This article is a puff piece. Don't waste your time.
There are no hard numbers mentioned here, but your unimpressive facebook and twitter counts could hardly drive any meaningful amount of revenue (facebook: 74 fans, twitter: 105 followers). With those numbers, I wouldn't be surprised if your 1000% increase was an increase from 1 app purchase to 11 purchases.
The numbers only have a minor effect on the actual study. Whether it is an increase of 100 to 1000 sales or 1000 to 100000 it does not matter as a 10x increase in sales is not seen without some kind of justification. What PRNDL Development Studios was able to do with the resources available, at the time, supports our initial belief that using social media does have a direct relation to interest, and ultimately demand, for a product or service. Social Media was the only changed variable from November (as well as previous months in 2010 and 2011) to December 2011/January 2012. Even the expected growth in sales from the holiday season does not account for the growth we have experienced (expected growth in sales for '10-'11 was about 3x, but only lasted a week into January '11). The thing about social media and marketing is that word travels fast on the web. If PRNDL was able to get just one of our "105" followers to buy or RT one of our tweets then their followers also see it and could do likewise. It turns into a chain reaction, so the initial user base is not even a concern as long as you have engaging users who are interested in your product. If you wanted to be realistic in your charge that our follower and like counts are too small to matter, you should actually use the sum of all of our followers and friends list to those who like us on facebook to consider if it could have a factor on revenue.
We are only encouraging other businesses to pursue social media ventures. Based on our findings we can only encourage investigation of the hypothesis that social media is a major factor in driving demand. What we have found is not fact, more an observation.
Thank you for reading, and for your input. It is duly noted.
It's a lot easier to grow from 1 to 11 than 1000 to 10,000. There's just no substance to your article without actual numbers that back up the increase. It's nice that you see social media as a contributed to your business- and nice that you want to share- but there's nothing actionable in the article.
I would be interested to see how much time was actually put into the social networking effort. And if there were any other factors for the increase (like ads).
I spend a few minutes ever couple hours on social networking. If I come across a good article or story throughout the day I take a minute to tweet it as well. The importaint thing is responding to users and being as engaging as possible to show you are still active. We've run 1 or 2 low priced ads on a small blog and miscellaneous other small traffic sites as well as set aside a small daily budget for Facebook ads. These have been quite consistent over the past year, and have been assumed to have a minimal impact on the increase in sales we have seen over the past 2 months which we have attributed to social media.
There are no hard numbers mentioned here, but your unimpressive facebook and twitter counts could hardly drive any meaningful amount of revenue (facebook: 74 fans, twitter: 105 followers). With those numbers, I wouldn't be surprised if your 1000% increase was an increase from 1 app purchase to 11 purchases.