Marketers in 2010 need to Focus on Brevity and Relevancy

As the new year dawns, by wrapping up her professional year, Hitwise’s Sandra Hanchard observed in a blog post that Australians are “spending more time on fewer sites.” And only three parent industries which increased their average session duration over the year are Computers and Internet, Shopping and Classifieds and Adult.

Among that, social networking and forums are the places where people spent longest time. The average session duration they stay in Social Networking and Forums was 20 minutes 43 seconds in November 2009, compared to 19 minutes 12 seconds in November 2008.

She wrote, “The top 10 websites accounted for 29% share of visits in November 2009, compared to 26.3% share of visits in November 2008.”

It appears that Australians are paying less attention to everything else out there beside the Computers and Internet parent category. They also spent a longer amount of time on Email Services, Portal Frontpages and Search Engines.

Since Australia isn’t too different from America and the U.K, so these patterns are likely to exist elsewhere too.

For the small business websites, it will be hard for them or they may never be able to attract people the way Google, Bing or Facebook does. It is also the iron fact that to topple Google, Bing and Facebook will be very hard for small business owners. Thus, to attract the market and to get ahead in such condition, Hanchard added, “So if I had one standout message for marketers in 2010: ‘Brevity’ and ‘Relevancy’ of communications will be the earmarks of success for engaging with the 24/7 connected consumer.”

In the other words, Small Business can use other popular sites like YouTube, Twitter and so forth to get their message out, to establish and build their brand and market position etc.

Speaking of that, in their “Social Media and Online PR Report,” Econsultancy and bigmouthmedia found that directly engaged with the consumer, and attempted to improve products and services (longer-term in focus) are the two most common strategy the surveyed companies will use.

In regarding to Twitter usage, recently eMarketer report: publicizing new content was the top activity, using the micro-blogging site for customer service or gathering customer feedback is another activity companies do.

You can see there nearly two-thirds (63%) of companies reported responding to tweets, and 34% responded “systematically.”

Thanks for reading, see you next year.

Happy New Year 2010!