Social networking is (again) the activity that internet users spend the most time doing. It’s been this way for a few years now, and Experian’s latest report confirms it’s still the case. Experian says that, in the U.S., 27 percent of every hour spent online is spent on social networks and forums — that’s about 16 minutes out of every hour. Entertainment sites (nine minutes per hour) and shopping (five …Read More

That’s an old statistic from 2011. You may remember me writing about it before: 63 percent of U.S. consumers are more likely to use a local business if it has information available on a social networking site. I mention that stat regularly when I’m speaking at Local U workshops about social media for local businesses. And I always sense that the audience immediately asks the same question that I asked …Read More

… and that’s okay, I guess. I say this because I see social media experts: 1.) Publishing valuable, original content on someone else’s domain. I just don’t get this at all. Why would anyone, much less a social media expert, publish their own content in such a way that it creates value for some other domain? If you’re using Quora blogs or Google+ or LinkedIn to publish evergreen content that …Read More

Twitter can be a tough nut for small businesses to crack. You send out tweet after tweet after tweet and … nothing. (This is why Twitter has been doing small biz education and on-boarding for a while now.) So if being active isn’t working, try being passive. Passive? Yes. I mean: use Twitter as a customer service tool, listening first and responding when needed. It’s really simple. You can do …Read More