Chart of the Day: Consumers are Driving the Conversation for Technology Brands on Twitter
As marketers, we love to build inspirational campaigns to engage our target audiences and a large part of any campaign in 2017 will reside on social media. Alongside Facebook, Twitter is our go-to network for sharing campaign content allowing our followers to see our message and hopefully like, retweet and spread the word through their own words.
This varies massively from industry to industry where some campaigns can feel like you're pushing your message out more than your audience is interacting with the content, which isn't ideal.
According to research by Brandwatch, a massive 91.1% of all Twitter activity around technology brands (including new phone releases and the internet of things) was due to the Twitter community rather than the brand. From a marketing standpoint, this is exactly how you would…
Chart of the day: Facebook reach 1.9 billion monthly active users
Last week Facebook released its Q1 2017 results, reporting it has hit 1.9 billion monthly users as of the end of the march quarter. Their monthly active users have risen by 17% YoY, despite the rise in competition Facebook has seen consistent growth. What was surprising about this report was the rapid growth Facebook have see in the Asia-pacific region.
When comparing the two charts its hard to not notice the significant growth for the Asia-Pacific, with almost double the amount of monthly active users. This growth will be due to the focus Facebook have put on areas of lower connectivity, to reach their goal of building a strong global community.
Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook founder and CEO said "We had a good start to 2017,…
Use these Social Media Campaign Tools to run more effective Social Media Campaigns
Social Media campaign tools give you flexible campaign and advertising tools for running campaigns on all the major social media platforms. They provide a quick and easy method for setting up customer engagement campaigns, from templates for quizzes, surveys, and sweepstakes to white label options with full CSS editing and iFrame functionality. These tools can focus on a number of campaigns goals (e.g. driving engagement or collecting leads) and have powerful social sharing features out the box but with custom options ensuring each campaign can be tailored accordingly.
Key things to consider before purchasing and using these tools:
Whilst these tools provide a quick and easy option for many brands, ultimately these tools act as a third party between you and the customer limiting your control of the customer…
Instagram’s algorithm update and why it’s good news for marketers
Most businesses are on Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn, but now need to be concerned with the new power player, Instagram. Instagram is one of the fastest growing social channels, it was recently reported that it now has 700 million active users per month and sees 95 million photos uploaded every day.
With this ongoing increase in popularity of Instagram, even businesses who haven't traditionally used Instagram like business-to-business companies should consider it for engagement. At Smart Insights we have seen good organic sharing of our infographics and industry trends on Instagram via a smartinsights hashtag, so we've decided to 'take the plunge' and I've recently set up a Smart Insights Instagram account - follow us to learn and be inspired by all things digital marketing.
In 2016 Instagram announced a major algorithm update which is still important to success. The update took many…
Chart of the day: most users find their favourite brands on Snapchat by searching for their username
The research by Snaplytics shows that most Snapchat users wanted to engage with brands and actively seek them out on Snapchat
The latest research in their quarterly updates also shows that Snapchat is the most popular social platform amongst US teenagers.
The research found:
More than 6 in 10 (64%) search for brands using their username
A quarter of new followers have used Snapcodes and almost 1 in 10 (9%) have used deep links. Snapcodes are QR codes for Snapchat profiles, which may appear on websites and across social media
6 in 10 (61%) of Snaps are video, rather than images
Snapchat has 161 million daily active users.
Source: Snaplytics
Sample: The data is based upon the metrics from accounts monitored with the technology from Snaplytics. The data…
Are LinkedIn's new features the most effective B2B ad product on the market?
This week has seen the launch of two powerful new B2B advertising products from LinkedIn. Both have the potential to help B2B advertisers get far more benefit from the business-focused social network.
LinkedIn Matched Audiences
Matching audiences to email addresses is one way to re-target people who you know are interested in your product (because they've given you their address). Facebook, Twitter and Google already have options to re-target audiences based on email address.
The idea is you upload the list of your customer's email addresses, and then the ad network matches these addresses to the people on its database, so you can serve ads to those exact people. This is a great tactic for B2B because the long, complex selling process for big ticket purchases often involves signing up to research and white papers and then comparing several different providers. Advertising to…
Chart of the Day: As Twitter's active users stagnate, WhatsApp becomes the front runner
Twitter was once a fast-growing social media site and the darling of marketers everywhere. But it has fallen on hard times of late, as growth as stalled.
This chart from Statista shows Twitter only managed to gain 31 million additional users actively utilizing the platform monthly over the past two years. Whereas Facebook has seen over 467 million join. This is impressive for a platform once considered to have plateaued. But the biggest of threats is WhatsApp. The instant messenger platform presents a massive opportunity for marketers. Companies such as Just Eat and BBC are just a couple of the brands who are successfully using the platform to enable instant customer service and highly targeted marketing.
With this in mind, do marketers need to adjust how they spend their social marketing budget? And would investing in growing platforms…
The five biggest announcements from Facebook’s global developer conference
On the 18th and 19th April Facebook hosted F8, their annual global developer conference, where the technical community joined up for two days of workshops, product demos and 1:1 time with Facebook’s product experts.
Whilst the content and announcements at F8 are typically geared towards developers, there is always interesting and important news that digital marketers should be aware of, too. For this post I’ve selected five top announcements but you can watch the full keynote here.
Facebook Analytics
What is this:
During the F8, updates were announced for Facebook Analytics in order to help businesses better understand their customer behavior across devices and channels. This update is designed to enable businesses to measure and optimise their complete customer journey across mobile, web, bots on Messenger, and now Facebook Pages and Offline Conversions, too. Facebook will also be launching automated insights, custom dashboards, and additional…
Facebook is at the forefront of marketing technology innovation
Mark Zuckerberg was on stage yesterday at this year's Facebook for developers conference, showing off some nifty new software and coming out with some rather clever ideas for augmented reality products. Here we ask which innovations do marketers need to be aware of and plan for?
Perhaps most important of all isn't the new innovations he announced, but what he re-iterated. He made it clear he is sticking to Facebook's 10-year road map, which was launched last year and again given prominence in this year's conference.
The roadmap looks deceptively simple, but it reveals a whole host of different strategies and new technologies that Facebook will be investing in. You can click on the image below to see a higher resolution version.
There are a few extremely interesting things worth noting from…
Chart of the day: Content marketers are changing the social metrics they use to judge their content
Social Media Matrics, such as Facebook shares, video shares and retweets on Facebook are becoming increasingly important for measuring content marketing success.
Recent research by Newswhip found that there are some social metrics which are becoming less important, such as Facebook likes and Instagram likes.
The research shows that shares are overall becoming much more important than light-touch interaction, such as "likes". Marketers value shares far higher and measure the success of their content on such metrics as they represent more important engagement and reach.
In the same study, they found that a lack of people resources and financial resources (lack of budget) are the biggest barriers to social content distribution.
Source: Newswhip
Sample: 250 publishing, PR and Marketing professionals
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