The world went and got all social. People at all ages are using Facebook, Twitter, Linkedin, or YouTube. Below you can take a look at some social media statistics you need to know:

• Facebook
• More than 800 active million active users with more than 200 million added in 2011 (2012).
• 56% of consumers said they are more likely to recommend a brand to a friend after becoming a fan on Facebook (2012).
• There are more than 3.5 billion pieces of content (web links, news stories, blog posts, etc) shared each week on Facebook  (2012).
• Twitter:
•  There are now 100 million active users on Twitter (2012).
• eMarketer estimates thatthere will be nearly 21 million users in the US by the end of this year (2012).
• 34% of marketers have generated leads using Twitter (2012).
• YouTube:
• 4,000,000,000 page views a day, which adds up to 1,000,000,000,000 a year (2012).
• 60 days > 60 years: More video is uploaded in two months than the three major U.S. networks (ABC, CBS, NBC) combined created in six decades (2011).
• 2 billion: Number of global video views per week being monetized (2011).
• LinkedIn
• LinkedIn’s members have reached 147 million (2012).
• 39% of the members is a Manager, Director, Owner, Chief Officer or Vice President (2012).
• The 10 countries with most LinkedIn users: United States (58.5 million), India (13.3 million), United Kingdom (8.4 million), Brazil (6.8 million), Canada (5.1 million), France (3.2 million), Netherland (3.1 million), Italy (2.8 million), Australia (2.8 million) and Spain (2,6 million) (2012).

 

From the statistics above we can claim that social media has become a very important part of our everyday interaction. And this is actually very cool because all these social platforms enable you to keep track of many activities your users perform and the feedback they provide. This eventually will help you to better understand your users, get into interaction with them and even get them involved in your future product development. And the final goal would be delivering a product that will meet the needs of your target audience in a relatively easy and cost-effective way.

Social media tools are one way to achieve this. Below there is a brief overview of 5 social media tools that can help you to capitalize on the information you can absorb from social platforms.

1. Get Satisfaction

• What? –  It is a social media tool helping companies to build online communities with the main aim of enabling productive conversations between the companies and their customers. “Realize that simply engaging your customers in conversation won’t earn you a gold star and it won’t make your customers happy. Conversations are everywhere these days, and it seems like the more everyone talks about conversations, the harder it is to start the ones that matter”, writes Get Satisfaction . Thus, this tool helps you build a community with a focus where both parties, companies and customers, provide constructive feedback.

 

• How? – They say: “We are everywhere your customers are (but not in a creepy way)”. How do they achieve this? Their platform unifies conversations happening on your site, Facebook, Twitter, or your blog. It integrates with the systems your company uses. They further explain: “Whether it’s CRM, Helpdesk, or Social Media Tools, our growing list of partner integrations gives you an easy way to connect community to your systems of record. For the DIY minded, we have an open API that lets you access all public information”.

 

• Who? - There are 55 000 customer communities powered by Get Satisfaction. Among them you can find companies such as Nike, Mint, P&G, Foursquare, Visa, American Heart Association, Texas.gov, Microsoft and so on.

 

2. Social Mention

• What? - “Social Mention is a social media search and analysis platform that aggregates user generated content from across the universe into a single stream of information”. They say it is ”Google Alerts but for social media”. You can create an alert and receive free daily email alerts of your brand, company, CEO, marketing campaign, or on a developing news story, a competitor. You can also get the “Realtime Buzz widget” and display realtime buzz on your site or blog. Besides the point-in-time social media search and analysis service, the daily social media alerts, and the realtime buzz widgets, Social Mention also provides API.

 

• How? - In order to track what others are saying about particular topic you just need to enter the keyword(s) in the search tab, then you can filter the search (search in all, blogs, microblogs, comments, bookmarks, news and so on).

 

• Who? - Social Mention monitors 100+ social media properties directly including: Twitter, Facebook, FriendFeed, YouTube, Digg, Google etc.

 

3. User Voice

• What? - User Voice provides tools that on one hand help the customers engage and speak while on the other hand they help companies better understand and interact with their customers.

 

• How? - There are three User Voice products that help you to get connected to your customers. Those are:

               - User Voice Feedback: hosted feedback forums which allow customers to create, discuss, and vote for ideas.

               - User Voice Helpdesk: simple tool helping companies  to track and respond to customer issues.

               - User Voice Full Service: a complete solution combining both, User Voice Feedback and User Voice Helpdesk, in a simple and    

                 easy to use tool.

 

• Who? - Some of User Voice users are Merchmo, Blackbaud, Rackspace, or Noom Inc.

 

4. MailChimp

• What? - It is a tool that helps you to design great email campaigns, share them on social networks, integrate with web services you already use, manage subscribers and track results. You can use MailChimp’s templates or design your own. It offers cool features and integrations that generally meet your needs.

 

• How? - In order to use MailChimp’s newsletter publishing platform, you need to first create an account (it is free to sign up).  Once you do that you can immediately start creating content and publishing it. In between you can create different lists of people to whom you will send the posts. It is very simple and even better it has very helpful guides explaining everything you need to know: from how to get started, to designing templates, from email marketing and getting social to understanding reports.

 

• Who? - Some of MailChimp’s users are the following: Nerdbots, Flux Projects, Angry Birds, Raleigh Denim.

 

5. Monitter

• What? - It is a location-based monitoring system that tells you what people on Twitter are tweeting about right now within a certain mile radius.

 

• How? - It is a very simple tool. All you need to do is enter the keyword, zip code and the radius. You can follow several keywords at the same time.

 

To sum up: All the information you need is out there. But in order for that information to be valuable, you need to analyze it and ultimately come up with certain set of activities designed to produce the outcome you want. And social media tools are great approach to achieve this. So check out what tools are available, what suits your startup needs the best and get into action!