Can social networks help you grow your business? (Small Business E-commerce Link Digest – April 16, 2010)

Happy Friday, Big Thinkers! It’s been a busy week in the land of the local, social, mobile web. Twitter’s Chirp conference was going on all week, which led to a bunch of significant news on the social front, many of which help answer our question. The answer is, “social networks can help you grow your business… if you use them the right way.” Fortunately, there was a ton of good information this week on how to use them the right way. So let’s look at what we’ve got:

• We here at thinks took a look at Twitter’s new “Promoted Tweet” advertising platform and why it matters to you. Now, ReadWriteWeb offers useful statistics about Twitter usage, while Search Engine Land compares those numbers with Facebook and Google Buzz. Some highlights include:
  

  Updates/Posts

  • Facebook status updates: 700 per second
  • Twitter tweets: 600 per second
  • Buzz posts: 55 per second

  And compared to searches (see our postscript below)

  • Google: 34,000 searches per second
  • Yahoo: 3,200 searches per second
  • Bing: 927 searches per second

  Also, apropos of nothing, Take a look at the speaker list from Chirp. Is it just me or are Twitter founder Biz Stone, COO Dick Costolo and “The Search” author John Battelle all wearing the same glasses? Does Twitter require those specs to speak there? Anyways…

• As if the stats from Twitter’s Chirp conference weren’t convincing enough, Adweek points to a new Nielsen study that finds social media use is now “…a regular habit for three quarters of the online population.” While the data is less flattering about Twitter than Facebook, it’s clear many people are using these sites.
• The always enlightening Jeremiah Owyang, um, enlightens us with his look at five ways companies organize for social business. His charts offer a nice breakdown of the benefits and limitations of each structure. Well worth the read.
• And, finally, Mashable has a great overview on how to target social media influencers to boost traffic and sales. Having covered this ground myself a time or two, I think they’ve done an excellent job of laying out how to put your best influencers to work for you.

Enjoy the weekend, folks. We’ll catch you back here next week.

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