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?

More than 42 million unique users viewed videos on Facebook in December, totaling more than 238 million videos and averaging 23.9 minutes per viewer.

But Yahoo, VEVO and Google all posted higher numbers, according to the latest data from comScore.

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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.

Israelis spend more time per person on social media than people in any other country, yet the percentage of Israel’s population that uses the technology doesn’t rank in the top ten.

Meanwhile, the U.S. ranks first for having the largest percentage of the population using social media, yet the country doesn’t make the top ten for the amount of time spent per person using the technology.

Those gems of data appear in a comScore report somewhat misleadingly entitled “Top 10 Need-To-Knows About Social Media And Where It’s Headed.”

The actual list of 10 itself consists of things we’ve heard about already, but the charts that accompany each of these items present the most helpful information.

That said, we’ve got the list below for you, but you’ll want to pay more attention to the niftiest of the charts that we’ve surrounded this post with. And do let us know in the comments section what insights you glean from the comScore data.

New data from comScore shows what many Facebookers might have already guessed:  Social networking really means time spent on Facebook.

Ben Elowitz broke down the data on his Digital Quarters blog today, which reveals that Facebook accounts for 95 percent of social networking time in the U.S.

In his blog post, Elowitz adds:

In terms of being relevant to consumer audiences, there’s now no question that “social” means “Facebook.”

And, if you want to take advantage of the more than one  in every seven  minutes of online time that consumers spend on Facebook, you follow one simple rule for media in a social age: You must be present — in the Facebook news feed — to win.

Readers, do you agree with these numbers showing Facebook is the dominant social networking site?

People who search the web for the word Facebook are slightly older yet less affluent than people who search for Google Plus.
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Facebook enjoyed 162 million unique U.S. visitors during July.

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Over the past few days, the media has erupted with oversimplified stories saying Facebook usage in North America has dropped; and some of the sensationalized coverage makes it sound like there’s been a mass exodus of members from the site.
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We Latinos are enjoying a sizzling connection with Facebook.
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Based on recent information provided by web analytics firm comScore, Facebook’s market share in some countries is extremely high. However, if you look at the overall population of some of these countries, it is very small.
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