Walmart came first amongst the brands, followed by Macy’s and Bebe, which are holding the second and third positions, respectively. Walmart is known for the super discounts that they offer. It puts into use some effective social promotion strategies like incorporating conventional discounts with Groupon’s saving model and community relationship. Walmart put stress on promotion over other social networking outlets. For example, they appointed 12 managers for marketing on Twitter.

Macy’s spent more than Walmart on social media promotions, but in spite of that it came second. Unlike Walmart, Macy’s has a direct approach and gathered 358244 new fans between mid January to mid March. So far other retailers are concerned, their fan bases depend on how well they marketed their brands on social networks and the factors to influence marketing are mostly how well the executed sector specific advices and if they associated any social cause as a part of their brand promotion. In this sense, Walmart is the paradigm of perfect social promotion and marketing. Not surprising at all that it came out first in the list.

Just like it’s important for every human being to introspect, social networking also needs to look back at its past. Keeping this in mind OnlineSchools.org has created an infographic, which depicts the evolution social networking has undergone over 3 decades and packs in information which have been long forgotten with the success of Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and others.

The first email was sent in 1971. Then in the late 70s, bulletin board system was introduced and in mid 90s, a social networking site called Geocities was launched. Almost at the same time, TheGlobe.com, another site to give users the feel of customized online experience, came in the picture. According to the infographic, 90s closed with SixDegrees.com. What happened in this decade, that we all know but still the visual representation makes us to refresh our memories.

The infographic highlights the following:

• 381,576,305 checkins were made in 2010.
• A checkin has been made in every single country in the world, plus space.
• North Korea was the last country to check in.
• The Rally to Restore Sanity on October 30 was the biggest event of the year, with 30,525 checkins made in Washington, D.C. that day.
• Food venues were the most popular checkin category in 2010; campuses were the least.
• MTV, Bravo, the History Channel, Zagat and VH1 were the most popular brand pages.
• California was the #1 state for gym checkins, relative to total checkins.

The infographic shows that in 2010, over $1.7 billion have been spent on social media marketing in the U.S. It also depicts that Facebook dominates other sites by garnering 53% of the total marketing amount spent, while MySpace bags 17%. Twitter got 3% and other sites managed to draw 16%. The global spending was somewhat near to $3.4 billion. Also, corporate blogs, twitter accounts, youtube channels and facebook fan pages are top platforms to use social media for marketing.

Such an overall growth will gear up Reddit’s confidence in the New Year. A major reason for them to happy enough is, in January 2010, Reditt’s pageviews were less than that of its arch-nemesis Digg, which was undergoing an acclerating growth at that time. But then in July, Digg’s pageviews were reported to be 200 million. Digg started slow down since then and could never regain its lost ground and in the last quarter of 2010, Reddit literally outnumbered Digg.

For Digg, September 2010 was the month of mayhem. Their redesign failed to bring the desired result and a huge number of users started departing. It was a golden opportunity for Reddit to turn the floating traffic resulted from the exodus into their users and a challenge as well.

Reddit has succeeded in doing that. At the same time, they kept on improvising their site. As Victor Barrera, one of the Reddit users has tweeted, “I think Reddit’s growth can be attributed to a couple main factors: Digg’s decline and a multitude of improvements and upgrades that really played into the scalability of their platform.” That is indeed true.

As for Reddit, there are some other things in the trail of amplification. Both bytes in and bytes out have increased three times since January 2010. Total number of servers has been increased from 50 to 119, RAM from 424 GB to 1214 GB and disk space from 16 TB to 48 TB to support all the traffic. Reddit also announced that in January their search “sucked” but it “works” now.

Reddit ends the blogpost with, “2010 was a great year for reddit, and 2011’s gonna be so awesome it’ll make 2010 look like 2009.” Sure it will…

The rise of social networking tracks closely with that of Facebook. As of April 26, 2010, 46% of the U.S. online adult population reported having visited Facebook in the past 30 days,” said the report. People primarily logon to stay in touch with friends, followed by for fun and to communicate with family, according to the study. Career- and job-related reasons were low on the list: 19% said they used the sites to keep in touch with professional contacts; 9% wanted to make new professional contacts; 6% sought professional development; and 5% said it was part of their job, the report found.

But now increasingly people are shifting to social media not only for personal reasons but also professional. Last week, a study conducted for Cisco found that 68% of IT decision-makers determined employees were accessing social networking sites from work. As the lines between personal and business computing increasingly blur, it is becoming clear that employees are going to use social networking and personal devices whether permitted or not.

Social networking sites’ impact on business is growing. Social networks are not only for the young: While almost 90% of connected 18 to 34-year-olds visit these sites today, 41% of online adults aged 50-plus make monthly visits to social networks, the study said.

The graph below shows the Google Trends result for ‘how to delete Facebook account which clearly seems to be on the rise. It was at its peak somewhere in May 2010. An astonishing fact is that this phrase was most searched in Delhi when we look in terms of all the cities in the world.

According to a study from OTX  and virtual fashion site Roiworld, nearly one in five teens (19%) with a Facebook profile had decreased or discontinued their use of the site as of April 2010. In addition, 9% of teen internet users said they had a Facebook profile but had completely abandoned it.

The Roiworld survey of 600 teens (age 13 – 17) found that while teens spend around 80% of their online time on social networks,Facebook’s popularity is beginning to fall drastically. While about 45% say they have lost interest, 16% said they are leaving because their parents have joined and 14% think “too many adults/older people” now use the social network.

Facebook is definitely not going the ‘Orkut way’ but we are waiting to see what it does to contain its large teen audience.

According to its co-founder, Biz Stone, the micro-blogging site has reached over 800 million search queries. That’s over 24 billion in a month, way ahead of Bing (4.1 billion) and Yahoo (9.4 billion) combined but still lagging behind Google by a huge margin which supports about 88 billion search queries per month.

Maybe this is success is exactly what Twitter had always wanted. If we go by what Biz Stone spoke about at the World Innovation Forum Twitter seeks to shun the social networking site image it has acquires since the very beginning. They claim to be an information network or a source of new with social elements to it.

Biz also had some tips for companies trying to enter the Twitter-sphere. “I usually tell people who are just getting started: Search for your company or brand name or the name of your restaurant, and see what people are saying,” he suggested to the crowd. “You don’t necessarily have to immediately develop this strategy. What you can do is you can see if users are misinformed or if they have questions, and then you can jump in.”

Twitter is growing in leaps and bounds but do they know what they exactly want?  Only time will tell.

A Ball State University study of a primarily female group of college students found that a majority of them had seen ads on their phones, including 51.2% of smartphone or touchscreen phone users and 61.3% of feature-phone users. Text ads were most prevalent. Their reactions to ads were highly negative. More than 40% were annoyed to get an ad, compared with just 1.2% who were pleased and 17.6% who were neutral. Even more dramatic, nearly three in 10 said they were less likely to purchase a product after seeing a mobile ad for it. Slightly fewer reported their purchase intent was unchanged, but only a small number said mobile ads encouraged them to purchase.

A substantial minority of respondents (44.3%) would not be induced to receive mobile ads under any circumstances, but 37% were willing to accept them for something free in return. Free ringtones and music were the most popular exchange. In addition, almost two-thirds of all respondents said ads would be OK if they got paid to see them, and the largest segment of that group wanted at least $1 in return for each ad viewed.

College students are an attractive target for mobile marketers who know their audience is always on. Non-advertising marketing efforts like sponsored or branded apps may be seen as less intrusive or inappropriate, though about only half of the group has smartphones so far.

According to an analysis by the French firm Semiocast, Twitter users in Asia accounted for 37 percent of Tweets during a recent day. The country-wise statistics are-  The U.S. is still Twitter’s single biggest contributor, currently with 25 percent of tweets (down from 30 percent in March). Japan is now No. 2, at 18 percent, while Indonesia has 10 percent of daily tweets and South Korea has 2 percent.

The statistics for Japan represented above is a bit larger than indicated by a statistic Twitter recently released to the Associated Press. It says Japanese users tweet about 8 million tweets a day, which translates to 12 percent of the global total. But the fact that Twitter is big in Japan is not a coincidence. The company has put special emphasis on that country, launching a Japanese version in early 2008.

Some 16.3 percent of Japanese Internet users are on Twitter, compared to 9.8 percent of Americans, according to Nielsen. Twitter says it saw an all-time record — 3,283 tweets per second — when Japan beat Denmark in the World Cup last week.

While Twitter has been busy rolling out geo-location and related tools, those are not yet widely used. On June 22, Semiocast found that of 2.9 million total tweets, only 0.6 percent included geo-tags (although that’s up from 0.5 percent three months before).

So how does Semiocast determine the location of the rest of the tweets? It’s imperfect, but the company looks at the locations users specify in their static profile information (usually their hometown, so this doesn’t change on a per-tweet basis as someone travels) and the language users tweet in.

Now Twitter is getting lots of problems managing the huge amounts of data and tweets which is up-to 190 million monthly unique users which has led to instability problems.

What is the future of Twitter in Asia? How many users actually are active amongst the statistics that we see right now? How will this help brands in their Social Media Marketing Strategies?- Some unanswered questions that you will surely get an answer to in the future.