There has been some heated discussions about teens and their decline in Facebook usage in 2013. Warnings that Facebook will earn its spot as the next “has been” social media website alongside Myspace are circulating the web. According to a study by Socialbakers, total reach of Facebook brand pages among teens ages 13-17 fluctuated throughout the year but ended 2013 in about the same realm it began. The teen’s age group was the only one in the study that did not have a substantial increase in reach in 2013 (29.1%).

So why did reach among teens remain stagnant in 2013? A very high level of market saturation among 12-17 year olds undoubtedly played into it. eMarketer estimates that “95.9% of social networkers ages 12-17 used Facebook in 2013.” With numbers that high, remaining stagnant is not so bad, however, future decrease is likely.

In Facebook’s Q3 2013 earnings call CFO, David Ebersman acknowledged that Facebook “did see a decrease in daily users specifically among younger teens.” Facebook’s rapid growth among older age groups is a big turn off to teens. Looking back at the Socailbakers study as noted by Marketing Charts, reach among ages 45-54 was up 69%, reach among ages 55-64 was up 71%, and reach among the study’s oldest age group (65 and up) was a whopping 74% higher at the end of 2013 than it was in the beginning. With most teens looking for independence, having their parents and grandparents on Facebook compromises its ability to give them that.

As a result, teens are not necessarily ending their relationships with Facebook, but are expanding the number of social media sites they use. According to a study by GlobalWebIndex, mobile chat services, video-sharing apps, and photo-sharing apps are becoming the new cool thing. Luckily, Facebook has its various acquisitions keeping it in the teen social media game. Facebook owns Instagram which has seen an 85% increase in teen usage in 2013. Most recently, Facebook announced that it would be acquiring the mobile messaging company WhatsApp for $19 billion. WhatsApp had an 81% increase in usage among teens in 2013.

To learn more about Facebook’s WhatsApp acquisition, check out BIA/Kelsey‘s post WhatsApp with $19B Acquisitions These Days? by Mike Boland.

The post Facebook and Teens: Their Future Together appeared first on BIA/Kelsey - Local Media Watch.

Mobile devices are becoming vital to Canadian consumers when they are searching for local businesses. Brick and mortar foot traffic is increased as a result with 65% of consumers who search on mobile devices going directly to a brick and mortar locations to complete their purchases. Maps are also a key factor for mobile search with 85% of smartphone users finding local map inclusion in search results at least somewhat important. When consumers actually perform a search, 94% of searchers prefer to use mobile browsers over mobile apps.

Social media is key for reviews and recommendations of products and local businesses. Eighty-six percent of respondents reported that ratings and reviews were an important factor for them when making a purchase decision. Consumers not only like to see what other people have to say about products they have used or businesses they have visited, but they also like to provide their own reviews. Thirty-seven percent of respondents said that they were likely to post about a purchase they have made to their social media network.

Here are some other key findings from the Annual Kantar Consumer Search Behavior Study:

— Consumers continue to show greater confidence in “organic search” results over pay for click

— Consumers prefer mobile browsing compatibility over mobile app availability (by a factor of 9)

— 60% of Canadians search for local business information at least once a week (27% at least a few times a week)

— 48% are conducting searches directly through search engines like Bing, Yahoo and FireFox or Google (opposed to searches within company websites or directory listings)

The post Social and Mobile Search Increasingly Important to Canadian Users According to DAC Group appeared first on BIA/Kelsey - Local Media Watch.

-Mark Britton, CEO and President, Avvo
-Pete Flint, CEO, Trulia.com
-Matt Maloney, Cofounder and CEO, GrubHub
-Carey Ransom, CEO, Real Practice

Collectively, these four have raised the princely sum of about $140 million in private funding.

The first panelist was Pete Flint, CEO, Trulia.com. Trulia, of course, is a major real estate vertical. (Trulia added rentals to its real estate listings about 18 months ago.) It claims the largest user-generated community in the real estate industry.

Trulia has attempted to push the envelope on leveraging social services. It runs a large real estate Q&A on its site, covering the real estate transaction process, information and commentary on neighborhoods, etc.). Flint said the crash in the housing market has actually helped the business, because it has made brokers more interested in consumer preferences and consumer-generated commentary.

Next was Matt Maloney, cofounder and CEO, GrubHub. GrubHub is where the consumer goes for dine out, either take-out or delivery. So GrubHub quite a bit different from other restaurant/food sites that focus on reservations.

GrubHub handles almost 15,000 restaurants nationally. Restaurants pay GrubHub a commission in the vicinity of 15 percent of each order. About 40 percent of its traffic is from mobile users. Maloney pointed out that the pay-for-performance model worked with its restaurant clients, whereas paid advertising did not.

The third panelist was Mark Britton, CEO and president of Avvo, the legal and professional services directory website. Avvo became the largest consumer-oriented legal website in just three years, and Britton attributes a lot of that success to the ways it has harnessed social media. (Britton pointed out that Avvo is now four times the size of Martindale-Hubbell online.)

Avvo’s Q&A forum handles 50,000 questions and answers monthly. Although its business model includes a subscription-based pro model, advertising is a big (primary?) source of its revenues. Britten said Avvo wanted to use a CPC revenue model, but its lawyer clients said it had a strong preference for a fixed-cost pricing model.

Carey Ransom, CEO of Real Practice, talked about how his company aggregates responses and leads from a variety of ad campaigns, to Real Practice’s centralized platform. The platform supports centralized lead management, real-time lead notifications and cross-campaign performance comparisons. Real Practice started by serving only lawyers, but has since expanded to other professions. They key to its success is its ability to tailor its mechanisms (such as the lead processing pipeline) to specific professions and verticals, unlike more generic lead gen sites.

To complete the arc of this session, Ransom mentioned that Real Practice is also integrated in with Avvo profiles, in a classic example of symbiosis between players who could otherwise be, arguably, competitors.

The post ILM West: A Deep Look at ‘Super Social’ Verticals appeared first on BIA/Kelsey - Local Media Watch.

Mentions, reviews, blog comments, tweets, posts and now check-ins. It’s enough digital noise to lead local business owners to throw their hands up in despair. As Internet fragmentation accelerates, a host of reputation management providers have carved out an important foothold in the digital landscape by aggregating merchants’ online activity through a single dashboard that subsequently allows for sentiment analysis, syndicated messaging and competitive benchmarking.

Like so many parts of the digital ecosystem, however, reputation management is quickly becoming commoditized, which can actually make the SMB’s decision process about brand marketing and protection more complicated. That result runs counter to the very problem that reputation management aspires to resolve.

In our first Social Local Media industry report, Andrew Shotland and I examine the current state of reputation management and project how the industry must evolve to create a more holistic, simplistic and measurable solution. All the leading vendors are profiled, with the report comparing and contrasting them across 10 foundational criteria and distilling their differentiating features, as well as highlighting their business model challenges. We also explore opportunities and considerations for resellers that may be thinking of branding a solution for their own clients.

As BIA/Kelsey has touted for years, there is robust opportunity in ERPM. Our forecast, in fact, pegs local spend in this segment to eclipse $5 billion by 2015. For this growth to be realized, and for these tools to truly capture the needs of the enterprises they serve, there is a pressing need for differentiation through an elegant interface that consolidates the fragmented Web into an easily managed system.

“Single click publishing,” improved social messaging, scheduling functionality, mobile features and automated loyalty tools are all essential elements of the holistic communication platform that will win the future.

Social Local Media subscribers can access the full report here.

The post SLM Industry Report: The State of Reputation Management appeared first on BIA/Kelsey - Local Media Watch.

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The debut of BIA/Kelsey’s newest advisory service – Social Local Media – is fast upon us, with the launch set for Wednesday, Feb. 23, and an introductory webinar to follow the next day (2/24). Over the next eight business days, we are going to engage in a social media marketing campaign to give you a voice in shaping the program and its conversations.

Beginning today, we will utilize our Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn pages, as well as this blog, to thoughtfully engage with you daily. We’ll share examples of the social data and insights that you will find in SLM. And most importantly, we’ll solicit your input through polling questions that will take the temperature of how different companies (SMBs, agencies, publishers, broadcasters, online pure plays, etc.) are implementing social media plans. Plus we’ll ask for your suggestions about how the webinar can address your biggest needs in social.

It’s fascinating to examine how players are identifying and approaching opportunities in the local social ecosystem, and the first thing we’ve seen is how social platforms have revolutionized how companies and their customers interact and share. We now want to put our own social media channels to work in order to learn more about your challenges, questions and needs in social so that we can appropriately address them on the webinar and throughout our coverage. Will you participate with us?

Join the conversation on our Twitter feed (@BIAKelsey), our Facebook page, or in our LinkedIn Group…or post a comment directly to the blog. You may also E-mail us (webinarsATbia.com).

The post Social Local Media: BIA/Kelsey Wants to Get Social With You appeared first on BIA/Kelsey - Local Media Watch.

Today I am excited to announce that BIA/Kelsey has greatly enhanced its focus on social media to include dedicated coverage on our Local Media Watch blog and a new Continuous Advisory Service called Social Local Media.

BIA/Kelsey Analyst Jed Williams and BIA/Kelsey Associate Andrew Shotland, a.k.a. the Local SEO Guy, are teaming up to lead our coverage of this fast-growing and complex marketplace.

As you’ve likely read here or elsewhere, there are some astounding facts underscoring our decision to invest in social: More than half a billion Facebook users, Twitter’s exponential growth and, and perhaps most important, the millions of SMBs that are turning to Facebook and other social media platforms to acquire and retain customers.

Our aim in initiating coverage of social media is not to overwhelm you with data, but rather to help you make sense of this fascinating and important market by offering deep analysis, thoughtful insight and grounded recommendations.

So how will BIA/Kelsey approach its social local media coverage? We’ll do it by focusing on two central sets of questions:

1) “How is the social local media landscape evolving, and what are the implications for various players in the space?”

2) “As a media company, agency, SMB, etc., how exactly do I do social?”

The companies we profile, the trends we study, and the analysis we offer will center on answering one or both of these questions. As a result, our social-related blog coverage will assume a variety of forms. Predominant among these will be news-analysis — what’s happening, how does it change the social local landscape, and what are implications for our various constituents? We will also offer case studies, data synthesis, executive interviews, op-eds and other approaches to understanding this evolving space.

Your input and engagement with us, our analysts and each other will be a key ingredient in our serving up the best possible coverage of this dynamic and rapidly changing marketplace. As Jed and Andrew lead our rollout of this exciting new coverage area, they will need your direct and constant feedback to evolve the direction and emphasis of Social Local Media.

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I sat in on a breakout session this morning at SES Chicago entitled “Local 2.0: The Evolution of Local Search.” Gregg Stewart from TMP division 15miles moderated, with two local SEO experts presenting, David Rodecker or Relevant Ads and Curtis R. Curtis from SharksFly Marketing.

According to the speakers, many of the old rules of local SEO are changing, driven by a range of factors, including the emergence of social media and advances in geo-location.

Rodecker noted that the use of geo-modifiers in domain names, once rewarded, is increasingly a non-factor or even detrimental. This is largely due to advances in how search engines identify user location. Rodecker noted that in his work with clients, he has seen wide variation in ranking between those with and without a geomodifier. Often the pages best optimized for a category saw better results than those optimized for geography. This was not a welcome message to some SMBs in the room  that had gone well down the geo-modifier path.

Both speakers made it clear that local online marketers need to find a long-term solution to using call tracking numbers without undermining themselves from an SEO standpoint. The search world puts a premium on on consistency, and call tracking numbers undermine this with a different numbers in each of the various online ads an SMB places.

Rodecker recommended using images and javascript as workarounds for call tracking numbers. While Curtis agreed, he was quite adamant in asserting that “call tacking is one of the things you want to avoid.” Given that much of BIA/Kelsey’s data suggests SMBs place a premium value on calls as a leads source, this is a serious issue for local marketers.

The speakers were also clear that the local ecosystem is not all about Google anymore. Bing is an emerging local player, and Facebook is already a local juggernaut, with 2 million online businesses and climbing, a number that is fast approaching the estimated 4 million SMBs on Google. Add to this the emergence of location based services like 4 Square and Twitter and the local ecosystem looks more and more like a multi-headed monster.

The room this morning was packed, mostly with small businesses or agencies that represent them, and the messaging was directed to those having to grapple with the constantly moving goalpost that is local SEO.

The post SES Chicago: New Rules for Local Search appeared first on BIA/Kelsey - Local Media Watch.

The broader implication, according to 3L, is that publishers can treat Facebook as another, perhaps easier, path for establishing a sticky online presence for their small business customers. SMBs can use the fan pages to connect with customers, learn more about their preferences and push targeted offers to them.

Once the fan pages are built, publishers can choose to organize them into local directories that reside on Facebook as another way to drive leads to their customers.

“This [Facebook presence] may be more valuable than being online [with a website], because you are not competing with Google,” said 3L CEO Joakim Richter. Facebook has recently passed the 500 million user threshold, and its engagement figures are enviable, with members typically spending more than 2 hours a day on the social networking site.

The Pagenator acquisition signals a shift for 3L, which will continue to offer its Core directory publishing system (clients include Eniro and Local Insight Media). However, Richter told us last week that the Pagenator acquisition opens up a new opportunity to help directory publishers develop an online strategy that requires little effort or investment to launch.

“This is very similar to selling an ad, and it is easily adapted to the sales force,” Richter told us. “It is also not cannibalistic. It is pure new revenue.”

One of the key features of the Pagenator process is that in in the same process that develops the the fan page, the system also generates microsites (landing pages), smart phone ready microsites and rich media ads.

Jeff Whitehead, Pagenator’s founder, has now joined 3L as its head of product area-social media. One of his most interesting Pagenator projects, pre-3L, was helping create the social media application for Tweak Footwear, a new shoe company that was built entirely on social media, including soliciting design ideas from its Facebook fans.

Whitehead will be speaking at BIA/Kelsey’s Directional Media Strategies 2010 conference, Sept. 14-16, in Dallas, on the panel, “Web Sites: The Basic Listings of the 2010s?” The panel takes place on the event’s second day.

The post 3L Acquires Pagenator, Offers Auto Fan Page Creation for SMBs appeared first on BIA/Kelsey - Local Media Watch.

Yell works with the digital agency TGB Digital to target ads to the most relevant audience using the ONE Media Manager system.

Below is a screen shot that shows an ad for a wedding dress shop that is served on all profiles whose relationship status is set to “engaged.”

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