Tag Archives: Social Media

Social Media

Has the Mom Audience Migrated to Twitter?

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In my post from last week following the migration of moms from web portals to blogging, I stopped short of saying they were on Twitter. Yes there are some power moms out there tweeting as an extension of their blogs (75% of Twitter Moms maintain a blog as well according to Mashable), but has the mom-audience migrated to Twitter yet?

My first anecdotal thought on this was the Twitter-centric Mashable event last month during Internet Week New York, when one of the speakers touting CircleofMoms.com asked how many of the 250-plus audience were moms. Only three hands were raised, which really surprised me.

So I turned to Quantcast for a bit more scientific sample (although still rough data*) and looked at the demographics for twitter.com visitors and the percentage of people that had children ages 0-17 (Quantcast does not break down this stat by gender, but since Twitter is higher-skewing female — 55% — than the internet average, using it is a viable proxy for the number of moms).

Looking back at January, you can see that only 26% of Twitter users had kids, way below the internet average. But by June, Twitter demographics were looking a lot like the general internet population (42% with kids), and actually showed a higher than average percentage of users with younger kids (which you might expect as Twitter skews young and the average age of a new mom is 25.1 years old according to the US Census Bureau).

The mom-audience IS on Twitter. Brands seeking to reach moms should at minimum ensure they have a Twitter account set up and are using it as part of their overall Social Media listening and communications strategy, especially if they are looking to court moms with young children.

* On Quantcast rough data: I realize that more and more users read their Twitter feeds in Seesmic, Tweetdeck or RSS feeds and that might not be captured by Quantcast, but Nielsen had similar sampling issues when it looked at Twitter churn rates and found even with additional channels the sampling still held.

Social Media

Where Have All the Moms Gone? From iVillage to Facebook to Mommy Blogging

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Mom’s have always been a target for marketers and for good reason: the Marketing to Moms Coalition reports that moms control 85 percent of household spending and account for nearly $2.1 trillion a year. Plus their influence carries on, even when mom isn’t around: 40% of college freshman say their mom is the most important and influential person they have ever known (as noted in the New York Times).

So while we know they are desirable for brand marketers, what we also know is that they are uniquely hard-wired for the word-of-mouth, viral opinion sharing that is at the heart of social media: they pass along good information (e.g. 80% of moms pass along emails they find valuable – Lucid Marketing and BSM Media, 2004,) and rely on recommendations from others for many purchase decisions [I have seen numbers as high as 64% of moms relying on recommendations attributed to a 2002 study but I’ve also seen a more recent Razorfish Study that shows 29% of online moms first find out about a product from their friends/family (only behind TV), 31% of online moms find out more through such referrals, and 21% make a decision based on these referrals (second only to websites)].

How to Tap into the Mom Network

Companies have continually tried to aggregate content and build communities that appeal to women in an effort to help marketers and advertisers reach this coveted demographic. The grandma of all these efforts is iVillage.com, now part of NBC, and is ranked as the 250th most trafficked site on the internet, with 73% of the monthly 4.2 million visitors in the US being women according to quantcast. But guess what, the engagement factor is pretty low – at only 7 monthly pages viewed per monthly person – and they skew old with 28% of the visitors being over 50 years old (more than double other mom-centric sites).

Now granted, iVillage is more women-oriented than mom-focused (Parenting is the 2nd on the list of similar interests, right behind Women), so I looked at other mom-oriented sites (trying to stay away from solely baby-centric sites) using stats from quantcast:

Site Rank Monthly Visits (US) Monthly Pages per Person Percent of Users Heavy or Regular Users Percent of Visits from Heavy or Regular Users
iVillage.com 250 4.2 mil 6.7 22% 50%
parents.com 587 2.2 mil 12.7 25% 56%
cafemom.com 1,273 1.2 mil 54.3 41% 86%
baby-gaga.com 2,964 551K 43.5 33% 75%
CircleofMoms.com 5,969 268K n/a 24% 45%

Again, these are just a sampling of sites, but the level of engagement (looking at pageviews and amount of users and visitors that are not just passerbys but regularly engaging) for cafemom.com is very impressive, especially when compared to some of the bigger rivals. But something more interesting popped up when looking at the monthly traffic trends: these sites were stagnant with regards to the monthly traffic. As moms get online, these mom-centric hubs just aren’t growing. Maybe the website is indeed dead.

Naturally I jumped to the conclusion that moms have moved the conversation to Facebook, where 54% of the users are female and 48% have children 0-17 at home (compared to the 41% at iVillage and 59% at cafemom.com). Indeed, a (recent AdWeek article) noted that “mothers aged 25-35 with at least one child at home are 85 percent more likely to spend time with Facebook compared to the average online consumer.”

So I looked at very simplistic terms (baby, mom) in Facebook Lexicon to see if we could spot any growth in the usage of the terms on users walls and status updates:

In general these topics show no growth and are fairly flat (other than blips in May for Mother’s Day and the use of “baby” during Valentines), which is surprising when you consider the growth in the overall Facebook user base. So I tried more topic-specific items like “diapers” and “parenting” to look at the trend:

These mom-oriented phrases on walls and status updates appear to have grown in 2008, reached a plateau in February, 2009, but have been steadily falling since. While this is a crude look because we have few other tools to understand Facebook demographics, it does seem to suggest that moms have left Facebook behind for a different platform to discuss and share. Facebook did little to make moms happy when they removed some photos of moms breastfeeding, causing over 115,000 users to protest online and in front of their offices in January. Whether that was the impetus for flight or not, it appears that the more vocal and social of moms have left. So where are they now?

Moms Blogging a New Trail

I’ve been seeing more and more mentions of mom-blogging in the last month as a new phenomenon (although moms have been blogging for years) – they are very social, sharing their opinions about products and their life, but very small and disparate. Musings from a VC in NYC shared “The top 50 Mom blogs generate about 30 M Pageviews / month. The real strength of Mom blogs lies in the long tail. There are hundreds of thousands of mom blogs that generate > 10k Pageviews / month.”

Even while I’ve been thinking about this for a couple weeks after listening to more and more marketers talk about mom-oriented sites and the emphasis of women, the excitement around mommy-blogging is hitting new heights. AdAge came out this week with a video report ”Inside the Mommy Blogger Business” (definitely worth a view) which notes that no one really knows how big the group of mommy bloggers are (because no one is tracking the metrics), but hazards a guess of 5 million mommy bloggers.

Getting to the actual growth of mom bloggers is something I’m trying to piece together (it helps complete the picture that vocal and engaged moms have moved beyond the Facebook platform to blogging). WordPress has seen the overall number of bloggers grow over 20% since January and blogger.com traffic is up nearly 15% in the last three months. BlogHer.com has seen 73% growth year over year, with mostly female bloggers.

Clearly there’s been growth and marketers are taking notice, trying to figure out how to leverage this group. MomsWhoBlog.com notes “It is estimated that 80% of blogger moms are reviewing products” already. They also tell mom bloggers, “as a mom blogger, you WILL BE approached by marketers, it also means that you need to ensure that you do not end up being used by them.”

I think the more interesting trend here is that if users are given easy-to-use tools to host and run their own blogs and customize them (the add-ins for WordPress and Blogger have a vibrant developer community, much like Facebook Applications), then vocal, truly engaged moms (and others) are going to rely less and less on rigid aggregated communities (like iVillage or cafemom.com) and even Facebook itself.

Social Media

How Big Brands Dip Their Toe in the (Social Media) Water

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Last week at Time Warner’s Conversations on the Circle panel, a consumer packaged goods company manager who was setting up the company’s use of social media tools bemoaned the fact that in the middle of the project, the company barred employees from using Facebook and Twitter, effectively killing their social media efforts.

Big brands continue to grapple with how to effectively use social media, but some trailblazers are tentatively experimenting with different aspects. Tuesday’s Social Communications Leadership Forum put on by the Business Development Institute shed a bit more light on the struggles of big brand marketers evangelizing social media and highlighted some of the processes to launching their efforts in risk-adverse companies:

  • When Internal Resistance Gets Tough, Bring in the Reinforcements: Linda Block, Marketing Director for HomeAgain Pet Recovering Service which is part of Schering-Plough Corporation, knew the typically conservative company in a deservedly risk-adverse industry. To help get the approvals to launch their private social network, she brought in external legal counsel to help the internal legal team get more comfortable with the project.
  • Go Slow, Build Support: Kimberly Miller, VP of Consumer Marketing and Head of Audience Development at People.com gave an example of the slow process of opening up user comments on articles. People.com didn’t want to risk the reputation it has and close relationships with some stars. So they started slowly, allowing comments on one article each day and set up filtering to show that it wasn’t going to be a problem. Likewise, Joshua Karpf, Manager of Digital Communications at PepsiCo, said they are experimenting and spending time evangelizing inside the organization about the value and metrics versus other media: employees that were part of their foray into blogging and video casting from South by Southwest are spending time sharing their experiences internally to build more awareness of how to use the medium creatively.
  • The Competitors Made Us Do It: Miller detailed that People.com doesn’t launch anything without a full-fledged strategy, branding and monetization plan – but they launched Twitter for their head editors on the site largely because their competitors were in the space and they couldn’t afford not to be there. That said, Miller noted that if Twitter can’t help move the brand forward by either driving positive sentiment or traffic, then they’d pull it down because it definitely takes resources to keep it running.
  • Have an Exit Strategy: Block also said another way she was able to allay the fears of legal teams was to work with their agency, Flightpath, to ensure that if there was an issue with FDA compliance or something else went wrong, they could quickly take down the site.

As an audience member noted, at some point companies are going reach a tipping point, where the risks of NOT engaging users through social media are greater than the risks of engaging. Kudos to these marketers sharing some of their tactics and blazing a trail many more companies will be following in the months ahead.

Ultimately “using” social media is not the goal, it’s a component of the overall marketing and communication strategy. Like all new initiatives, testing and roll out plans with measurable results help prove the effectiveness of the strategy. But in some cases management remains resistant. Does anyone else have strategies that have proven effective in turning around an initially resisting upper management?

Other Tidbits from the Social Communications Leadership Forum

  • Stumbleupon is consistently a top five referral site for People Pets; they pay for clicks with a paltry budget of $500 per month but it becomes even more cost effective as they benefit from the viral effect of getting exposed to those users friends.
  • PeoplePets has over 54,000 Twitter followers in two weeks, only 14,000 registered community members after six months (which exceeded plans). Within the community, there are 7-8 key influencers with which they keep close contact. They are looking at external vendors to look at influencers outside the community.
  • Metrics for PeoplePets include unique visitors and engagement stats (return visitors, time spent and pages consumed). In addition, they look at actions within the community, including number of hugs given (200,000 to date), ribbons won in contests about their pets photos, friends made, photos uploaded and number of wall posts.
  • HomeAgain has used its micro-chip embedded product plus relationships with shelters and 300,000 volunteer “Pet Rescuers” to help find over 500,000 lost pets – pretty interesting business and pretty low cost for only $14.99 annually.
  • My favorite quote about the art form of Twitter was a Flightpath Director who quoted Mark Twain, “If I had more time I would be briefer.”