4 Ways Businesses Can Benefit from Social Media Today
Following on from our recent blog post on the ‘four ways businesses can benefit from social media today’, I wanted to take a look at the numbers behind the key social networks in the market today and explain briefly how they can be used effectively in a marketing strategy. You will probably have a fair idea of the 5 social media sites that I’m going to focus on; Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, Instagram and Snapchat.
Mark Zuckerberg’s brainchild continues to hold the main stage as the top performing social network due to the number of active daily users. According to Facebook’s Newsroom a whopping 1.32 billion people are actively using Facebook on a daily basis. In terms of the gender, it is reported a higher level of women users to men, 83% to 75%. From a business perspective, Facebook predominately caters for the B2C companies and is definitely attracting usage with Wordstream reporting over 50 billion businesses now set up on Facebook business pages. I’m a huge fan of Facebooks advertising platform and I’m not the only one considering advertising revenue grew by 59% this year (Wordstream). Those of you that have read our other blog content would know that we are huge fans of video marketing in TML and we are right to be excited given that 100 million hours of video content is consumed daily through Facebook alone. Aside from the statistics, Facebook offers a sophisticated advertising platform that allows businesses to narrow down their audience to ensure their message is targeting efficiently. It even has a barometer to tell you whether your audience is too narrow or broad. Most importantly through, this medium of advertising costs far less (if managed properly) then other mediums of marketing communication.
This is probably my favourite network from my own businesses perspective. Personally, I have been using LinkedIn for years and through this time my profile and level of usage on the social network has evolved. LinkedIn has many of the same features that Facebook has including a very intelligent advertising platform and analytics tool. The key difference is that the content generated and exchanged is targeted at a B2B audience rather than B2C. The 2015 Social Media Marketing Industry report said that LinkedIn has “surpassed Facebook as the #1 most important social platform for B2B marketers”. So lets look at the key statistics provided by HubSpot:
LinkedIn has attracted 433 million active users of which 40% check their network every day. More importantly 49% of key decision makers use LinkedIn as a form of networking, seeking information to benefit their own company. Compared to Facebook, LinkedIn has 106 million active monthly users. 79% of B2B companies suggest that LinkedIn helps them with lead generation whilst 94% of B2B companies use LinkedIn as their primary channel for sharing content. An additional statistic that Hubspot shared that stopped me in my tracks was that reportedly LinkedIn company pages have risen from 24% to 57% year on year. They’re definitely doing something right!
A lot of speculation has taken place in the media about Twitter’s future in the market. My personal opinion is that Twitter will stay but its core function for companies will be customer service. We already see mobile phone networks such as Vodafone using Twitter to answer customer queries and announcements. Looking at the stats provided by Brandwatch, Twitter still has 313 million active users and within a day 500 million tweets are sent across the world. 76% of users are said to recommend brands if they’ve received a prompt response from a friendly customer service representative. In terms of brand awareness, Twitter is still a powerful tool for this marketing goal with it’s very own advertising platform included. Granted, I wouldn’t find it to be the most user friendly in comparison to Facebook and LinkedIn but it is workable and I do use it with some clients. Brandwatch continues it’s statistics by saying that 47% of users who follow a brand being more inclined to click through to the company website. So my message about Twitter is, use it wisely!
Research from Wordstream tells us that there are 400 million active Instagrammers per day. 15 million are registered businesses but let’s look a little closer at what the Instagrammers used the business pages for; Wordstreams analysis says that in March 2017, 120 million instagramers made a visit to a company website, got directions or sent a direct mail to a business based on an ad on Instagram. For those of you who are not familiar with Instagram, it is the social network that allows people and businesses to share pictures, short videos and short messages and updates with friends and family. In Ireland, Influencers are loving Instagram, particularly Instagram stories where they can share snippets of their day to day lives and create sponsored ads around brands they are promoting as well as posting regular pictures and short videos on the main feed. There is no doubt that Instagram is ramping up in popularity and I’m eagerly awaiting the next set of statistics from Wordstream about this network.
Snapchat
Speaking of Instagram stories, leads me nicely into the final social network of my top 5 – Snapchat. Snapchat is loved and adored particularly by millennials. Millennials in all honesty are a tricky demographic for marketers as they are very tech savvy, they don’t like looking at traditional ads, and they get bored with online media very quickly. Snapchat is the tool that they seem to get. It allows someone to share a short 20 second video with others or you can create a sequence of Snapchat stories which last 24 hours. Again, influencers are very much into snapchat stories and would use it in a similar vein as Instagram. There is a debate as to whether Instagram stories is better than Snapchat stories. I think it comes down to the individual using the networks. Many brands and influencers are opting to use both.
Only a short couple of years have passed since Facebook first landed with us and now look at how the world of social media has evolved. It certainly will keep us on our toes. An important thing to note is that one company does not need to be on every single social network, it comes down to the company type, target audience and marketing goals.
If this is an area that you would like to explore more for your company, drop me an email at christina@tml.ie. I would be delighted to sit down with you and work through a social media strategy.
Christina
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