The year 2011 was kind to Facebook marketing platforms Buddy Media and Vitrue, as the two companies boasted of record financial results.

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Amazon.com, Best Buy, Target and Walmart all enjoyed a boost in their brand visibility as a result of social media promotions this holiday season.

That’s based on an analysis by Buddy Media and comScore, which compared paid ads versus earned media for the aforementioned brands.

Their findings somewhat contradict other holiday shopping season statistics that suggested social media had less of an effect.

Buddy Media Chief Executive Officer Michael Lazerow discussed the findings with comScore Chief Marketing officer Linda Abraham at the Digital Life Design conference in Munich, and provided a recap of it all in a blog post today:

The data shows that earned social media impressions can stack up favorably against paid ads for brands who maximize their efforts. Using an estimated value for earned impressions of $3.55 cost per impression, Walmart earned $417,000 worth of impressions while Best Buy earned $86,000 in impressions.

Promotions can significantly expand the viral impact of social media to friends of fans. When looking at the lift received from promotions that started in November, all four brands received a lift of 2.2x or higher. Target received the highest lift between October and the end of November at 3.5x.

For most retailers, a significantly higher percentage of fans and friends of fans visited the retailer’s website, as compared to the rest of the Internet. A whopping 64 percent of Amazon’s fans visited Amazon.com, compared to 27 percent of the total Internet. For Best Buy, 18 percent of fans and 13 percent of friends of fans went to BestBuy.com, compared to eight percent of the total Internet.

In the presentation, Lazerow and Abraham said that Facebook now accounts for one in seven minutes spent online, while social media overall accounts for one in five minutes spent online.

Another point that the two executives included in their presentation: Facebook users spend more time looking at the news feed on the homepage than they do on brands’ pages, which means that promotions need to have a broader focus than just brands’ pages.

Readers, what do you think about this set of findings from Buddy Media and comScore?

The event will take place Thursday, Jan. 12, at 11 a.m. Eastern Time, hosted by comScore Chief Marketing Officer and Executive Vice President Linda Abraham and Buddy Media Chief Executive Officer Michael Lazerow.

The topics Abraham and Lazerow plan to address include:

• Planning, designing, and executing effective social media strategies;
• Understanding who your social audience is, demographics and beyond;
• Measuring the performance of your social media;
• Best practices from competitive brands within the social landscape; and
• Quantifying the impact of earned media using meaningful social media metrics.

Abraham said in an email announcing the webinar:

Currently, social networking accounts for 19 percent of time spent online globally. Four out of every five people who have access to the Internet across the world use social networks in some form, many several times per day, some on multiple devices.

With social networking being such a pervasive and integral part of the online experience, penetrating all aspects of consumers’ lives, it is vital for marketers to understand how their audience is reached through social networking and maximize the value of their social marketing strategies.

Buddy Media launched an art competition as a fresh component of an ad campaign that took flight earlier in the fall.

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It was all fun and games in the battle between Facebook and Google Plus until the leading page creators got involved.

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Facebook has finally adjusted its news feed to give equal visibility to posts coming from all of the third party publishing applications.

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Pretzel Crisps has had success working with Buddy Media on Facebook before, so why not do it again to promote the introduction of two new flavors?

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What if there were a way to post to Facebook that would reduce your interactions with fans by up to 70 percent? You’d want to avoid that, wouldn’t you?

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Don’t let your Facebook content lose its sizzle just because summer is over. Here are five tips to keep Facebook posts hot and spicy even as the temperatures cool off. Read the rest of this entry »

Not all applications get equal treatment from Facebook, at least not when it comes to placement in the news feed.

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