Social Influence Benchmark Report by www.StrongMail.com

StrongMail recently released its inaugural Social Influence Benchmark Report, which shows that branding campaigns should be targeted to Twitter and blogs, but sales campaigns would be better served by email marketing and blogger outreach.

The report covered the following sharing channels: email, Facebook, Twitter, blogs (blogger, WordPress, personal links and embedded badges) and “other” (Myspace and Bebo).

Content Sharing and Extending Brand Reach

In what will likely be surprising to some, email proved the most popular method of sharing content, with 86% using that as their preferred sharing method.

However, once shared, the percentage of information to go viral was much higher on non-email channels. Email was re-shared only 41% of the time while Twitter was re-shared 1837% of the time. More interestingly, “personal links” (i.e. embedded links for blogs) were more viral than Facebook.

How can these results be used by brand marketers?

If you want to grow your brand awareness to reach new audiences, you should encourage your brand champions to Twitter and blog about your messaging.

Conversion from Clicks

When it comes down to whether recipients actually converted (bought something, signed up, etc.), email marketing was the highest performing channel at 36.8% with blogs and badges at 20%.

How can these results be used to generate sales?

If you want to drive sales, you should start by launching an email marketing campaign and then encourage your audience to forward the email to a friend or blog about the message rather than tweet about it.

Careful Conclusions

While the report showed that the conversion of traffic from Twitter was low, it was a percentage and did not attribute back to final numbers or value of sales, nor does it take into consideration the long-term value of that outreach.

What can be concluded is that by carefully targeting your campaigns to different customer types who are able to share your messages via their preferred method, you can increase both brand reach and sales.

StrongMail Influencer

This data was collected from millions of share activities that took place on the StrongMail Influencer platform during Q3 2009.  StrongMail Influencer is a viral marketing tool that can be integrated into email campaigns and websites to encourage people to share via their preferred social media channel. Featuring in-depth reporting on share activity and conversions, Influencer enables marketers to identify and remarket to their top influencers.

StrongMail influencer helps marketers to:

• Identify the “key influencers” within their customer base.
• Target key influencers with socially enabled email campaigns.
• Track the performance of socially enabled email campaigns to enhance targeting, incentives and optimise for enhanced branding or ROI.

This is not a paid review, and I have no commercial connection with www.StrongMail.com.