Social Media has, for obvious reasons, been on everyone’s minds since early 2000s. As a result, new avenues have opened up for reaching your customers – almost too many to keep track of. The crazy thing is that it hasn’t stopped. With the development and popularity of mobile technology, like smartphones and tablets, Social Media has become much more than a website on your desktop, but something consumers carry with them everywhere they go.
Social Media advertising isn’t just to drive visitors to a specific website, it has become a way to showcase your offerings on platforms that people engage with daily. In this article, we’ll take a look at the development of Social media has come since then, and the issues people, and more importantly, marketing professionals are discussing about the role of Social Media in advertising and marketing in 2015.
Top questions marketers are asking
Social Media is something that is always changing and evolving. Part of what concerns marketers is how they can create a methodology of interaction with Social Media in order to increase its use as a marketing tool. To that end, here are the top five questions that Social Media marketers are asking:
- What Social Media tactics are most effective?
- What are the best ways to engage my audience with Social Media?
- How do I measure the return on my Social Media marketing?
- How do I find my target audience with Social Media?
- What are the best social management tools?
It’s pretty clear that marketers are concerned with the long run here – something might work for a single campaign or for a year, but then it might stop working after that. Marketers are concerned with finding the best and most consistent ways to interact with Social Media.
Analyzing Social Media performance
A universality of Social Media marketing is that it can be hard to judge how effective it is. It doesn’t have the obvious markers of success or failure that a traditional marketing campaign does ergo it can be really difficult to determine whether something is effective or not. In fact, many Social Media marketers have reported that they are never really sure whether their campaigns are effective or not. As a result of this, analytic software and processes are becoming much more widespread and popular as people try to understand their marketing efforts better.
Benefits of Social Media
The benefits of using Social Media as a platform for marketing are pretty well-documented. First, it can reach a huge audience at a minimal cost. Second, it provides built-in tools for determining whether people might be interested in your product or not. The latter is based simply on the fact that Social Media users have to enter personal defining information that helps to identify their interests and demographics.
Most used Social Media platforms
Currently, the top Social Media networks are, in order, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Google+, YouTube, Pinterest, and Instagram. These positions have remained relatively stable since 2014, although Google+ increased in popularity a little, and Instagram increased in popularity a whole lot.
The most important Social Media platform
When asked what the most important Social Media platform was, marketers have, obviously, very different answers. However, unsurprisingly, around 52% of them suggested that it was Facebook – a number only challenged by LinkedIn, with 21%. Given that Facebook was one of the sites that launched the Social Media craze around ten years ago, it’s not surprising that it retains a high place on these analytics, but it is interesting to see just how high.
Predictions for future Social Media behaviors
When asked which Social Media networks that marketers wanted to learn more about, or start increasing their use of, they responded with a few answers: 66% answered for Twitter, YouTube, and LinkedIn, and 62% for Facebook. Not too surprisingly, around 82% said that they were not planning on using Snapchat, and another 61% said that they weren’t going to use Vine at all. This gives you a pretty good idea of the types of Social Media networks that marketers are interested in. YouTube stands out as the type of platform without any features like a profile page or a chat interface, but their video content has proven to be very effective in the past, which makes it important to marketers.
Most used type of content
The types of content used in marketing are not very surprising: The highest slot is taken by visual content, with blogging as a close follower, and video content not too far behind that. One interesting note is that blogging is far more common among self-employed workers and small businesses. In companies with 1000 or more employees, blogging is rarely as popular as it is with smaller organizations.
Response to new platforms
When asked how willing they are to use a new social network, only 5% of marketers responded that they’d be very willing to do so. This kind of points something out about Social Media – it’s very mercurial, as we know, and that means that while Social Media marketers are very aware of its power to reach a huge audience, they’re also aware that hedging your bets on Social Media networks you can trust is a better idea than to take up with a new and untested network.
This information is some of the most current statistical work out there on Social Media. These insights can definitely help you if you’re confused about Social Media marketing, or interested in growing your audience with its use. Take note of the trends in the market to help gauge where you are at with your Social Media presence, and which direction is likely to be the most profitable.
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