We all want our efforts on Social Media to be successful right? Well, believe it or not, it’s not enough to just know all the best Social Media tips or even be up to date with the latest Facebook news. It’s also super important to “know the ins and outs” of social networks, that is, find out about predominant user trends on each of the social networks themselves. Understanding the big picture in which you make daily decisions is critical for achieving your goals. That’s why in this blog post I will present 6 Trends on Social Networks that all Social Media Managers should know.
6 Trends on Social Networks to guide your Social Media Strategies
Below, I’m going to give you a selection of the latest trends on Social Networks most relevant to Social Media Marketing. The numbers you see are from studies on specialized sites like chartbeat.com and quintly.com.
1- What do people do when they are connected to social networks?
Knowing what people do while they are connected to social networks is the main desire of endless digital marketing specialists and Social Media Managers. Why? Because knowing how social networks are used makes it possible to come up with proposals for users with much higher probability of generating interaction In this context, different studies revealed how users spend their time when they go on Facebook and Twitter. Here are the results:
On Facebook: the activity that is recorded to be most frequent on a daily basis is clicking the Like button. This information, obtained from a survey conducted by the Global Web Index, shows that people most use Facebook in order to connect with their friends.
On Twitter: what most people do on this microblogging network is reading and finding out about new stories. This data shows us that the predominant use of Twitter is a news source for the people who use it. This piece of information gives you an idea of the type of content the majority of users expect. In turn, this will help you figure out which types of posts will increase your CTR or help you get more followers on Twitter.
2- Where are investments in Digital Marketing focused?
Recent research from the site Social Media Examiner, points out that new efforts in Social Media Marketing will focus on the following social networks:
LinkedIn: the largest network of professionals is favored by companies planning to intensify their communication campaigns. Consequently, it’s expected that over the next few months, investments in marketing on LinkedIn will definitely increase.
Twitter: a study that analyzed Social Media strategies for more than 3500 digital marketing specialists, ranked Twitter among their favorites when talking about investing. Meanwhile, this social network has been “upping the ante”, as it recently demonstrated with the addition of the moments tab.
YouTube: the social network centered around audiovisual content was also among the most chosen by experts when planning new campaigns.
Specifically, over 60% of marketing specialists surveyed chose to bet on LinkedIn, Twitter and YouTube.
3- What are some characteristics of the average Facebook user?
A recent study analyzed statistics (Facebook Insights) from the Facebook audiences of 20 “giant” media sites who have an overwhelmingly strong presences on Facebook, such as The Huffington Post, BuzzFeed, Yahoo and others. This is what was found:
- 18 of the 20 Fan Pages have audiences that are predominantly male
- Only 2 of the 20 surveyed had a mostly female audience, which were Yahoo and BuzzFeed.
- Most people who follow the Fan Pages of the 20 studied have completed their university studies.
4- Instagram users interact with each other more than those of Facebook
A recent study by Quintly showed that the number of interactions on Instagram generated by users is 10 times higher than that of Facebook. Data was collected from over 5000 Insta accounts, revealing that users are much more dynamic on this “Photographic” Social Network.
More specifically, the study focused on establishing the Rate of Interaction on Instagram. To do this they had to divide the number of interactions obtained for each post by the number of followers of the account. The results were surprising, because the Rate of Interaction on Instagram was 4.80 per 100 followers, which far exceeds that of Facebook, with just 0.72.
Along the same lines, marketing and social network specialists conducted a study of more than 2,500 Instagram accounts, to learn more about the level of engagement between users on individual posts. The results far exceeded rates across sites like Twitter and Facebook.
To see how much the engagement level between users on Instagram exceeds that of the other trends on social networks, take a look at the following figures:
- Rate of Engagement on Instagram: 2.81%
- Rate of Engagement on Twitter: 0.21%
- Rate of Engagement on Facebook: 0.25%
Another interesting fact that the study pointed out is that posts with images on Instagram still get more interactions than posts with videos. It also revealed that over 90% of interactions are Likes, and that large accounts post on average of 7.24 times a day whereas small accounts only post 1.6 times a day.
5- What are the best times to publish and republish tweets?
Specialists from Chartbeat have been working on establishing the best times to post on social networks. To do this they set out to study the correlation between the web traffic of numerous sites and interactions on social networks. In turn, they could confirm that both traffic and interactions begin early in the morning, peak at noon and tend to decrease during sunset.
From this study, it was concluded that traffic on social networks is low compared with the rest of the Web from 5 AM until noon. Said Social Media traffic tends to increase from 3 PM until 1 AM. Thus, it was established that from evening until approximately midnight is the best time to reach your audience.
Moreover, researchers that focus on trends on Social Networks have been working on developing an algorithm to find out which re-published tweets are the ones that get the most interactions.
Moreover, researchers that focus on trends on Social Networks have been working on developing an algorithm to find out which re-published tweets are the ones that get the most interactions. During the study, tweets were re-published with small format variations, in order to establish in detail which of them was the most popular.
The results showed that composing tweets with the following characteristics is the best for getting more interactions on re-published tweets:
- Write your tweets with an informative style similar to press headlines.
- Ask users to share the information with their followers.
- Reduce the use of mentions and hashtags.
- Use positive or negative terms equally.
6- Tweets with images generate more retweets
Stone Temple Consulting recently analyzed more than 2 million tweets to find out how different factors operate within each post. The most useful data obtained was about generating interaction on Twitter. They revealed that tweets that include photos are 9 times more likely to be retweeted.
That’s why we strongly advise you to include images when scheduling your Twitter posts. We also recommend that you take advantage of Twitter Cards in order to automate the inclusion of photos in your tweets.
Now you know about the 6 most significant trends on social networks for Social Media Management! From here on out, you can evaluate what kind of content you should share on each of your social accounts, according to interaction rates, the composition of the audience, in which ways people use each Social Network as well as other factors mentioned in the article. For more information, you can check out our post on the Four Major Social Media Trends.
Did you like this blog post? Which of these 6 Trends on Social Networks have you found the most interesting? Tell us your opinion! And please remember to share this blog post with your contacts. 😉