Alan DraperAs 2016 approaches, it’s a good time to reflect on the state of social media marketing in 2015, and decide which social media platforms you hope to grow in the next year.
Social Media Examiner put together an easy-to-read Social Media Marketing Industry Report for 2015 that had a few interesting insights which may help in determining your 2016 strategy:
1. Currently, about 64% of marketers are using social media for six hours or more weekly.
By spending as little as six hours per week on social, more than 66% of those marketers are seeing lead generation benefits with social media. Though, to reach these goals marketers often rely on the help of social media management tools. 87% of marketers reported they don’t know which social media management tools are best to use. If you feel you fall in this group, check out these social media tools to add to your toolkit!
2. Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Google+, YouTube, Pinterest, and Instagram were the top seven platforms used by marketers in 2015.
The big changes seen from 2014 included Twitter use dropping from 83% to 79%, Instagram increasing from 28% to 36% use in 2015, and SlideShare joining the ranks. Facebook even had a 1% decline in marketer use from last year. It is likely these trends will continue into 2016, and new platforms like Periscope will take part of the market share.
3. 66% of marketers plan to increase their use of Twitter, YouTube, and LinkedIn in the future.
Twitter moved up two spots from the 2014 report to be the number one social media platform that marketers plan to use more of in the future. YouTube and LinkedIn followed close behind, especially among B2B marketers. Surprisingly, Facebook saw an 8% decline in reported future use.
While it is always helpful to get an idea of how other marketers feel about social media platforms, we want to hear from YOU.
By answering our poll question below, “Which social media platform are you LEAST comfortable using?” we will put together a blog post about the social platform with the most votes. This blog post will be a guide with best practices, tactics, and statistics on how to improve engagement on that platform as you strategize for 2016.
This article was written for Business 2 Community by Alan Draper.
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To be honest, I find it hard to use LinkedIn as a marketing tool. Yes, LinkedIn is a must-have personal online profile/resumé and is beneficial for your career if you have one; but it’s just hard to reach the right audience or grow it when you’re using it for business. Hope you can have more tips on how to grow your LinkedIn audience. Anyway, this article has valuable data that we can surely use for 2016. Time to strategize for next year!
Glad you enjoyed the article! It’s true – LinkedIn is tougher to master, especially when they still restrict posting in groups as individuals and not as Company or Showcase pages. Be sure to vote in the poll to hopefully get a new guide on LinkedIn marketing: https://www.playbuzz.com/websig10/social-media-marketing-poll OR check out what we have written about it already: http://www.pagemodo.com/blog/search/linkedin/
For B2C marketers, Facebook remains the best social media tool in my opinion. The quality of facebook advert targeting is high and accurate. Linkedin is only useful for B2B marketers. Youtube can definitely become an important and relevant platform as we believe in the power of images but the cost of making videos stays high.
The issue with YouTube is that many publishers see it as a video hub only and not a marketing tool. The real challenge is getting them to see it as an advertising platform rather than a “hub” , especially now that you can execute native on both Facebook and Twitter.
Great article, helps to see the wood through the trees. I’ve just launched http://www.socialater.com which is a social media manager and the first three platforms we focussed on was Linkedin, Twitter and Facebook.