How Social Media Research is Driving Automotive Marketing

This 30-minute webinar session will focus on how the automotive industry — from manufacturers to dealers and all points in between — can leverage their existing customer base to gain meaningful social media insight.

Why you should attend: We will be sharing best practices and ‘what’s next’ ideas to help you set your social media and other marketing strategies apart.

Who should attend: Dealers, manufacturers, ad agencies, and anyone interested in the automotive industry and social media

Hosted by: Nathan Scripps, Rapleaf automotive lead

Date: Thursday, Nov. 19, 2009

Time: 2:00 – 2:30 pm ET (11:00 – 11:30 am PT)

Related posts:

1. An In-Depth Look at AOL, Gmail, Hotmail, and Yahoo Email Users – Part 2: Social Media Profiles and Friend Counts
2. Rapleaf, Social Graph Research, and Online Friendships in Latest BusinessWeek
3. Rapleaf Study: Popularity and fan demographics of Michael Jackson, The Beatles, Elvis, and Madonna across social media

Unlike age and gender data, online activity and friend counts do not have clear trends across email service providers. What the data seems to suggest is that Hotmail users tend to have slightly more social media profiles, and Gmail users tend to be slightly better connected overall.

Here are the results:

Social Media Profile Counts of AOL, Gmail, Hotmail, and Yahoo Email Users

Highlights

• 85% of users have two or fewer social media memberships
• On average, Hotmail users have slightly more social media profiles than AOL, Gmail, and Yahoo users

Online Friend Counts of AOL, Gmail, Hotmail, and Yahoo Email Users

Highlights

• On average, 66% of sampled users have less than 10 friends online
• Just over 7% of users have more than 150 friends online
• Gmail users average the most friends overall with 46.2; Yahoo users average the least with 40.0

Concluding Remarks

The vast majority of email users have two or fewer social media memberships and less than 50 friends online. Gmail users tend to be slightly better connected while Hotmail users generally have more social media memberships. Marketers interested in word-of-mouth advertising on social media should focus their efforts on the 7% of users with more than 150 friends to engage influencers.

The next part of this study will look at social network memberships.

Interested in analyzing your customer email list?

We’d be happy to help – to find out what we can tell you about your audience, contact us at info@rapleaf.com.

Related posts:

1. An In-Depth Look at AOL, Gmail, Hotmail, and Yahoo Email Users – Part 1: Age and Gender
2. Rapleaf Study: Popularity and fan demographics of Michael Jackson, The Beatles, Elvis, and Madonna across social media
3. Rapleaf Study on Social Network Users: Sports fans are friendly and women love hockey

For this study, we sampled 120,000 users with @aol.com, @gmail.com, @hotmail.com, and @yahoo.com emails, and looked at their age, gender, online activity, friend counts, and social network memberships.

We broke this study into several parts so this post will only cover the age and gender data.

Overall, people who use these four webmail clients tend to be young, with over 75% of all users under 35 years of age. Part of the reason for this younger skew is that these demographics are based on self-reported data from public social media profiles, and the people who use social media are generally younger. Even so, comparing demographics between each of the email services offers insight into userbase differences.

Here’s what we found:

Ages of AOL, Gmail, Hotmail, and Yahoo Email Users

Highlights

• Nearly 50% of Gmail users are under 25 years of age 
• AOL users tend to be older, with 31% of users being at least 36 years old 
• Yahoo and Hotmail email users have similar age distributions 

Gender of AOL, Gmail, Hotmail, and Yahoo Email Users

Highlights

• Hotmail has the greatest gender skew with over 57% of users being male 
• Gmail tends to have more female than male users (53% vs 47%) 
• AOL and Yahoo are gender balanced 

Concluding Remarks

Gmail, Hotmail, and Yahoo users tend to be younger while AOL users are slightly older. Hotmail’s audience tends to made up of more males, Gmail users tend to lean female, and AOL and Yahoo users are equally likely to be male and female.

Next time, we’ll study friend counts and how active these email users are online.

Interested in analyzing your customer email list?

We’d be happy to help – to find out what we can tell you about your audience, contact us at info@rapleaf.com.

Related posts:

1. An In-Depth Look at AOL, Gmail, Hotmail, and Yahoo Email Users – Part 2: Social Media Profiles and Friend Counts
2. Rapleaf Study on Demographics, Online Activity of Twitter Influencers in CPG’s Customer List
3. Rapleaf Study on Social Network Users: Sports fans are friendly and women love hockey

 Who are these Twitter influencers and what do they look like? To answer this question, we analyzed social media profile counts and self-reported demographics of the CPG’s top 0.1%, top 1%, and top 10% most followed Twitter users and compared that data with the 90% least followed users. As a reminder, the sample set includes over 40,000 “active” Twitter users (defined as those with at least five followers, five friends, or five updates).  

Main findings

• The company’s most popular Twitter users are predominantly female and between 36 and 45 years old
• The more popular a user is, the more social media profiles they have online: over 43% of the top 0.1% most followed Twitter users have more than six online profiles

Bear in mind that these results are specific to the CPG company’s audience and, consequently, will tend to skew towards middle-aged females. Here are more details on user demographics and online activity:

Gender of CPG’s Most Popular Twitter Users

Highlights

• Top 0.1% of most popular Twitter users are 66% female; over 83% of the top 0.1%, top 10%, and bottom 90% of users are female
• For the company, the proportion of male users increased as popularity increased

Ages of CPG’s Most Popular Twitter Users

Highlights

• Over 39% of the top 0.1% most popular Twitter users are in the 36 – 45 age group
• Nearly 66% of the top 0.1% are at least 36 years old
• There are hardly any users under 18 years of age and less than 10% of users are 25 or under

Online Profile Count of CPG’s Most Popular Twitter Users

Highlights

• Users in the top 0.1% tend to have the most profiles across the social web, followed by users in the top 1% and top 10%
• More than 53% of the top 0.1% most popular users have at least five online profiles, compared to 30% of the bottom 90%
• In order of popularity, the six most-popular social media sites for the top 0.1% outside of Twitter are Facebook, Myspace, LinkedIn, Wordpress, StumbleUpon, and Flickr. 

Concluding Remarks

In general, the most popular Twitter users in the CPG company’s customer list tend to be females age 36 – 45 who have many social media profiles, especially on Facebook, MySpace andLinkedIn. Rapleaf’s client is a leading provider of food products and drinks so it’s not surprising that their customers are primarily young to middle-aged females. In addition to the CPG company’s market focus, another reason why people under 25 years old are so underrepresented may be because younger demographics, especially teenagers, are not avid adopters of Twitter. It would be interesting to study how the demographics and online activity of these customers compare to those of Twitter’s most popular users.

Related posts:

1. An In-Depth Look at AOL, Gmail, Hotmail, and Yahoo Email Users – Part 1: Age and Gender
2. Rapleaf Study: Popularity and fan demographics of Michael Jackson, The Beatles, Elvis, and Madonna across social media
3. Rapleaf Study on Popularity of Twitter Clients

It wasn’t too long ago when Rapleaf only had data on a handful of people. Today, with our people database growing rapidly, we have insight into over 375 million consumers (linked to 600+ million emails), including their demographics, psychographics, social network memberships, friend counts and more. We’re proud to help leading businesses better understand their customers in our continuous quest to improve the consumer experience.

Related posts:

1. An In-Depth Look at AOL, Gmail, Hotmail, and Yahoo Email Users – Part 2: Social Media Profiles and Friend Counts
2. An In-Depth Look at AOL, Gmail, Hotmail, and Yahoo Email Users – Part 1: Age and Gender
3. Rapleaf Partners with Accertify to Combat Online Fraud

Fraudsters beware. We are proud to announce that we are now working with Accertify, a leading provider of fraud prevention solutions for online merchants, to identify risky transactions and reduce fraud loss. Rapleaf’s social media data will be incorporated into Accertify’s fraud-screening platform to help major internet retailers improve customer experience while providing them with another layer of protection against fraud.

You can read more about our partnership here: Accertify and Rapleaf Partner to Deliver Enhanced Online Fraud Protection

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