social marketing Archives - Tulsa Marketing Online

Report Shows Engagement is Down Everywhere Except TikTok

Facebook, Marketing, Social Media Marketing

Are we past the peak era of social media? The new 2023 Social Media Benchmark Report from Rival IQ suggests that engagement is stagnating or falling across every social network except one – the increasingly popular TikTok.

Below we will talk a bit more in-depth about the report’s findings and what they could mean for online marketing. First I want to share some other important findings from the study.

Organic Engagement is Stagnating or Falling – Engagement rates remained somewhat steady for Facebook and Twitter but interaction on Instagram is dwindling.

Users are Posting Less – Facebook and Twitter both saw 20% decreases in post frequency.

Contests and Giveaways are Less Effective – Typically, contests and giveaways are popular ways for brands to boost interest and interaction – especially around holidays. This year, though, industries saw more from holiday-themed hashtags included in posts instead of giveaways.

Reels Rule – For most industries, Instagram’s Reels have become the most engaging post type.

How Was The Report Made?

For the study, Rival IQ chose 150 companies at random from 14 industries such as media, nonprofits, and travel.

The companies included all had an active presence on Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, and Twitter. The brand also had to have between 25,000 and 1,000,000 followers on Facebook and at least 5,000 TikTok, Instagram, and Twitter followers.

The company then monitored post frequency, interactions, and content type across these social networks throughout the year.

The Big Picture

Put simply, engagement on other platforms has gotten worse and worse in recent years. These days, no industry sees an engagement rate over 0.47% on any platform except TikTok.

On the other hand, TikTok’s rate sits at 5.69% – making it the obvious choice for most brands right now.

Of course, not every industry sees such high engagement rates. For example, industries you might think are popular on TikTok saw lower engagement rates compared to less competitive niches like Higher Ed.

As the report puts it:

“Higher Ed sees epic engagement rates on TikTok but is one of the least frequent posters, while Media brands’ lagging engagement rates prove once again that more posting isn’t necessarily better.”

There are a variety of other factors which could be contributing to the huge gap between rates on other platforms and TikTok. TikTok is new, attracts a younger audience, and makes content the absolute focus of the app.

For now, the question is whether TikTok will be able to hold onto its huge lead or if it is just riding its newfound popularity before it too starts to see drops in engagement.

For more, download the full report from Rival IQ here.

February 23, 2023/0 Comments

Pinterest hits 200 million monthly active users

Marketing, Mobile, Social Media Marketing

Pinterest just hit a major milestone and they are celebrating by teasing several new features coming soon.

According to a blog post last week, Pinterest officially surpassed 200 million monthly active users, representing more than 40% growth since last year. Notably, more than half of these users live outside the USA which shows how Pinterest is progressing as a global platform.

At the time of the milestone, Pinterest says that over 100 billion pins had been created. It also notes that 85% of all searches on the platform come from mobile devices.

Of course, the company isn’t using the milestone as an opportunity to relax or slow down. The announcement hints at several features planned for the near future.

“You’ve told us what you want to see next, so we’re building them—it’s that simple,” Pinterest says.

For example, pinch-to-zoom functionality has been widely requested and is slated to be released soon. But, that’s just the beginning. Pinterest is also starting to test “boards-within-boards”, allowing users to create subcategories for their Pinterest boards.

Over the next few weeks, Pinterest will be sending invitations to select users to begin testing the feature – as well testing other new ideas.

The platform is keeping mum about any other projects or features they have coming down the pipeline, but the milestone announcement says you can expect to hear more in the near future.

September 25, 2017/0 Comments

Instagram Lets Brands Filter Out Abusive or Inappropriate Comments on Posts

Google, Marketing, News, Social Media Marketing

How many times have you spent several minutes, maybe even hours, planning and scheduling the perfect post to social media, only to receive a torrent of hate in response? I don’t mean disgruntled customers voicing a complaint. I mean the abusive, hateful, and often vulgar comments that flood social media posts from brands, celebrities, and anyone else who chooses to post on sites like Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram.

These awful comments have become so commonplace many just view them as an unfortunate fact of life, but some social platforms are starting to take steps to erase the hate from their sites.

This week, Instagram unveiled a new filter that users can enable to hide inappropriate or abusive comments and messages aimed at making the image-sharing platform a safer place for brands and users alike.

According to the announcement from Instagram co-founder Kevin Systrom, Instagram hopes the new feature will help foster a community where “everyone feels safe to be themselves without criticism or harassment.”

The new feature allows users to hide comments containing words or phrases that are frequently reported as inappropriate, but posters can also list custom keywords or phrases they wish to have hidden in comments under their posts.

While the feature gives posters more control over the comments they receive, it isn’t without its limits. The filter only blocks negative or inappropriate comments and can’t be used to block other abusive types of media uploaded to the site like image memes or videos.

Brands who receive rampant hate from trolls or abusive users also still have the ability to delete comments, report users, or block specific accounts.

Enabling the filter is easy. Just click the gear icon in your Instagram profile and click on the new “comments” feature. From there, you can toggle the filter on and off or add your own list of words or phrases you wish to have blocked from your page.

While the tool may be an effective way to filter out the random abuse many receive on social media, I would caution brands from using it as a way of hiding messages from users with legitimate complaints or issues, as that only tends to make matters worse.

September 13, 2016/0 Comments

Instagram Draws Inspiration From Snapchat With New ‘Stories’

General, Marketing, Mobile, News, Social Media Marketing

Instagram is launching a new feature, but many are saying the new feature seems inspired by another popular social photo app – Snapchat. The new feature called Instagram Stories lets users and brands share a collection of moments that disappear after 24 hours.

If that sounds familiar, it is because the feature is very similar to Snapchat Stories. Not only does it allow users to easily package their best moments of a day into one easy-to-view collection, but Instagram Stories also includes the ability to draw on photos or videos to make them even more exciting.

“With Instagram Stories, you don’t have to worry about over-posting,” an Instagram rep told AdWeek.

The new feature is already available on iOS and Android mobile operating systems. It can be found at the top of Instagram feeds, where you can either share your own stories or tap icons to look at what others have shared in the past day.

Unlike most Instagram videos, clips included in stories are limited to 10 seconds. There are also no likes or comments on stories.

For now Instagram isn’t saying whether marketers will be able to take advantage of stories by promoting them like normal posts, however, businesses can still use the feature to engage with the community and build recognition for their brand and products.

August 2, 2016/0 Comments

Instagram Launches Official Account Dedicated To Helping Businesses

Advertising, Marketing, News, Social Media Marketing

Social media marketing is a great way to connect with your audience and raise awareness for your business, but getting started can be difficult. Every social network has its quirks and kinks to manage and you can’t use the same recipe for success across all platforms.

That’s why Instagram is launching a new official account, dedicated solely to sharing business tips and case studies to help inspire your marketing and advertising on the popular social photo platform.

The aptly titled @instagramforbusiness launched yesterday, starting with a showcase of Ben & Jerry’s, a company that has been marketing itself on Instagram since the platforms very early days in 2011.

Instagram says business has always been an essential part of Instagram from its very start, and it expects even more to follow suit following the launch of Instagram ads.

In the future, the company will be sharing content through the account designed to inspire and motivate marketing and advertising efforts on Instagram. Here’s what you can expect to see shared on the new account:

“Each week, we’ll run exclusive, behind-the-scenes stories that inspire, inform and showcase the work done by three important groups in our business community from all around the world—brands, small businesses and creative agencies.”

In the coming week, the account will be sharing stories from a local Chicago florist called Flowers for Dreams and New York creative agency BBDO.

October 15, 2015/0 Comments

Bad Social Media Lessons from Paul Christoforo

Advertising, Marketing, Social Media Marketing

So Paul Christoforo and Ocean Marketing have gone viral. But even though they say bad marketing is good marketing, I think this particular instance is an example of bad marketing being bad marketing.

How To Market with Social Media

Marketing, Social Media Marketing

Social media is the next step in the evolution of the internet. This is important because it closes more gaps between individuals, eliminating the old hurdles such as distance, cost of communication, age, gender, stereotyping. The internet is slowly bringing many of these barriers down.

Whether or not this is good or bad may be argued, but in the eyes of an internet marketer (such as you and me), there is much good because of this. Social media establishes a means of communication unlike anything else. And the reason it differs so much is because of the personal level is introduces. Through social media, you meet *individuals*, not companies, not groups, but specific people. People socialize best by meeting individually, not by reading a statement another person wrote, or by listening to a recording made. Social media is all about getting closer to specific individuals. This allows a closer relationship, trust is endowed, many opportunities arise.

To get started with social media, there are many options. You can set up a Twitter account, the one-line version of blogging. You can go a longer route, set up the oldest version of what could be considered social media, a blog. Create a Facebook account and find contacts. Whichever way you choose, the key is to initiate a connection point.
– If it’s a blog, it should be one that has a very open invitation for comments, it should link to other blogs or other social media sites you are using.
– If it’s Twitter, find other contacts. Find people whose tweets you are interested in, follow them, then find who they’re following. Eventually people will start following you, as well.
– If it’s Facebook, search for people who are like-minded. If you’re specifically wanting individuals knowledgeable in your market, search for the authorities for your market. You’ll find a lot of people use Facebook – you should find many.

The key is to use more than just one social media source. And it’s good to try getting into as many as possible, not just for the benefits of social media marketing, but also to establish your name in each of these sites. If you’re a big name in internet marketing, especially, as other people will take advantage of using a well-known name in social media if you don’t do it first.

To get a good idea of what social media sites to hit, here are some of the major ones:
– Facebook.com
– Twitter.com
– MySpace.com
– LinkedIn.com
– YouTube.com
– Blogger.com
– WordPress.com
– Friendster.com
– Classmates.com
– LiveJournal.com
– Flickr.com
– Flixster.com
– StumbleUpon.com
Keep in mind, some of these are very specific to market types. You will not use Flixster in the same way you would use Classmates.com, but for internet marketing, they all have their uses. From a marketing perspective, the key to using social media is to select the appropriate one for YOUR MARKET. There are plenty of social networking sites, you can find many more here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_social_networking_websites

And this is the best way to get a good amount of followers for any one particular website. Use the social media site in the way it was designed. To get a spike in followers, viral marketing is key. To get a gradual growth, you must establish yourself as an authority figure for something specific within your market. For example, for YouTube, for viral marketing, you would need to create something that has immediate attention capture ability, something that viewers would want to pass on. For the gradual growth of followers, be consistent. Put quality videos out that handle questions for that market, and do it consistently.

Realize that to get a good number of followers, you can’t be limited to just one social media network. If you use Twitter, link to your Twitter page from your blog (Eben Pagan is a fan of this technique), from Facebook, from MySpace, from YouTube. Put your YouTube video posts in your blog, put them on your Facebook account. The key is cross-linking social networking sites. This is one of the most effective ways to grow your business online.

Now in order to turn this into a money-making machine, the marketing must be done in the same way you gain followers – by using the social networking site as it was designed. If you put up raw sales copy on Twitter, you will likely have a lot of people unfollowing you. That is abusing the system. For Twitter, talk about how you’re excited about your new endeavor, and the landmark accomplishments you complete as you finish them. If your excitement is genuine, it can be contagious. If you have anything to share related to your progress that is linkable, post it! When you finish, share it as though you are sharing it with your FRIENDS, not with your market’s customer-base. This can also be done on Facebook, MySpace, and even YouTube. Use YouTube to make a video log of your progress. Post the videos on your blog.

To cross-link different social media sites, keep your eyes out for relevant “widget” apps, or “plugins”. In this way you can have your last tweet on Twitter show up as your status on Facebook (Twitter plugin), or have a blog entry appear on your Facebook page (using Mirror Blog).

To see how effective social marketing can be, look at any of the major internet marketers. Jeff Walker used Twitter to follow his PLF 2.1 launch and answered questions about it on Twitter (a nice tie in with use of social proof) (http://twitter.com/JeffWalker). Frank Kern uses his blog heavily for his product launches, and uses the comments section for social marketing nicely (http://masscontrolsite.com/blog/).

Keep in mind this is only for the internet marketing market – these techniques can be used for ANY market to make contact with individuals, and communicate directly with them.

Other resources to help your social media marketing:
– Flock: The Social Web Browser – makes it easier to have the major social networking sites quick and handy
– Delicious – Been around, but a quick way to see what people are looking at
– Technorati – Essentially a bookmarking site for blogs
– Digg – Still one of the internet authorities – shows sites that are socially approved, or “dugg”
– Reddit – Similar to Digg, another social networking biggie
– OnlyWire – Sends links of your choice to several well-known bookmarking sites and social networking sites
– Ning – A free online service to create your own social website
– Squidoo – A very powerful site to connect to several different sites/resources, either personal or business, using “lenses”

Social media marketing is still growing. Learn to use it in the way it’s intended, and you can have social marketing grow your business in a huge way, as well as connect directly with many people involved and interested in your market.

January 2, 2009/0 Comments

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