Heidi Allen Digital Strategy

Complied from Facebooks Ad platform, in January 2011, this slideshow give some interesting stats – check out slides 14 and 15 for example – slightly more male than females (which surprised me) but the next slide shows the distribution of said genders.  Quite a different picture, that said stats are difficult to compile and interpret, so always have a big pinch of salt to hand.

How do you engage teenages using social media in health. I’m not sure this is easy to answer. They are the SMS generation, not facebook. Any ideas?

This was a question I asked on LinkedIn How about this for a superb answer and case study from Jesper Nyholm, Copenhagen, Denmark

I have sucesfully engaged teenagers in online communities (social media) promoting healthy lifestyle.

I have concepted and implemented several health-campaigns for both Danish companies and Governments trying to reach the teenagers through social media.

(we have succesfully engaged more than 150.000 people in healthy campaigns via social media since 2005. some of the campaigns lasted 12 weeks and on average we have 80% of the participants completing the campaigns with daily interaction and with great healthy results)

my key findings are:

1. you need to make a story of the healthy issue – don’t spend to much time on talking health – spend time on encapsulating health into a relevant context for the teenagers.

2. you need to have a scoreboard and think in points and merits – look at all that is happening on facebook these days; farmville, mafiawars – or outside facebook; world of warcraft – these games are based on getting points and honor your effort.

3. When engaging teenagers, make sure that everybody can join your initiative at their own level – It is like playing golf; a bad player (unhealthy teenager) is able to challenge a pro player (healthy teenager) because of the handicap scoresystem in golf.

I know that this is a very brief introduction to our key findings. We are working on a book on the subject – and  have plenty of relevant cases to introduce you to if you need more inspiration?

Gotta love social media for providing gold answers.

And in line with how young people are using email, texting, PEW released this data on how young people communicate

If I’m lucky Jesper may expand on this answer in the future. It’s clearly a well researched project they have undertaken.  Here’s hoping.

but not as we were expecting. Defining the generations according to age and habits online is an ever movable feast (for example do you know what age Gen X is supposed to be?). What I do like in this report is that the generational divide is narrowing – there are some things that are becoming commonplace across all the generations, listening to podcasts for example. This is a good thing.

Here is the 2010 update from PEW

There are still notable differences by generation in online activities, but the dominance of the Millennial generation has slipped in many activities. Milliennials, those ages 18-33, remain more likely to access the internet wirelessly with a laptop or mobile phone. In addition, they still clearly surpass their elders online when it comes to:

• Use of social networking sites
• Use of instant messaging
• Using online classifieds
• Listening to music
• Playing online games
• Reading blogs
• Participating in virtual worlds.

However, internet users in Gen X (those ages 34-45) and older cohorts are more likely than Millennials to engage in several online activities, including visiting government websites and getting financial information online.

Finally, the biggest online trend is that, while the very youngest and oldest cohorts may differ, certain key internet uses are becoming more uniformly popular across all age groups. These online activities include:

• seeking health information,
• purchasing products,
• making travel reservations,
• and downloading podcasts.

Even in areas that are still dominated by Millennials, older generations are making notable gains. While the youngest generations are still significantly more likely to use social network sites, for instance, the fastest growth has come from internet users 74 and older: social network site usage for this oldest cohort has quadrupled since 2008, from 4% to 16%.

Update in response to Matthew’s comment here are ages of the different generations. It’s interesting to see how the generations are defined, for example, the Millennial generation are named after the turn in the calender and refers to those born after 1980 – the first generation to come of age in the new Millennium.

You can download the full Generations 2010 Pew Report here

Experimenting with various ways to share an article means I now have more facebook and twitter aps than you can shake a stick at:  in the column, in the article and on the wibiya toolbar at the bottom.  There is an argument for less is more. Nevertheless….

What are the stats on Twitter and Facebook influence?

Twitter reply and RT

Sysomos examined 1.2 billion tweets posted in the last two months (what do they do in their spare time?). Their analysis is worth a read. They surmise that a tweet that generates a reply or a retweet suggests it is interesting enough that it has sparked a conversation or people want to share it with their network (which is what you want if you are blogging for example).

29% of tweets generate a reply or a retweet

• Of this group of tweets, 19.3% were retweets (maybe because it’s quick and easy to do) and the rest replies, in other words of the 1.2 billion tweets examined, 6%, (or 72 million) were retweets.

Most retweets happen in the first hour

• Which means timing your tweet if you have just published a blog post is important (you may want to post the tweet more than once for different time zones for example).

Facebook ‘Like’

According to facebook + media, the like button is important.  They asked ‘Who are “likers” and found:

• People who click the Facebook Like button are more engaged, active and connected than the average Facebook user.
  The average “liker” has 2.4x the amount of friends than that of a typical Facebook user.

• They are also more interested in exploring content they discover on Facebook
  They click on 5.3x more links to external sites than the typical Facebook user.

• The ‘like’ button is favoured by a younger audience.
  The the average “liker” on a news site is 34, compared to the median age of a newspaper subscriber which is approximately 54 years old, (as reported by the Newspaper Association of America).

Again, maybe because the like button is easy to use (like the retweet) people favour using it and it means content is shared quickly. So, although less is more, for the moment, twitter and facebook are here to stay on this site for a while.