As reported on Brian Solis, comScore also revealed insight into social consumers and their spending habits.  According to the report, 23% of Twitter users follow businesses to find special deals, promotions, or sales.  Of that, 14% of Twitter users reported taking to the stream to find and share product reviews and opinions.

comScore’s research also shows that Facebook and Twitter visitors spend more money online than average Internet users.  On Facebook, heavy users spend on average $67 online, topping the total internet average of under $50.  Active Twitter users spend an average of $63. Twitter users, regardless of how often they were on Twitter, outspent general Web users by upwards of 64%!

Taking a snapshot view, members of social networking sites spend 1.5x more online than the average Internet user, indicating that engagement or paid presence within social networks definitely offers benefits to businesses.  See Brian Solis for more detailed analysis and statistics.

70% of social networkers now keep in touch with family via their various online networks, up from 61% a year ago, showing a shift as those who signed up for social networking to keep in touch with friends are using these sites to connect with family members as well.

Two-thirds of all online adults today have visited a social networking site in the last 30 days, up from 53% in 2008 and 20% in 2007. Social networks have thoroughly penetrated the young adult market, as nearly 9-in-10 online 18-to 34-year-olds visit such sites today. Older Americans are definitely involved as well, with 41% of online adults age 50 and older making monthly visits to sites like Facebook, MySpace and Twitter.

The rise of social networking tracks closely with that of Facebook. As of April 26, 2010, 46% of the U.S. online adult population reported having visited Facebook in the past 30 days.

An astounding two-thirds of social networking site visitors (68%) say they have shown their support of a product, service, company or musical group by becoming a “fan” or a “friend” on a social networking site – this number is up 9% from last year.

Knowing that social networkers are comfortable connecting with products and brands they support, it’s important to understand which brands have the best opportunity to connect with this group. Specifically, Facebook users are full twice as likely as the average American adult to shop at H&M. Twitter visitors are 3.7 times more likely to shop at Nordstrom.

Geographically, the report shows that heavy users of social networking sites are primarily concentrated in the Northwest and markets that are heavily influenced by major colleges or universities.

See the 2010 Social Networking Report on Experian Simmons for more information, graphs, and the full PDF report.

While mobile advertisers are increasingly trying to drive users to brand pages or promotions on social sites, click-to-call remains the most common type of action they encourage in ads (at 36%), followed by signing up for a service (29%), submitting a form (28%), application download (24%) and watching a video (23%).

77% of mobile ad campaigns overall directed users either to a mobile site or a custom landing page. According to Millennial, spending on rich media units is up 85%.  MediaPost anticipates that spending on mobile rich media ads more broadly will increase dramatically with the launch of the iAd platform (also on July 1).

Among other findings from the Millennial report, the number of ad requests per page view was just over one (1.03) and the average monthly page views per user was 108. The average session time was up by a minute to five minutes — three seconds — as the ending of the school year led to more time spent on mobile phones.  See MediaPost articles for more findings.

Last July, Facebook board member Marc Andreessen told Reuters the company was on track to surpass $500 million in annual revenue for 2009. Estimates in various media reports had previously pegged the company’s 2009 revenue at $550 million to $700 million, but the two sources said revenue in 2009 was in fact $700 million to $800 million, and one source added that 2009 revenue was more than double the previous year’s total.

Facebook’s revenue growth has come as the number of users on its website has exploded. The company started 2009 with the January announcement that it had reached 150 million users. By December, that number had swelled to 350 million.

As user numbers have swelled, so have advertisers:  Facebook Chief Executive Zuckerberg cited statements by other Facebook executives that the number of advertisers on Facebook had increased by a factor of four during the past year-and-a-half.  ”We can provide really good, relevant advertising to people because they tell us exactly what they are interested in, and who they know, and those people tell us what they’re interested in,”  Zuckerberg said at the All Things Digital conference in June.

Kistner notes that the decline of Web 2.0 and the rise of social media are connected. Since Facebook has hit the scene, the original social media tools have peaked in usage: blogs, wikis, forums and RSS.

Social media has been very popular for news outlets to cover (more so than Web 2.0 and new media ever were), and while has been quite disruptive to established media outlets, those that are embracing and even reinventing themselves are doing well (such as the NYTimes.com).

Facebook is the site receiving the most interest in the “explosion” of social media. It is so popular that no other search term in Google beats the number of searches for Facebook. The closest search term Kistner has found to rival the number of searches for Facebook is the word “the”!

Social media is showing dominance in traffic and usage in addition to monopolizing search attention. Compete.com is also showing Facebook as the mosted visited website, above Google and Yahoo.

Kistner concludes that social media is the innovation to invest in for businesses.

Please see socialfresh for all charts, graphs, and more information.

• 80% of respondents have an active Facebook account, and 23% of those without an active Facebook account plan to join in the next six months
• 67% of respondents have reconnected with people through social networking sites that they never would have otherwise
• More than 30% of respondents access Facebook and/or Twitter from their mobile phone (through a browser or application) once a day or more
• 50% of Facebook users click on Facebook ads to “like” a brand
• 37% learned about a new product or service from a social networking site
• 32% of respondents have recommended a product/service/brand to friends via a social networking site
• 32% of Twitter users re-tweet content provided by a company or product

As reported on MediaPost, Daina Middleton, CEO of Performics, stated: “Social networks have made real and substantial changes in the lives of their users, in part by empowering them to more actively participate with brands and each other. More than a third of all respondents reported using a search engine to further learn after seeing an ad on a social networking site, for example, and more than a third think social networking sites are good sources of information about companies and products.” According to Middleton, social networking has led to a “more lively, two-way participation between brands and everyday customers.”

The study also revealed that consumers want to see more regarding products and services on social networking sites. Scott Haiges, noted that “Respondents expressed a strong desire to get more printable coupons [49%], notifications of sales and special deals [46%], and information about new products [35%] from companies or products on Facebook.”

Companies with a social media communications plan tended to focus on these elements: resource-allocation guidelines for ongoing activities, registration of branded usernames on social sites and research into competitors’ use of social media, as reported on eMarketer.

There was a significant disparity between what respondents thought should be part of their company’s plan and what was actually part of that plan. 71% of respondents were concerned with preparing and distributing policies for ongoing communications, but only 45% of companies had such policies. Respondents were equally concerned with the ongoing monitoring of brand reputation, at 71%, but only 52% had a plan for such activities. More than two-thirds of respondents saw a need for departmental protocols detailing how social sites should be used by sales, human resources, customer service and other groups within the company, but only 29% reported distributing policies and/or communications protocols to employees.

A majority of companies with a social strategy included marketing (94%), PR (71%) and sales (55%) in their plans, with customer service (26%) and human resources (16%) lagging behind in use of social media. 71% of respondents agreed that the responsibility for creating social media strategies should fall to marketing departments.

Findings suggest that companies that have held back on adopting social media throughout their organizations would benefit from starting with a cohesive plan that involves all of the key groups within the organization (marketing, PR, sales, customer service, and human resources).

Twitter introduced its advertising system in April, first allowing companies (including Starbucks and Sony Pictures) to pay to display their postings on pages of search results for popular topics.  Unlike search results, a trending topic appears on the main page Twitter users see when they are logged into the service, at the bottom of the user-generated list of the 10 most popular talking points on the site.

Coke chose to become the second company to sponsor a trending topic during Wednesday’s final qualifying matches, when teams from the US and England – two of the biggest nations on Twitter – go through to the next stage of the tournament.

“We have formed fabulous relationships with Facebook, YouTube and Twitter,” said Carol Kruse, vice-president for global interactive marketing at CocaCola. “We get a lot of first looks and we jumped on that one [promoted tweets] immediately.”  Such enthusiasm from a large advertiser will come as a boost to Twitter’s efforts to generate revenues from its 190m monthly visitors.

Although Ms Kruse did not reveal how much Coke spent on the campaign, she indicated the test was not expensive compared to other forms of online advertising.

If any readers are able to locate the Experian Hitwise report, please post a link below.

Mediapost also references a report from eMarketer, released in December 2009, that estimates social network ad revenues in 2009 at $2.2 billion, a little over half the Borrell estimate. Even factoring in another third for the additional spending which Borrell says go to promotions (not advertising), that comes to just $2.9 billion, still significantly lower than the figure predicted by the Borrell report.

According to Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook might make $1 billion in 2010, up from about $800 million in 2009. The separate (December 2009) figures from eMarketer have MySpace revenues at $465 million in 2009, decreasing 23% to $360 million in 2010. Twitter execs forecast $140 million in ad revenue in 2010, while Classmates.com had about $80 million in ad revenue in 2009 and is on course for similar performance in 2010.  This leaves MediaPost to speculate about which social networks are responsible for the rest of the current and future (projected) spending.