New Social Analytics: This Week In Social Media
Welcome to our weekly edition of what’s hot in social media news. To help you stay up to date with social media, here are some of the news items that caught our attention.
What’s New This Week?
Facebook Announces Real-Time Analytics for Social Plugins: This gives Facebook page admins “access to real-time analytics to optimize Like buttons across both your site and on Facebook.” It’s another little upgrade to help you get more out of your Facebook marketing.
"You can use this real-time data to test the impact of button placement on Like Button CTR or identify the Open Graph image that generates the highest Like Story CTR."
How to Create Your Own Social Networking Community
If you have a medium- to large-sized online network, you might have noticed some of your contacts have been developing their own communities in the form of private groups, forums or social networks that are a mixture of free or paid memberships.
The Pros of Creating Your Own Community
So with all of the existing communities out there, what’s the benefit of creating your own?
Driving Traffic to Your Site – Let’s say that you start a forum on your own domain. If you’re successful in creating a popular community, you’ll be driving a lot of traffic to your website. The traffic, in turn, will lead to the next benefit. 
Social Media Smackdown: WWE Headlocks Social Media
Think you know what World Wrestling Entertainment (WWE) is all about? You might be surprised to read about WWE’s emerging social media story.
But first, it’s easy to pigeonhole WWE as fringe cable channel with a small group of die-hard fans, but you likely don’t know all the facts…
WWE.com outperformed ABC.com, CBS.com, NBC.com, NASCAR.com, PerezHilton.com, NHL.com and UFC.com. More people attended Wrestlemania XXVI than the Super Bowl, held in the same stadium.
“WWE” ranked #3 for most searches on Yahoo! in 2009, behind only Michael Jackson and Twilight. (As I write this, WWE is the top-trending search term on Yahoo!) And WWE.com has more than 14 million average monthly unique visitors worldwide.
More significantly, WWE’s own social networking site has 610,000 registered users who participate in forums, comment on blogs, and consume the millions of photos and videos that WWE updates continuously.
3 New Studies Show Value of Social Media & Businesses Slow Response
There are some interesting studies surfacing lately in the world of social media. Here’s a summary of three recent research findings covering the benefits of social media marketing, how forums help brands and how businesses are employing social media marketing.
#1: 50% of Small Businesses Say Lead Generation is Biggest Benefit of Social Networking
According to the “Small Business Marketing Forecast 2010” from Ad-ology, lead generation is the biggest benefit of social networking for U.S. small businesses.
Social Media Marketing Lowers Acquisition Costs 39 Percent for TakeLessons.com
It was a classic business beginning. Two friends, some margaritas, and maybe a little cocktail napkin scribbling.
In 2004, Steven Cox sat down with a fellow musician after a gig. Cox’s friend and his wife were expecting their first baby and hoping to buy a house. But as a musician and private instructor, he struggled with making ends meet.
“Playing music doesn’t necessarily pay all the bills, unless you have a really big contract or gig,” Cox says. “My friend was hanging flyers in drugstores and music stores but still not finding enough students.”
Cox, once a full-time musician, worked a day job in IT and management consulting at the time. When he suggested his friend go online to connect with aspiring musicians, the friend confessed, “I’m a musician. I don’t know anything about that.”
With that, Cox began orchestrating TakeLessons.com.
Today, TakeLessons is America’s leading music and voice lessons company—a position reached largely through social media marketing.
