With a significant amount of attention being placed on social media these days it’s easy to forget about your more traditional internet marketing programs. With the excitement of friends and followers businesses may be thinking that search engine optimization isn’t what it used to be. After all, if you can get thousands of fans on Facebook and LinkedIn than why worry about ranking well in Google?

Consider the following case study. A current client we’re working with has been working on and spending diligently to grow their social media presence. They’re doing very well too! On Facebook alone they have 20,000 fans. Last week our analytics showed over 50,000 impressions occurred on their Facebook page. This is the type of stuff most small businesses are dreaming about.

However, and like most businesses, this client doesn’t monetize through social media. They have to direct traffic to their website in order to start the sale cycle. So to better gauge the contribution of social media to their overall traffic generation efforts and sales we took a dive into the data. Here’s what we found…

When looking at all traffic we found that Facebook, one of the client’s largest (or perceived largest) marketing assets, referred only 7% of the total amount of traffic we accounted for. Google on the other hand accounted for 56% of the total traffic.

The most interesting part of the analysis was that while the company has been investing a considerable amount of resources into social media marketing, they had yet to invest any resources into their search engine optimization efforts. Yet, the majority of their traffic was coming from Google!

Now, this is not to say that social media is not important. It’s a VITALLY important tool in your kit and you should be using it as much as possible. Social media is fantastic for branding, disseminating information, social acceptance and in some cases lead generation.

However, the point of this long winded story is that search engine optimization is still as important as ever and is a huge component of traffic generation for businesses. When developing your marketing strategy you should consider how you’re going to integrate both social media and SEO and consider how the two work together and feed off each other.

Remember that social media marketing and search engine optimization in many cases are focused on achieving different objectives. In the case of our client social media is an invaluable marketing asset because mass social acceptance is important for them and their success. That may not be the case for all businesses. Additionally, as a national company it is important to use social media to brand nationally and build recognition and comfort with their identity.

Search Engine Optimization is still as important as ever for traffic generation. While social media sites are important it doesn’t change the fact that we’re now trained to use search engines to find the products and services that we need. In our opinion, SEO is still the best internet marketing strategy to drive traffic.

Check back next week when we release our story on social media and lead generation.

For a SEO or Social Media consultation please email grdeken@twidgetmedia.com.

Ask anyone who Lil Wayne is and most of them will know who you’re asking them about. Known by many as “the greatest rapper alive,” Wayne has built a music empire, putting out smash hits for himself and his proteges like clockwork.

But music is not his only talent. The rapper is a very clever business man and even more clever marketer, using collaboration as his biggest marketing asset. While he may be very well known now, it wasn’t always that way. So, what can we learn from the best rapper alive to build our own empires?

Collaborate with those who are not in your circle of influence. Wayne has worked with major artists in hip hop, but he’s also worked with those in the rock scene as well as reggae and pop music. Doing this expanded his reach into markets where he previously had very little exposure. The best part is that the famed rapper got paid to do all of it (usually in the six figure range).

Get out of your comfort zone. While he’s always stuck to his roots of rap and continues to make rap music, the famed musician has also ventured into more experimental styles of music and has picked up a lot of attention for it. As a result Wayne has become more and more regarded as a musician and artist than just a rapper.

Be clever, really clever. Wayne’s music goes past really good beats. People listen intently to his lyrics because of their originality and cleverness. Thus also making him one of the most quoted rappers alive.

You can’t win the game unless you’re willing to stay in it. Most people don’t know this but Wayne started rapping when he was 9 years old as the youngest member of Cash Money Records. Now 27, the rapper has put in 18 years working his way to the top. Nothing happens over night, and this is a great example of someone who has worked for a long time to climb his way to the top.

Learning from Lil Wayne is sure to up your marketing game and help you grow your own empire. Not familiar with the artist? Check out his bio on Wikipedia:  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lil_wayne

In college I studied economics. One of the things I always found to be the most intriguing was that of incentive. Considering economics is a social science I always liked to combine economic theory with theories of sociology and consumer psychology. Doing so seemed appropriate considering my role as a marketer. In other words I was always asking the question, “how can entice people to sign up, opt-in or purchase something from me or from my clients?”

With testing and probing I’ve continued to combine these three social sciences to get closer and closer to concretely answering this question. Most recently I’ve been working to achieve this with email marketing. Why? Because email marketing is extremely inexpensive. Email marketing is completely undervalued. High converting low cost marketing is what everyone business is striving for.

Email marketing allows us to place very strategic messaging in front of my target audience. In a nutshell email marketing is extremely profitable – If one can do it correctly. There are some key guidelines I’ve identified that can help anyone become email marketing experts. Follow these guidelines to skyrocket your conversion, make list membership valuable and build an email marketing empire.

1. Bigger is not always better! If you want to make serious long term profits focus on quality first. Everyone wants a massive email list, but an untargeted, unqualified list – no matter how large – is just a waste of time and money. However, a qualified, targeted list is gold. And as that list builds over time, so does the balance in your bank account. Keep it super targeted, keep it super qualified.
2. Deliver a ridiculous amount of value in every message you deliver. Every message should bleed value. Readers should feel like they’re getting the deal of a lifetime. Do this and your open rates will skyrocket. Just like we stated in our Social Media Best Practices post, we are creatures of habit. We remember the things we like, we go back to places we love, and we’re always looking forward to the next one, whatever it may be! So, give the people what they want, and I promise you, they’ll love you for it.
3. Make it personal. Make it special. This goes with creating value. I can’t tell you how many emails I receive with these generic templates and bland marketing messages trying to get me to buy something else I don’t really need. Marketers don’t think logically sometimes. If you’re promoting something make it special. Think about it like this. If you’re walking down the street and someone hands you a flyer to come to their restaurant you may or may not go, depending on if the happy hour or live music is to your liking. But, what if the owner came out, shook your hand, had you try a sample of their freshly prepared toast points with a rich tomato and basil pesto, paired with a delicious Chilean red wine and said, “I’d love it if you would dine with us tonight. We’re new and we’d love to have you be a part of our dining experience.”

   You may think twice right? Hell, you might have a seat right then and there. That’s how you’re emails should be, that personal and that special.

4. Give the list an exclusive feel and incentivize your audience to join. This should perhaps be the first guideline because this has to do with driving list growth. You should only be driving targeted traffic to your site anyways (assuming you want to convert leads and sales) so craft your pitch to them in a way that makes them feel like being a part of your email list is a service you provide. Not a cheap way for you to market to them. Brand your list so that users call it something other than what it is – an email list – and forget how simple what you’re doing really is. This isn’t something elaborate, it’s email with a spin. It’s all about the spin. Affiliate marketers are the kings of getting people to opt into their lists. They tell you about all of these benefits waiting on the other side (you have to put your email in to get to the other side) and make the list feel like some elite marketing club. The truth is they want your email so they can push other products to you and the rest of their super targeted list of marketing beginners who want to make millions kicking back from home (if only it were so easy).

Email marketing is fast becoming a powerful marketing tool and you can use it for profit if you have the right approach. Want some great examples? Look at any of the daily deal websites (Groupon, Coup Tessa, Living Social). How does it work? If you sign up they will give you ridiculously discounted deals only available through them (exclusivity + incentive). Then each day you get an email (habit building) that has a great deal for something 50% off or more in your city (value). Groupon makes over $1,000,000 per day (yes per day). Hello targeted email marketing…

This is a case study piece we put together to send out to our Jacksonville and Miami based clients.

Testing your advertising efforts is a luxury that didn’t truly exist until the age of the internet. Sure there were ways before, but they were expensive and time intensive, so the marketers of the world did the best they could.

Today our marketing efforts are completely quantifiable. And as such there is a huge opportunity for advertisers to drive sales through the roof and skyrocket their margins.

WAIT. Let me stop us right here. I’m not going to sit here and tell you about all of these crazy results like so many other companies and ‘gurus’. You NEED proof if you’re going to really take my advice. So, let me tell you about a recent campaign our company was running for one of the largest online dating communities on the web. Here is some data from this week illustrating some results in our testing phase.

From Left to Right: Date, Clicks, Leads, Conversion Rate, EPC and Earnings

As you can see, our first attempt converted only at 6.82 percent. Not a bad first attempt honestly, but we knew we could do better. So we kept testing, and testing and testing. Soon we went from 6.82% to 12.5%, then onto 16.46%. Wow!

Now, here’s where most people make a HUGE mistake! They stop testing. And where others stop testing, we keep going. We started testing more copy variations, looking at tons of other ads, refreshing our brains with some good ol’ consumer psychology and then…when we thought it wouldn’t go higher…well, it did…

Our latest conversion rate is 24.43%. YES, you read it correctly. That’s roughly a 250% increase in our conversion rate, and a whole lot more profit for our client.

One of the most important things you can do as a advertiser is to remove assumptions from the equation. We all have our education and life experience that entitles us to ‘knowing our audience’ but the reality is most of us simply don’t.

Split test your ads and focus on using your research to think just like your audience. You see ads every day, why do you click on them? You know there’s a catch, but you do it anyways. Why? It’s a tough question to answer, but running test after test will incrementally get you there.

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Do not read this if you are satisfied with your advertising efforts. If you want better results though, this is for you. Our team can work with your business one on one to put an ad campaign together that crushes your traditional standards. But we only work with a certain number of clients at a time, so it’s important to reach out to us now so we can try to fit you in. Call us at 904-315-4917 or email our director of marketing, Grant Deken at grdeken@twidgetmedia.com

Twidget provides Miami business owners with best in class social media marketing. Are you looking to grow your online presence by building a large fan base on sites like Facebook and Twitter? If so, our firm can help you achieve these goals by driving thousands of fans to your page every month.

Investing in the ability to get more fans is one of the best strategies to increase your brand visibility on The fastest growing community online today. Our Facebook marketing services offer you:

1. Stature: Visitors to your page are much more likely to “Like” and interact with your page if it already has a substantial following.
2. Competitive Edge: Unless your competitors are using a service like ours, you are going to leave them in the dust.
3. Quality service: We charge per fan (not per invite) i.e. if you paid for 1000 fans, 1000 fans will be delivered to your page. The promotion is done manually by inviting thousands of interested browsers directly to your page.
4. Money Back Guarantee: We are confident that you will be happy with your order! If we don’t deliver on our promise, you will be given a full 100% refund.

Let us guess. You’re a business, and a while back you started hearing how great Google was. Google Adwords. You only paid every time someone clicked your ad, and it could totally change your business!

Flash foward…

You’re blowing through your budget ten times faster than before, keyword bids are through the roof, and nearly every sale you make has you breaking even or even worse, taking a loss.

If only there were another way to serve highly relevant, targeted advertisements that was affordable and effective…

OK, if you read the title of this article you know what we’re talking about, and for good reason. Just like when Google was THE place to be a couple years ago (ok, maybe more if you’ve been in the game for a long time), Facebook is now the go to source to find targeted audiences and dominate your competition. We mean it, dominate…

Here are some key things about Facebook:

1) There’s a lot of high quality traffic available if you’re ready for it.
2) It’s far less expensive than Google search traffic.
3) Most people don’t know up from down when it comes to creating high performance campaigns.

We spent a lot of time and lot of money testing and researching how to be experts on Facebook. We did this because we strongly feel that Facebook is going to become the most powerful marketplace for advertisers to reach their audience. It’s not going anywhere, and now is the time to build momentum.

Here are some basic tips to help you build high performance, “through the roof” ROI for your business:

1) In depth market research – 80% of your success comes before you make your first ad. Research is the framework. You’re serving advertisements to people to persuade them to buy your product. Get in their heads, break them down, and figure out what motivates them to buy.

2) Split testing – Try variations of your ads and their copy and measure performance. If you think you’ve split tested enough, chances are you haven’t.

3) CTR and your bids – A good rule of thumb is that the higher your click through rate (CTR), the lower your cost per click (CPC). You want to pay less per click right? Well, you can, but only if you follow tips 1 & 2.

Happy Advertising!

Regards,

Grant Deken

P.S. Facebook, like any advertising platform, can sometimes overwhelm new advertisers. We’ve heard the horror stories of people blowing their monthly ad budgets in one day and we feel for those people. Call us at 904-315-4917 to talk to us about Facebook campaign management. For as little as $150.00 you can have the peace of mind that your campaigns are being handled by the best in the business. Click here to contact me personally.

We’ve recently been working with We Want It All, a women’s talk show based in Miami Beach that is getting a lot of attention. Because there are many people involved and some were relatively new to the social scene I had decided to put together a list – really more of a framework if I think about it – of best practices for success in social media marketing.

OK. Ready? Here it goes…

1. Always respond. To the good and the bad. Let your audience know that you’re there with them. Let them feel like they have a direct line to the show hosts.

2. Listen Intently. This is a huge mistake most people make. They want to push their own agenda and it doesn’t work. This audience is the key to success, and they’re telling you exactly what they want. “Give the people what they want!”

3. Be consistent. So many who have failed did so because they didn’t adhere to this rule. Update consistently and produce fresh content on a schedule. People come back when they know they could be missing something. Humans are creatures of habit. Help your audience create a habit out of you.

4. Content is King. Today, he/she who has the gold does not make the rules. They simply have more money to create more content! Status updates, photos, blog posts, events, episodes, shout outs, discussion boards, press releases and articles (like how to guides). All of it is content, and you should always be adding more.

5. Create Value in Everything. This especially applies to rules two and four. Always be sure what you’re posting has some type of appeal to your audience. Find out what they want and tailor your content accordingly. When people find value in what you’re saying they post comments, share it and make it viral, and that’s the goal!

6. Make it special. Create incentives for people to join your network and tune into the shows. Make them feel like they’re a part of something exclusive and fun, even though anyone can join.

7. Stand out. The average Facebook user is connected to 80 fan pages, and Facebook has over 30 billion pieces of new content posted EACH MONTH. You’re competing for attention, how are you going to get it?

8. Create Evangelists. Get your audience to promote your brand. Truly understanding your audience will allow you to appeal to them so well that they will take ownership of your brand (think Apple fans) and sell your brand for you. Nothing sells products faster than your own customers (through comments, testimonies, sharing content, etc.)

9. Measure results. Look at your inputs and correlate them with the outputs. In other words, see if what you’re doing is working, and identify which things generate the biggest buzz.

10. Have (a lot) of fun and love what you do. It may not always be smooth sailing, but when you’re audience sees the genuine passion for what you’re doing you can be sure they’ll listen up.

Mobile advertising is increasingly important, as cell phone adoption rates, especially smartphone adoption rates, soar. With a range of mobile advertising options, including SMS, WAP, mobile app display ads, search ads, rich media, video and push notifications, the landscape can be a bit complicated.

After a tough 2009, advertisers are expected to increase mobile and digital marketing budgets over the next year. With this in mind, it’s essential that advertisers keep up-to-date on their options in the mobile space.

Here, we’ve laid out five mobile advertising trends to watch over the coming year. Let us know which trends you’re keeping your eyes on in the comments below.

1. Continued Importance of SMS

With approximately 90% of the U.S. population owning cell phones, according to CTIA’s semi-annual wireless industry survey, and 98% of those phones being SMS-enabled out of the box, SMS is one of the most popular communication methods in the world. The rise of text messaging can be attributed to its low cost and ease of use. If you have a cell phone, you have the capability to text — no downloads or installations needed. And with the advent of unlimited messaging plans, texting has become the mobile communication option of choice for cell phone-toting teens, beating out e-mail, and phone conversations.

If that isn’t enough data to show that SMS is an essential communication line, there’s more. In May, 65.2% of U.S. mobile subscribers used text messaging on their mobile devices, up 1.4 percentage points versus the prior three-month period, according to comScore, making texting the top cellular device feature for all U.S. consumers, aside from calling.

The texting audience is large and still growing. eMarketer projects that the growth of the global market for ad support of mobile messaging will reach nearly $12 billion in 2011, up from about $1.5 billion in 2006.

“SMS doesn’t get a lot of hype that the flashy apps do, but it works because it provides what all marketers seek — a one-on-one dialogue with a customer,” noted Jack Philbin, co-founder and president of Vibes Media, a mobile marketing company based in Chicago.

Philbin explained that click-through rates (CTRs) and conversion rates for text messaging are much higher than rates for e-mail and Internet () display, two channels that win larger percentages of marketing budgets than mobile. The average CTR for text messaging is 14.06%, while the average conversion rate is 8.22%. E-mail brings in an average CTR of 6.64% and an average conversion rate of about 1.73%, and Internet display doesn’t even hit the radar with an average CTR of 0.76% and average conversion rate of 4.43%, according to the Direct Marketing Association’s 2010 Response Rate Trend Report.

The response rates that marketers experience via texting campaigns are definitely attractive. These high action rates are probably due to the fact that texting is an opt-in marketing channel, in which consumers actively seek out information and sign-up for updates. Philbin says that he looks at SMS as a funnel, in which marketers start with text interaction, optimizing their messages to drive traffic by including a link to rich media, video, or other marketing materials, where users then take the desired action.

What’s perhaps one of the most interesting reasons to advertise via SMS is that “about 90% of all text
messages are read within three minutes of their delivery, and over 99% of all text messages are read by the recipient,” according to a whitepaper on conversational advertising [PDF] by SinglePoint. The immediacy of SMS is currently unparalleled by any other marketing channel.

2. Experimentation with Rich Media

With Google’s acquisition of AdMob and Apple’s acquisition of Quattro Wireless, which led to their introduction of iAd, we’re bound to see a pretty heated tech battle in the coming year, as both networks will be going head-to-head, focusing on rich media advertising.

Eric Litman, CEO of Medialets, a rich media advertising and analytics platform for mobile, discussed why experimentation with rich media is bound to happen.

First, Litman pointed out that rich media ads offer more in-app interactivity via video, sound, gaming, and so on. He believes that the aesthetic value is an obvious advantage that will attract advertisers and ad creators. Furthermore, with the growing adoption of smartphones as the device of choice, Litman believes that rich media is the natural progression towards more engaging ads.

The engagement rates back up his predictions. Litman explained that “engagement rates in mobile blow away the best of online rich media, and engagement times in mobile rival those of television [advertising].” He continued to explain that he has seen engagement rates as high as 33% on rich media ads, with rates consistently hitting above 20%. At the low end of the spectrum, simple, expandable ads reach 6-7% engagement rates, which is still high when compared to other advertising options in mobile and online. These rates are “unheard of in the online world,” Litman commented.

Srini Dharmaji, CEO of GoldSpot Media, a rich media and video advertising platform for mobile, also illustrated the pros of rich media, including higher CPMs (cost-per-thousand impressions), but he pointed out a few downsides as well. He said that one of the biggest barriers to adoption of rich media is the need for the time and skills to create the ads. He pointed out that the lead time for creating one iAd campaign is currently about 8-10 weeks, due to Apple’s tight control of the process. “Media planners do not have the time to sit down and create a lot of these ads,” he said frankly. “A big company like Apple can do that, because they have the budget and clout. But smaller businesses do not have the time and money for it.”

An iAd running on the Dictionary.com iPhone app

Even with the lengthy creation process, publishers and advertisers are taking an interest in and experimenting with rich media ads. For example, Dictionary.com is a publisher of iAd ads on their iPhone and iPad apps, which have eight million and 500,000 downloads, respectively. Pictured above is an ad that is currently running within the Dictionary.com iPhone app to promote The Switch, a movie being released this week. Within the ad, users can watch videos, take a quiz or “build a baby.”

Ads like this one have already proven successful for Dictionary.com. Since enabling iAd ads, Dictionary.com has seen its overall iPhone mobile app eCPM (effective cost-per-thousand impressions) increase by 177%, and with the iAd network they are experiencing a 246% higher eCPM when compared with other ad networks, according to a representative of Dictionary.com.

3. Mobile Sites vs. Mobile Apps

One of the biggest decisions for mobile marketers this year is whether they should build a mobile site or app — or both. And for advertisers, the question is whether to advertise on mobile sites, apps, or both.

But there is a bigger question here on where mobile is going. With Google () betting on mobile web and search as the future, and Apple taking the app route, it is still not clear which platform consumers will prefer in coming years. Because of this fragmented mobile browsing experience, developing either can seem like a huge commitment to marketers, especially since mobile spending currently makes up less than 5% of marketing budgets in many organizations.

Furthermore, with the number of different device types, operating systems, and screen sizes available, the decision can be even more daunting. Even for advertisers, mobile ad creation can be a pain, as ad unit sizes vary across platforms. Because of the intricacies with mobile, less than a third of U.S. marketers think optimizing the mobile marketing experience is important to their customers, according to an April 2010 survey by eROI. Furthermore, just 23% of marketers responding to the survey reported having a mobile-optimized website.

It is estimated that by 2014 half of Americans’ web browsing will be done on mobile devices. Aaron Maxwell, founder of Mobile Web Up, a company that specializes in helping small and mid-sized businesses mobilize their websites, spoke about the importance of that not-so-distant prediction, and what it means for mobile advertisers and marketers:

“What does this mean for companies and organizations? If they depend on their web presence in any way, it’s important to start thinking about mobile now… checking how their website looks and works, or doesn’t, on mobile devices. Mobile internet use is growing faster than nearly anyone realizes. To them, I’d say: Don’t wait until 25% of your website visitors are using handhelds — that’s like waiting until a quarter of your backyard is on fire before grabbing a water hose! Start thinking NOW about how to make your website work hard for you on mobile devices.”

In the coming year, expect to see a larger debate on where mobile is going. With the onslaught of app stores, including Blackberry App World, Android Market (), Windows Marketplace for Mobile, the App Store for Symbian, the Palm app store, and, of course, Apple’s iPhone app store, it doesn’t look like the app is going anywhere anytime soon. But it should be an interesting debate at the very least.

Dharmaji commented on the evolution of mobile web and apps, saying, “Apple is all about mobile apps, and Google is all about mobile web. How the system will evolve, whether apps or web will be the chosen mobile solution, I have no idea, but I think that both of the platforms will co-exist. For advertisers, the most crucial part is presenting the ad. How the consumer accesses the ad, will not matter.”

4. Interest in Geo-Location

With location being the talk of the year, we’re looking forward to the evolution of location-centric mobile apps, and in terms of advertising, we’re excited to see how advertisers will utilize them. We’ve already seen a healthy usage of the popular location-based checkin app Foursquare () by many brands, especially newspapers, magazines and other publishers, including Bravo TV, the History Channel, The Huffington Post, The New York Times, and even Mashable (). To a lesser extent, marketers have even tested the waters beyond Foursquare with other location-based apps, including Gowalla (), Whrrl, Brightkite, Loopt, and SCVNGR.

However, a recent study indicates that this year may not be the time for location-based marketing, as only 4% of the adult Internet-using population has utilized any kind of location-based service, and just 1% of all adults check-in to a location at least once a week. Regardless of the stats, marketers are still taking an interest in the new technology.

For advertisers, marketing within apps is as easy as creating an ad-campaign targeted to a specific audience. For example, the Brightkite () app can target consumers by precise geography, by behavior, and within a given time frame.

An XpresSpa ad running on the GateGuru iPhone app

Dan Gellert, CEO of GateGuru, an iPhone guide for airports, explained that all the ads for their platform “are location-based offers from airport retailers to drive people into stores.”

Gellert explained a recent campaign with XpresSpa, an airport spa:

“We launched this campaign across 13 airports, which collectively represent about 20 stores for XpresSpa. Since June 1st, we have delivered 20,000 impressions to them on the Amenity List View [pictured left], and over 500 impressions on the Amenity Offer [pictured right]. The CTR (between the Amenity List View to get to the full page offer) has continually increased, and in our latest report hovered at about 6%. Of those 500 impressions, we delivered 75-100 into the store, which is a number we are very excited about.”

A conversion rate of at least 15-20% is quite amazing, and it goes to show that location-based ads can provide value for consumers when they are optimally placed and timed.

5. The Growth of Mobile Video

Lastly, with the explosion of Internet video consumption, it is assumed that mobile video will also be largely adopted in the coming years. While video isn’t a huge focus for advertisers right now and many cite broadband and technology inadequacies as barriers, many predictive stats tell the story of video’s increasing importance.

The number of mobile video viewers in the U.S. will grow nearly 30% in 2010 to reach 23.9 million, according to eMarketer’s forecasts, representing a reach of about 7.7% of the total U.S. population and just under 10% of mobile phone users. Those numbers are set to double by 2013 and increase still further in 2014.

By 2013, some even believe that video will be so widely adopted that it will be a significant driver of mobile data usage — occupying an estimated 66% of mobile traffic, Cisco forecasts.

With video taking an increasingly important role in the mobile market, advertisers should keep their eyes open for opportunities to try out new advertising options.

We’re keeping tabs of these five mobile advertising trends. Which trends are you watching? Let us know in the comments.

Series supported by Samsung

[Via Mashable News]

Jesse Thomas is the CEO and Founder of JESS3, a Creative Interactive Agency. JESS3 designs products and experiences for brands like Google, Nike, Facebook, MySpace, C-SPAN, Microsoft and NASA.

With constant news reports and studies regarding the adoption rates of social networking platforms like Foursquare (), Gowalla (), Facebook (), Loopt and SCVNGR, a clear idea of the big picture can get a little muddled. Is Facebook really as popular as we think? Are location-based mobile features really poised to hit mainstream adoption?

To better answer these questions, behold the “GeoSocial Universe.” The graphic below pits our social network usage against the huge adoption of mobile phones — currently at 4.6 billion worldwide.

Facebook, with over 500 million users, is still around 10 times smaller than the worldwide mobile market. Even web-based e-mail, which accounts for over 800 million users collectively, barely holds a candle to the mobile juggernaut.

The key here is convergence. Where do all these social platforms intersect with mobile, thus becoming “GeoSocial?”

The infographic below shows the number of users on each network, and what portion of those users overlap with the huge mobile “sun.” For instance, Facebook has 500 million active users, with roughly one-third of them accessing their accounts via mobile devices. Services like Foursquare, Gowalla, and Loopt, being entirely dependent on mobile tech, have 100% of their users within the mobile sphere.

Does this put things into perspective? Let us know what you think in the comments below.

[Via Mashable News]

Is your business looking to accomplish complex web objectives or develop tools to facilitate day to day operations? Our web development team can provide custom solutions ranging from Customer Relationship Management (CRM) to self hosted project management. Starting an internet company? We also build custom platforms to drive lead generation or retail sales for your business.