Life must be hard for television executives. To decide how much to charge advertisers and whether they should commission another season of a show, they have to know the size of their audience.
The only method they have to do that is by using a survey. The Nielsen ratings track what television viewers watch and then, based on demographics, make certain claims about what everyone else was watching at the same time.
Those figures could be bang-on. A good survey should be and these guys have been doing it for decades.
But if I was a television executive, I'd always be at least a little worried. What if the only people who watched the show were the families Nielsen surveyed... and everyone else was watching Fox News?
Fortunately, Internet marketers never have to worry about that. Our stats tell us exactly how many page views we receive, how many visitors, end even where they come from, what they were doing before they reached our sites and what they want to do when they leave.
No wonder so much advertising is moving to the Internet.
The picture though is starting to get a little murkier. Social media is now as much a part of Internet marketing as blogging, AdSense and email lists. And that means looking at some very different figures.
Facebook, for example, limits me to just 5,000 friends and doesn't let anyone else look at my profile. On Twitter though, I have over 4,800 followers... and no idea how many other people look at my tweets without adding me to their follow list.
More importantly, I don't how many of my Facebook friends are also Twitter followers. I don't know whether my social media audience is around 5,000 or closer to 10,000.
What I can do though is try to make sure that I'm reaching as much of that audience as possible in all the different ways that I can. So I put my Facebook URL into my background on Twitter so that my followers can find me. And I put my tweets on Facebook so that my Facebook friends will check me out on Twitter.
When you have different audiences in different places, part of the challenge will be to make sure that all of your message is getting across to everyone.
That's what helps to build a community, and it's the community that brings you success.
The social media landscape featured on this site can be viewed here
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November 26, 2008 12:08 PM
Hi Joel
Thank you for the post!
How can we get a *larger* size (that we can actually read) of your Social Media Landscape map?
-Vonalda
November 27, 2008 12:32 AM
Hi Joel, thanks for the great post. Like Vonalda could you please make the Social Media Landscape map a bit bigger if possible? Thanks.
November 28, 2008 02:18 PM
Hi Joel
Community is very important for internet marketers like you said joel but it must be a Good Unique idea to make a huge success
Thank you Joel
December 3, 2008 05:25 PM
Good post! And it is fun being part of your Twitter tribe! I'm tweeting a link to this.
Thanks, Judy Rey (judyrey)