What's Shareworthy: Survey Says...

With Yesmail's recent integration of ShareThis, I thought it would be good to do a little 2.0 consumer survey on what types of content is share-worthy on a social network or social media site, and how people feel in general about companies having a shingle on social networks. Because it was mostly those within my network, I had about 50 responses. Here’s what I found:

1. Sharing is still new - education and simplification is needed. Over 60% of those surveyed said they had not shared an email to a social site, and another 11% couldn’t get the sharing tool to work.

2. Viral content in social media is not necessarily all about sales. In fact, sometimes content that humanizes a brand is what gets shared. Here’s the content that was interesting to those surveyed.
• Cool or funny video (30% responded with interesting, 30% strongly liked it for sharing)
• Insider’s look at a company (30% responded with interesting, 16% strongly liked the content)
• VERY good sale (30% responded with interesting, 19% strongly liked it for sharing)
• Tie-in with a non-profit (32% s responded with interesting, 11% strongly liked it for sharing)

3. Consumers are lukewarm about traditional marketing efforts. It’s been said before that traditional tactics don’t work in the social media world. The survey reaffirmed that fact.
• Sweepstakes are not interesting. A strong 58% would not share a sweepstakes or contest, and 33% felt lukewarm (The response was ‘maybe’).
• Neither is a company’s presence on a social network. Unfortunately, a lot of consumers don’t care about a new social media presence. 38% would not share, 35% felt lukewarm.
• Even loyalty programs are not all that share-worthy. 30% would not share news about a new loyalty program, and an additional 52% felt lukewarm about it.

4. Consumers have accepted finding corporate brand presence on social media websites – as long as the brand fits the social network. A whopping 85% felt there were types of social media sites that didn’t make sense for companies to have a presence on.

5. Facebook rules in terms of company follows. 57% of consumers surveyed said they followed/friended a company on Facebook, while another 49% followed those on Twitter, and 27% on LinkedIn, and 8% on YouTube.