WebProNews

Razorfish has released a wealth of interesting data about consumer online behavior, and a good deal has to do with social media and brand interaction. For those struggling to find the right use of social networks for their business, the data is worth paying attention to.

The data is based on a survey of 1,000 consumers in the US, about half male and half female. They cover four major age groups and 10 major cities.

"To avoid duplicating the more broad-based work of Pew, Forrester, and other research firms, our goal was to survey what we call "connected consumers,'" Razorfish explains. These connected consumers have broadband access, have spent at least $150 online in the past six months, have visited a "community site" (MySpace, YouTube, Facebook, Yelp, etc.), and have consumed or created some form of digital media like photos, videos, music, or news.

"Based on previous Razorfish consumer research, we have found that these 'connected consumers' roughly mirror the U.S. population with broadband access. According to the Pew Internet & American Life Project, about 63% of all Americans today have a high-speed Internet connection, up from only 55% in 2008. This translates to roughly 200 million people, based on a July 2009 population estimate from the CIA World Factbook (total population 307,212,123, July 2009 estimate)."

In other words, pay attention to the results. You can find them all here. I wanted to highlight a few of the particularly interesting ones here, which pertain to social media use. They paint a pretty good picture of what consumers are looking for from brands on social networks (although these are certainly not the limits of what companies can do with them).

Beyond the data in the above graphs, another point worth mentioning derived from the research is that for Facebook, MySpace, and Twitter, those who follow brands are mostly looking for exclusive deals or offers. This mentality will likely increase moving forward as deals get more personalized as well.

Like Jeremiah Owyang recently discussed with WebProNews, sites can connect with existing networks like Facebook, Twitter, etc. (think Facebook Connect and similar services), and in the future, people may be able to log-in to corporate sites with their Facebook (or whatever) account, which will bring up their profile information for companies to serve personalized content (or perhaps personalized deals).

The point is, consumers are clearly more than willing to interact with brands through social media, and this will likely become increasingly true as social networks themselves gain more users. It's not only about pushing your offers out there and hoping people bite. People are becoming friends/fans of brands hoping you do give them special offers.

Interesting new marketing opportunities are going to continue to present themselves moving forward as networks get more advanced and more brands figure out new ways to use them.

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