Universal McCann’s “Power to the People: Social Media Tracker” study, now in its fourth year, indicates that social networks continue to climb in popularity around the world. But the research firm believes a change is happening in social media: Internet users are “starting to focus their digital life” around single networks, rather than around many specialized tools with social features.

The study found a major increase in the percentage of US Internet users with a social network profile between 2008 and 2009. This year, 59% of active Web users—those with access at least every other day—reported having a profile, up 16 percentage points. Previous gains were in the single digits.

eMarketer estimates that 44.2% of all Internet users in the US are social network users, meaning they log on to such sites at least monthly. Logically, Universal McCann’s figure is higher, since its respondents may have created a profile but use social networks less often.

According to the “Power to the People” report, the US is far from tops in social networking activity. Seven other countries polled had higher percentages of Internet users with a social network profile. Russia, which came in first at 85.3%, also had one of the fastest growth trajectories—just 23.1% of Internet users in the country had a social network profile in 2006, the first year of polling.

Worldwide, 62.5% of active Internet users ages 16 to 54 have a social network profile in 2009. In addition, 71.1% have visited a friend’s profile page.

Universal McCann also sees a “decline or stasis” in the use of separate sites for activities such as blogging and photo-sharing. Instead, users are looking to social networks that consolidate multiple social media in a single place.

“These platforms—and there are different dominant players depending on the market—continue to grow even as other elements of the social media universe stagnate or decline,” wrote the report’s authors.

Evidence of this consolidation can be found in the top social networking site activities reported in 2009. Messaging friends was most popular, with 81.5% of users, but the No. 2 activity was uploading photos (76.3%). About one-third of users installed “useful” widgets on their profile, and another one-third have uploaded videos on their social networks. Almost three in 10 respondents used their social network as a blogging platform.

As noted above, despite consolidation social media is not a one-stop shop. Universal McCann advises marketers to give consumers options when engaging them through social media. Allowing individuals to share and discuss on their platform of choice remains important.

Learn more about Social Media contact WSI Baltics

What is the purpose of Twitter? Social media marketers have been trying to answer that question as they use the microblogging service to promote their brands and products.

The general wisdom is that Twitter is great for conversations and self-promotions. But critics of the 140-character medium have some support from an August 2009 Pear Analytics study of the site’s public timeline.

The marketing analytics firm placed each tweet in one of six categories, and the big winner was “pointless babble”—what Pear Analytics referred to as “the ‘I am eating a sandwich now’ tweets.” More than 40% of all tweets monitored fell into this grouping.

Conversational tweets—those part of a dialogue between users or starting with the “@” symbol—made up another 37.55% of tweets. Tweets with pass-along value, also known as “retweets,” were much less prevalent, at 8.7%, and self-promotional messages made up just 5.85% of the total. Spam and news were even rarer.

Tweets with pass-along value, important for marketers hoping to get their messages distributed as far and wide as possible, were highest on Mondays and Wednesdays, when they made up about 10% of the tweets per day.

Marketers should note, however, that qualitative categorizations have a degree of subjectivity. For example, Pear Analytics’ news category excluded news about technology and social media. And whenever a tweet might fall into multiple categories but began with “@,” it was deemed conversational.

“With the new face of Twitter, it will be interesting to see if they take a heavier role in news, or continue to be a source for people to share their current activities that have little to do with everyone else,” wrote Ryan Kelly on the Pear Analytics blog.

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Digital advertising has been the bright spot in many ad spending forecasts, and that trend is slated to continue.

In the “Five-Year Interactive Marketing Forecast Report,” Forrester Research projects a 17% compound annual growth rate (CAGR) for US interactive marketing spending over the next five years, to nearly $55 billion in 2014.

As it grows, interactive marketing will represent an ever greater portion of US advertising spending. Pegged at 12% of the total in 2009, interactive ads will represent 21% of all ad spending in 2014.

Though both start from a small base, Forrester predicts social media and mobile marketing will grow fast. Social media marketing will experience a 34% CAGR, with mobile not far behind at 27%.

Search marketing makes up more than one-half of all interactive dollars, and will remain the biggest format through 2014. Search is expected to grow by a 15% compound annual rate.

According to eMarketer estimates (which exclude spending on mobile and social media), search advertising also makes up a majority of UK online advertising spending. Search spending will climb slowly this year, at just under 5%, but 2012 will see a return to double-digit growth.

Solus e-mail advertising—marketing e-mails sent to third-party lists—has the fastest projected growth rates of any format in the UK, again from a small base.

Turning to Europe as a whole, search dominates there, too.

In 2008, PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC) and the Interactive Advertising Bureau Europe (IAB Europe) reported that search took in the bulk of online advertising revenues.

As in the UK, e-mail spending in Europe represented a smaller portion of the total.

As marketers across the globe face budget cuts and shift from traditional media to more-efficient digital formats, getting the right media mix will be the key to success.

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Twitter made the June 15, 2009, cover of TIME magazine.

In a lead article, the publication predicted the microblogging site, consisting of tiny 140-character messages, would have a huge impact on businesses:

“As Twitter grows, it will increasingly become a place where companies build brands, do research, send information to customers, conduct e-commerce and create communities for their users. Some industries, like local retail, could be transformed by Twitter—both at one-store operations that cater to customers within a few blocks of their locations and at the individual stores of giant retail operations like Wal-Mart.”

The Washington Post ran an article, “Living on Twitter Time,” that covered the public’s fascination with tweets running the gamut of subjects from celebrities to politics.

MSNBC ran an article about how the phenomenon was invading Sunday services—“Holy Twitter! They’re Tweeting from the Pews.”

Of course, the fact that Twitter is now the subject of attention from the mass media has many in online media pronouncing its death and busily scratching out obituaries.

“Twitter’s fame and glory is not going to last,” wrote Jason Clark in an iMedia Connection article entitled “Why Twitter Will Soon Become Obsolete.” “I predict Twitter will find its social media and marketing niche, but I cannot see it being nearly as important as some marketers are making it out to be.”

In “Twitter at the Vanishing Point,” InformationWeek listed the site’s many technical flaws and noted, “Twitter isn't exactly catching fire with Generation Y.”

The latter criticism appears to be true. A survey by the Participatory Marketing Network (PMN) found that only 22% of Gen Yers used Twitter, a surprisingly low percentage since the survey found that 99% claimed to have an active profile on at least one social networking site.

But, criticism notwithstanding, Twitter is showing little sign of a slowdown in growth.

In May, Compete estimated that Twitter had 19.7 million unique visitors, far short of MySpace and Facebook. But it is growing much faster than the more-established social networking sites—more than 1,000% over the previous year.

But what is the verdict on Twitter: hot as in a flash in the pan, or hot as in the fiery eruption of a new medium?

The New York Times reported that since 2007 Dell had earned $3 million in revenues directly from Twitter postings, mainly through coupons and word-of-mouth.

In interviews with online marketers, eMarketer found many of them enthusiastic about the business possibilities of Twitter.

“Twitter can be used as a form of permission-based marketing to encourage two-way conversation, and brands can use it to create relevant, authentic and transparent communications,” said Stephanie Busack of Bob Evans Farms. “It can be used to build brand recency, loyalty and is a traffic generation tool in which links within profiles and tweets can direct people to specific areas of a site, microsites and blogs.”

“We have over 6,000 followers now on Twitter,” said David Tryder of Dunkin’ Donuts. “It’s another place where customers who really care about the brand can have a conversation with us.”

If marketers can master (or develop) ways to use the conversational aspects of Twitter to strengthen customer relationships, and sell like Dell, make no mistake, Twitter will be around for a long, long time—if Twitter CEO Evan Williams and company can work out the matter of a viable business model.

Note: No matter which side of the Twitter debate you are on, the power, scope and possibilities of the social medium are vividly on display in Tehran, where Iranians are using Twitter to not only communicate—bypassing censors—but posting photos of demonstrations and bloodied protestors (see Social Networks Spread Defiance Online, from The New York Times).