Digital CPG Blog

For some companies, an online coupon is social enough. Huggies recently took it one step further, however, with an innovative offer: “Instead of just the traditional online coupon to drive more diapers off the shelf, Huggies is offering parents a 2-for-1 choice.  More precisely – that is a choice between a $3.00 or $1.50 incentive.  The “catch” is simple and pleasant – just tell 3 friends about the Huggies deal.  They also offer customers the choice of how to spread the news to other fellow parents:  via social networking sites like Facebook, via instant messaging or via a good old-fashioned email,” reports Colloquy.

Their research shows that child care is the most important category for advice and referrals from friends and family, which makes the Huggies promotion all the more critical and smart.

The offer is clear, engaging and compelling – word of mouth at it’s best.

How have different social networks grown over the past year? Take a look:

Twitter

Then: Twitter has 75m user accounts, but only around 15m are active users on a regular basis.

Now: Twitter now officially claims to have 175m registered users, although it’s unclear what percentage regularly user the service.

Then: The average number of tweets per day was over 27m.

Now: Twitter now states that 95m tweets are written each day. This is a staggering 250% increase.

Then: The average number of tweets per hour was around 1.3m.

Now: At the new rate of growth, its calculated that there are nearly 4m tweets per hour

LinkedIn

Then: LinkedIn has over 50m members worldwide.

Now: Officially, Linkedin has grown 100%, now having over 100m professionals who use the platform worldwide.

Facebook

Then: Facebook has 350 million active users on global basis.

Now: Facebook officially hit the half-billion member mark last year. According to figures from Socialbakers, there are now some 640m Facebook users worldwide.

Then: 50% of active users log into Facebook each day. This means at least 175m users every 24 hours.

Now: Still citing the 50% active rate, using the official 500m figure, this means at least 250m users every 24 hours. This is more than a 40% increase in 12 months.

It’s important not to take the growth numbers as indicative of value, however. Some studies are saying for instance Twitter isn’t even that social:

A whopping 50% of all content consumed on Twitter is generated by only 20,000 users. This is no 80/20 rule: even if we assume that a significant number of Twitter accounts are dormant (which appears to be a valid assumption), a very, very small group of “elite” users (0.05% of all users by Yahoo Research’s calculation) is producing half of the content that gets consumed.

Although these elite users are not part of the traditional media, the researchers observe that “information flows have not become egalitarian by any means.“

What’s more:

• Yahoo’s researchers found that Twitter isn’t very “social” in another important respect: individuals on Twitter follow back far less than they’re followed.According to the researchers, “The Twitter follower graph, in other words, does not conform to the usual characteristics of social networks, which exhibit much higher reciprocity and far less skewed degree distributions, but instead resembles more the mixture of one-way mass communications and reciprocated interpersonal communications“.
• There’s significant fragmentation on Twitter. In other words, “Celebrities listen to celebrities, while bloggers listen to bloggers.” Even if this isn’t necessarily surprising, it does highlight the fact Twitter users organize themselves around subjects more than they do other people.

Which just means take all of the data with a grain of salt and run your own experiments. Where do you find your customers on the net? Where are they interacting and engaging?