The popularity of social media is undeniable – three of the world’s most popular brands online are social-media related (Facebook, YouTube and Wikipedia) and the world now spends over 110 billion minutes on social networks and blog sites. This equates to 22 percent of all time online or one in every four and half minutes. For the first time ever, social network or blog sites are visited by three quarters of global consumers who go online, after the numbers of people visiting these sites increased by 24% over last year. The average visitor spends 66% more time on these sites than a year ago, almost 6 hours in April 2010 versus 3 hours, 31 minutes last year.

’nuff said…

“Old people” on Facebook: They couldn’t beat it, so they joined it.

But why? And how did they hear about social media in the first place? They can’t all be simply stalking their younger relatives, can they?

A new study from the AARP — that’s the American Association of Retired Persons — shows that baby boomers in the 50-years-old-or-better age bracket are cool with the Internet (), down with Facebook, hip to the iPad and not just using the web to spy on their kids and grandkids.

The AARP spent some time last month interviewing 1,360 adults over the phone. They found that more than a quarter (27%) of Americans age 50 and older use social networks. Facebook is the most popular — in fact, 23% of all survey respondents said they preferred it to sites such as MySpace (), LinkedIn () and Twitter. Another study earlier this year from eMarketer showed that boomers and seniors were flocking to Facebook, again showing a strong preference for this site over Twitter and MySpace — all this in spite of the fact that another survey showed older Americans reported hearing an awful lot of bad news and media coverage about Facebook.

When it comes to general web surfing, 49% of respondents between the ages of 50 and 64 and 40% of all adults age 50 and older, said they consider themselves extremely or very comfortable using the Internet. In other words, we’re very close to seeing the majority of senior citizens embracing the web as a content medium and communication tool.

Lots of companies — more every day, it seems — want to have Facebook “fan” pages, where customers or would-be customers can connect with them and become part of their online community. But what are those fans actually worth to a company? Everyone has their own views on that question, but now a social media measurement firm called Syncapse has come up with an actual dollar value in a report released today (PDF link). The answer? An average fan is apparently worth about $136.38, although for some very successful social marketers the value can be dramatically higher, while for some less successful companies it can be virtually zero.

Syncapse came up with the figure by asking 4,000 fans of 20 of the top brands on Facebook — including Nokia, BlackBerry, Victoria’s Secret, Adidas, Nike, Coca-Cola, Starbucks and McDonald’s — why they were fans of those companies or brands, and about their past and future purchasing behavior. Syncapse then tried to estimate what the value of each fan’s spending would be to a company, as well as the value of continuing to have that fan as a customer over time.

The key findings of the report are likely to come as music to the ears of advertisers that have been pursuing a Facebook-based social media strategy. According to the survey:

• On average, fans spend an extra $71.84 they would not otherwise spend on products they describe themselves as fans of, compared to those who are not fans.
• Fans are 28 percent more likely than non-fans to continue using a specific brand.
• Fans are 41 percent more likely than non-fans to recommend a product they are a fan of to their friends.

That probably helps to explain why, according to recent statement by the company, the number of advertisers working with Facebook has doubled in the past year.

A social media marketing company called Syncapse surveyed [PDF link] 4,000 people who have “Liked” the top 20 brands that have pages on Facebook and figured out exactly how valuable those “fans” are.

The study (“The Value of a Facebook Fan: An Empirical Review”) estimates that someone who has Liked a brand will spend an average of $71.84 more each year on that brand’s products or services than will someone who has not Liked it on Facebook, for a total average annualized value of $136.38.

This method is very different than the one employed by Vitrue in another fan value study a month ago. Vitrue’s method valued fans by figuring out how much it would cost to buy advertising on a website to reach the same people.

Product spending was only one of six fan benefits that Syncapse studied. The others were loyalty, propensity to recommend, brand affinity (“perception and recall”), media value (efficiency of Facebook vs. other ways to reach consumers) and acquisition cost.

In most cases, the average fan was more valuable to the brand than the average non-fan, though results varied widely on an individual basis. For example, some fans spent no money at all on a brand and never recommend it to friends.

Note that this was just demonstrated as a correlation, nothing more.

Forrester’s recently projected social media marketing spend to increase at an average of 34% a year through 2014. But Marketers are still finding it difficult to locate the ad agencies that are credible and capable within the social media arena. According to Forrester’s research, marketers don’t trust traditional agencies to run their social media campaigns, but neither do they trust  interactive agencies their entire marketing program to smaller interactive agencies. Marketers find it difficult to find credible and capable ad agencies experienced in the social media arena.

In 2009 more agencies had surrendered and started participating in social media. But they left their marketing minds on the bank when they jumped into the water. A lot of agencies don’t have a clear objective for using social media and it almost seems like they have a check list to check off to show they are social media credible. We have a agency blog, Twitter account, Facebook Fan page and LinkedIn. They fail to connect the dots to make social an effective tool for new business.

Follow the ‘via’ link to go to the source and read 5 reasons why agencies struggle…