but you don’t have a burning need that you’re trying to fulfil it’s pretty easy to give up before you get to that point where you start to see returns on investment in time and effort.”
Only 7% of the social media users surveyed said they were regular users of Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn, logging in to each at least one a month. Those users were most likely to be under 50, university educated and live in a high-income household with a child under 12 in the home.
Morrison said social media membership will likely continue to grow as users who previously held out feel obligated to finally join in.
“We’re getting into now that cultural tipping point where it’s no longer really that choice of, ‘I don’t need it, I’m not going to use it,’ but rather, ‘I’m being left out of things now because so many people use it and they assume everyone has it.””
On the other hand, there will always be resisters who refuse to sign on to what they deem to be a fad.
Maybe it’s not for you “if you are very satisfied with the amount of interaction you have with your friends and family and the people you lost touch with you’re happy to not be in touch with them anymore. Or you’re not looking for a job, you’re happy with where you are,” Morrison said.
“If you’re very satisfied with your life it’s quite possible you do not need whatever new technological gizmo that comes your way.”

Inbound Marketing Methodology

The best way to turn strangers into customers and promoters of your business.

The proven methodology for the digital age

Since 2006 inbound marketing has been the most effective marketing method for doing business online. Instead of the old outbound marketing methods of buying ads, buying email lists, and praying for leads, inbound marketing focuses on creating quality content that pulls people toward your company and product, where they naturally want to be. By aligning the content you publish with your customer’s interests, you naturally attract inbound traffic that you can then convert, close, and delight over time.

How to interpret the graphic

Along the top are the four marketing actions (Attract, Convert, Close, Delight) inbound marketers must take in order to obtain visitors, leads, and customers. Along the bottom are the tools marketers use to accomplish these actions. (Note the tools are listed under the marketing action where they first come into play, but that’s not the only place they’re applicable! Several tools, like email, can be essential in several stages of the methodology.)

What is Inbound Marketing?

Sharing is caring and inbound marketing is about creating and sharing content with the world. By creating content specifically designed to appeal to your dream customers, inbound marketing attracts qualified prospects to your business and keeps them coming back for more.

Major themes:

• Content Creation - You create targeted content that answers your customer's basic questions and needs, and you share that content far and wide.
• Lifecycle Marketing - You recognize that people go through stages as they interact with your company, and that each stage requires different marketing actions.
• Personalization - As you learn more about your leads over time, you can better personalize your messages to their specific needs.
• Multi-channel - Inbound marketing is multi-channel by nature because it approaches people where they are, in the channel where they want to interact with you.
• Integration - Your publishing and analytics tools all work together like a well-oiled machine, allowing you to focus on publishing the right content in the right place at the right time.

Make marketing people love.

By publishing the right content in the right place at the right time, your marketing becomes relevant and helpful to your customers, not interruptive. Now that’s marketing people can love.

The Four Marketing Actions

Attract

We don’t want just any traffic to our site, we want the right traffic. We want the people who are most likely to become leads, and, ultimately, happy customers. Who are the “right” people? Our ideal customers, also known as our buyer personas. Buyer personas are holistic ideals of what your customers are really like, inside and out. Personas encompass the goals, challenges, pain points, common objections to products and services, as well as personal and demographic information shared among all members of that particular customer type. Your personas are the people around whom your whole business is built.

Some of the most important tools to attract the right users to your site are:

• Blogging - Inbound marketing starts with blogging. A blog is the single best way to attract new visitors to your website. In order to get found by the right prospective customers, you must create educational content that speaks to them and answers their questions.
• Social Media - You must share remarkable content and valuable information on the social web, engage with your prospects, and put a human face on your brand. Interact on the networks where your ideal buyers spend their time.
• Keywords - Your customers begin their buying process online, usually by using a search engine to find something they have questions about. So you need to make sure you’re appearing prominently when they search. To get there, you need to carefully, analytically pick keywords, optimize your pages, create content, and build links around the terms your ideal buyers are searching for.
• Pages - You must optimize your website to appeal to and speak with your ideal buyers. Transform your website into a beacon of helpful content to entice the right strangers to visit your pages.

Convert

Once you’ve got visitors to your site, the next step is to convert those visitors into leads by gathering their contact information. At the very least, you’ll need their email addresses. Contact information is the most valuable currency there is to the online marketer. In order for your visitors to offer up that currency willingly, you need to offer them something in return. That “payment” comes in the form of content, like ebooks, whitepapers, or tip sheets -- whatever information would be interesting and valuable to each of your personas.

Some of the most important tools in converting visitors to leads include:

• Calls-to-Action - Calls-to-action are buttons or links that encourage your visitors to take action, like “Download a Whitepaper” or “Attend a Webinar.” If you don’t have enough calls-to-action or your calls-to-action aren’t enticing enough, you won’t generate any leads.
• Landing Pages - When a website visitor clicks on a call-to-action, they should then be sent to a landing page. A landing page is where the offer in the call-to-action is fulfilled, and where the prospect submits information that your sales team can use to begin a conversation with them. When website visitors fill out forms on landing pages, they typically become leads.
• Forms - In order for visitors to become leads, they must fill out a form and submit their information. Optimize your form to make this step of the conversion process as easy as possible.
• Contacts - Keep track of the leads you're converting in a centralized marketing database. Having all your data in one place helps you make sense out of every interaction you’ve had with your contacts -- be it through email, a landing page, social media, or otherwise -- and how to optimize your future interactions to more effectively attract, convert, close, and delight your buyer personas.

Close

You’re on the right track. You’ve attracted the right visitors and converted the right leads, but now you need to transform those leads into customers. How can you most effectively accomplish this feat? Certain marketing tools can be used at this stage to make sure you’re closing the right leads at the right times.

Closing tools include:

• Lead Scoring - You’ve got contacts in your system, but how do you know which ones are ready to speak to your sales team? Using a numerical representation of the sales-readiness of a lead takes the guesswork out of the process.
• Email - What do you do if a visitor clicks on your call to action, fills out a landing page, or downloads your whitepaper, but still isn’t ready to become a customer? A series of emails focused on useful, relevant content can build trust with a prospect and help them become more ready to buy.
• Marketing Automation - This process involves creating email marketing and lead nurturing tailored to the needs and lifecycle stage of each lead. For example, if a visitor downloaded a whitepaper on a certain topic from you in the past, you might want to send that lead a series of related emails. But if they follow you on Twitter and visited certain pages on your website, you might want to change the messaging to reflect those different interests.
• Closed-loop Reporting - How do you know which marketing efforts are bringing in the best leads? Is your sales team effectively closing those best leads into customers? Integration with your Customer Relationship Management (CRM) system allows you to analyze just how well your marketing and sales teams are playing together.

Delight

Inbound marketing is all about providing remarkable content to our users, whether they be visitors, leads, or existing customers. Just because someone has already written you a check doesn’t mean you can forget about them. Inbound marketers continue to engage with, delight, and (hopefully) upsell their current customer base into happy promoters of the companies and products they love.

Tools used to delight customers include:

• Smart Calls-to-Action - These present different users with offers that change based on buyer persona and lifecycle stage.
• Social Media - Using various social platforms gives you the opportunity to provide real-time customer service.
• Email and Marketing Automation - Providing your existing customers with remarkable content can help them achieve their own goals, as well as introduce new products and features that might be of interest to them.

A New Methodology

The new Inbound Marketing Methodology covers each and every step taken, tool used, and lifecycle stage travelled through on the road from stranger to customer. It empowers marketers to attract visitors, convert leads, close customers, and delight promoters. The new methodology acknowledges that inbound marketing doesn’t just happen, you do it. And you do it using tools and applications that help you create and deliver content that will appeal to precisely the right people (your buyer personas) in the right places (channels) at just the right times (lifecycle stages).

Are People Watching TV Ads or Looking at Their Mobile Devices?

April 23, 2013 by MarketingCharts staff

There has been a good deal of research lately devoted to TV consumption trends as they relate to increasing adoption of smart devices, and as TV increasingly becomes part of a multi-screen experience. Some signs point to TV multitasking as enhancing the viewing experience: for example, a recent study found that interacting with social media while watching TV drives increased program engagement. But a key question remains: are these viewers watching TV ads or picking up their devices? A new study [pdf] by Symphony Advanced Media sheds some light on this issue.
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The study – sponsored by the Coalition for Innovative Media Measurement (CIMM) – measured cross-media advertising effectiveness using passive measurement of ad exposure. This type of measurement captures data from panelists every second of every day without the need for panelist interaction, using a single source to time stamp TV, online and application usage.

The results reveal that 30-40% of actual TV ad viewing occurred concurrently with mobile device usage. It’s important to note that these results are limited to 3 test cases: a CPG brand; a wireless brand; and a pharma brand. (Each were national advertiser campaigns.) It’s also worth noting that the study was limited to participants who use their mobile device in front of the TV, so may not be representative of all mobile owners.

Still, on average, participants spent one-third of TV ad viewing time looking at their mobile phone or tablet. The researchers suggest that “TV viewers may not be tuning away from commercials… just picking up the phone or tablet.” While the study doesn’t measure the effects on ad attention or effectiveness, previous research from the IAB suggested that multi-screen users are actually better able to recall TV advertisers. The IAB posited then that the surprising result could be because people who have their second devices during commercial breaks are less likely to channel surf or skip the commercial break, leaving them aware, at some level, of the brands on the screen. (The listen to – rather than watch – TV phenomenon.)

Whether or not the IAB results would hold up under further testing, it’s interesting to have some hard data to support the IAB’s theory that viewers with mobile devices are using them during commercial breaks.

Other Findings:

• The Symphony Advanced Media study also found that on average, viewers who were exposed to an ad across one of the 3 test campaigns consumed 24 hours of TV on average per week, while those who were not exposed to an ad watched an average of 10 hours per week. That’s a fairly logical result, in that heavy TV viewers are more likely to be exposed to a particular ad than light viewers.
• Upper funnel metrics such as favorability and unaided awareness grew by 51% and 22%, respectively, when participants were exposed to both TV and online ad campaigns, versus TV campaigns only.

7 Landing Page Tests You Can Run Tomorrow!

Apr 22, 2013 at 10:15am ET by Mona Elesseily

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For many years, I’ve been participating in sessions/panels in which I critique PPC landing pages volunteered by audience members. As crowds go wild for this type of session, I’ve decided to use this space to focus on effective landing page elements and provide several examples thereof.

#1 Use Credibility Indicators

Include credibility indicators on your landing page such as testimonials, reviews, awards, social media information (Facebook likes, number of tweets, etc.), and seller ratings (on Google, this info is pulled from Bizrate and other rating sites).

Here are some specific ideas related to testimonials:

1. Use testimonials to reiterate your company’s core value propositions. For example, consider prominently featuring one extremely compelling testimonial, in larger or selectively bolded print, above a few smaller-print ones further down the page. Whether this featured testimonial is from CNN, NYT, or a particularly eloquent customer depends, of course, on your track record, business, etc.
2. In general, testimonials work better for emotional/personal/edible/retail items. Using citations in publications and expert opinions are better options for products like art, theater and software solutions.

#2 Incorporate Product Badging

In 3 Neuromarketing Considerations for Landing Page Optimization, I covered neuromarketing and how the reptilian brain prefers fewer options. A great way to reduce the number of options and highlight a single or only a few options is to use product badging. Below is an example from unbounce.com and they highlight the Pro plan with a “best value”:

Here are some other badging options:

• Top Rated
• Best Seller
• New Arrival
• Top Pick, Top Seller or Hot Seller
• New
• Great Gift
• Etc.

#3 Remove Page Elements

Try removing page elements. While it is important to test various elements on a PPC landing page, testers must also make a concerted effort to remove elements that distract visitors. In general, cleaner pages tend to convert better than cluttered ones. Here are some suggestions for minimizing the clutter:

1. Remove elements that don’t add value to the #1 conversion goal of your page. For example, remove newsletter sign up options, links to other content, navigation on a page, etc.
2. Chop down ad copy and try incorporating bullet points on your page. Less content is easier to read, and copy pops against the white of a page. Take a look at this example from buyfolio:

#4 Test Your Copy

Vary your writing style, using tone and word choice to see what resonates with your audience. When testing copy, I’ll generally use the same overall paragraph components, but change a few sentences and talk about how the product might make different users/visitors feel. Remember, customers buy emotionally and defend their purchases rationally. Make it a goal to get visitors excited about your product or service and see what that does for conversion rates. There are plenty of clues in review information, or you can directly investigate what jazzes your clients (past or current).

#5 Take It Slow

Think about it: it’s not always the best strategy to go for the sale. It might make sense to break down your sales process into a couple of steps — perhaps get a little information at the beginning (like name and phone number or email address) then continue the conversation and building the relationship via phone or email. Taking time to build rapport can really help boost conversion rates and is particularly valuable in a B2B or high-ticket sales situation where sales cycles are longer. In the context of dating, asking for the sale too fast is tantamount to asking someone to marry you after one date. Oy vey.

#6 Test Your Messaging

Evaluate your site by asking someone (preferably someone who doesn’t know anything about your company) the following questions:

• What specific services does your company offer?
• Why should they do business with you?

Go back and rework your landing page copy if users cannot figure out what your company is about in less than 4 seconds (the amount of time before people tend to bail on a page). Revised copy doesn’t need to be long copy, and bullet points are a great option to communicate marketing messages (as per #3).

#7 Use Banners

A great way to incorporate messaging into a page is to use banners and/or ribbons — not hard to do. Figure out why people should buy from you (you should have at least one USP) and put it on your page. Don’t be afraid to repeat it. Look at the example below from musicnotes.com — they have 250K sheet music arrangements (this is their USP), all of which are available instantly. Notice they repeat this over and over in different ways.

Don’t assume people know what you’re all about. Even Zappos, which is very well known for free shipping and returns, repeats this value proposition a couple times on their page. Take a look:

The above represent a few of the many tactics you can use for improving PPC landing page optimization. What strategies do you use? Sound off in the comments!

Social Media Attracts, Drives Purchases for Moms

April 22, 2013 by MarketingCharts staff

BabyCenter-Social-Media-Purchase-Influence-Among-Mothers-Apr2013Mothers are 20% more likely than the general population to use social media, according to [pdf] a report from BabyCenter and comScore. Beyond major sites such as Facebook and YouTube, young mothers (18-34) have higher reach than the general online population on other platforms such as Instagram (27% vs. 15%) and Pinterest (24% vs. 15%). An accompanying survey of expectant women and mother with kids up to 8 years old finds that 59% report having bought something because a brand posted a coupon or other offer on a social network.
44% have made a purchase due to a friend liking or posting about the brand on a social network, 32% because they saw a picture on Pinterest, and almost 1 in 4 on account of seeing a sponsored ad on a social network.

Mothers who are very active on social networks (defined as the top 20% of social networking mothers aged 18-49) are indeed active online purchasers. Compared to the general online adult population, they’re 96% more likely to have made an online food and beverage purchase, 73% more likely to have spent on movies and videos, 61% more likely to have bought apparel, and 82% more likely to have made an online purchase in the toys and games category.

Marketers looking to reach mothers on social media will likely find coupons or discounts to be a good way to attract them. Expectant women and mothers with kids aged up to 8 are 42% more likely than the general online population to say they like or follow brands on social media due to coupons and discounts (78% vs. 55%). They’re also 43% more likely to follow brands because they have bought or used the brand (40% vs. 28%), and 26% more likely to do so because they want to find out about new products early on (43% vs. 34%).

Other Findings:

• Expectant women and mothers of young children are 49% more likely than the general online population sample to own a smartphone (81% vs. 54%), 30% more likely to own a tablet (52% vs. 40%), and 65% more likely to have a streaming TV subscription (49% vs. 30%).
• 73% use parenting social media for brand and product recommendations.
• 45% are communicating more through social media and emailing less frequently.
• These women are more likely to check Facebook and text messages first thing in the morning, and less likely to check their email.
• 36% of these respondents say they have more than 250 Facebook friends, compared to 23% of the general population sample.

About the Data: The study describes its methodology as follows:
“The findings in BabyCenter’s 2013 Social Mom Report are the result of qualitative research including social media diaries, in-depth survey research among over 1,480 moms and other online adults, and a behavioral and secondary analysis with comScore covering e-commerce habits and social analytics. Fourteen new and expectant moms were recruited from across the United States via Facebook, Twitter, and BabyCenter and asked to keep social media diaries documenting their daily online activities and how much time was spent. BabyCenter also held in-home friendship groups in Chicago and San Francisco. Additionally, BabyCenter partnered with Socratic Forum to field an in-depth survey of more than 1,480 individuals including 928 expectant women or moms with kids up to 8 years old as well as 552 other online adults (referred to as general population) using Socratic’s online panel. Finally, comScore analyzed online behaviors of moms 18 to 34 and the top 20% of social moms age 18 to 49 compared to internet users 18+ (general population) in terms of e-commerce online spending by category, as well as social analytics including social brand exposure and referrals.”