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2018 Social Media Update: Top Social Media Channels By Category

Guide to Social Media Platform Channel Options
~ K. Quesenberry ~ 5 Comments

This is my yearly update on the latest social media channels and stats. Social media success is dependent upon smart planning. In Social Media Strategy  I lay out a five step process that includes a (1) situation analysis (target market, social media audit, setting business objectives), (2) developing key insights and a big idea, (3) selecting social media channels, (4) integrating other business functions, and (5) linking business objectives to social media metrics with KPI’s in each channel.The third step of selecting social channels to fit your brand, target and content can be overwhelming with so many options. Some list thousands of social media sites and apps, Wikipedia has over 200 and Brian Solis’s Conversation Prism 5.0 has over 200 in 28 categories. To simplify I have divided social media channels into eight categories by key characteristics and list the top three or more channels in each.Guide to Social Media Platform Channel OptionsSocial Networks: These are the websites and apps that connect people sharing personal or professional interests through profiles, groups, posts and updates. Facebook now has 2.2 billion monthly users (1.45 billion active daily) and is by far the largest social media channel of any of the categories. Some new features on Facebook include Watch Party which lets people join a live stream with friends so everyone can watch and comment together. The Groups tab brings all groups together in one place and a Join Group button embeds on websites and the dating feature matches users up with others who opted in for a dating profile. The new Facebook Ad Manager has been redesigned for efficiency and insights for optimization plus new education products. LinkedIn is the dominate business/professional social network growing to 562 million users in over 200 countries with opportunities for recruitment, professional networking/development, B2B prospecting, and social advertising to professionals. New LinkedIn features include an active status notification and you can add video to the Summary and Experience sections of your profile. Trending topics has been added to the feed showing trends related to a member’s connections and content preferences. Smart replies uses artificial intelligence to suggest replies to the messages received.

Social Messaging: Instant messaging are chat applications created around social networks for communication on mobile phones with less limits and more features than traditional texting. Facebook Messenger has grown to 1.3 billion users but is still behind Facebook owned WhatsApp with 1.5 billion users. Messenger gets new features like video with emphasis on customer service and bots. New features on Messenger include redesigning the app to be simpler, cleaner and faster with AR camera effects. New WhatsApp features include payments to send and receive money, the ability to delete sent messages, groups descriptions, group video calling, location and time stickers, plus Apple CarPlay and YouTube integration. Other popular messenger apps include Kik (300 million) that is popular with younger users age 13 to 23, Viber (900 million) which is popular in Eastern European countries, and Line (217 million) which is popular in Asian Pacific countries.

Blogs and Forums: Blogs are websites that contain posts or articles in reverse chronological order that include hyperlinks and usually allow commenting. Forums are online discussion sites also called message boards where people hold conversations via threads around common interests and topics. WordPress is the top blogging platform growing to 409 million users viewing over 21.5 billion blog pages a month with top media and marketing publishers including CNN, CBS Radio, TED, TechCrunch, the NFL, and UPS. WordPress has introduced new user center improvements. Tumblr (owned by Yahoo) is the short-form blog focused more on photos and video and less text that has growth to 409 million blog accounts and 737 million unique monthly visitors. Like other social media Tumblr has advertising options and has recently introduced a new safe mode feature to help tone down their adult content reputation. Blogger was the first major blogging platform and is owned by Google. Recent stats estimate 95 million monthly visitors to blogger.com down from 167 million in 2017. Blogger is a simpler platform with less customize options and is hosted on Google servers versus self-hosting available on WordPress. Other blogging considerations are Medium which has grown to 163 million monthly visitors while Typepad has dropped to around 14 million monthly visitors, Squarespace claims hundreds of thousands of blogs published on its platform and Wix also supports blogs. To find forums try directories and search options including BoardReader, ProBoards, or Omgili.

Microblogging: Microblogs are a form of traditional blogging where the posts are limited by length of content or file size. The innovator and leader in Microblogging continues to be Twitter which has grown to 330 million monthly active users with 500 million tweets sent everyday with an option for Twitter Ads. Twitter is great for real time news discovery, has become a second screen for live events and has become a mainstay for social media customer service. New Twitter features include doubling the character limit to 280, redesigned desktop site and mobile app to be lighter, faster and easier, Anti-Harassment and Cyberbullying Features, Moments for everyone, a new explore tab that combines moments, trends and search, and safer DMs. Pinterest is the social pin board dedicated to visual discovery, collection and sharing that limits posts to single images or video with captions of 500 characters and one link in the bio. Pinterest has grown to over 200 million monthly active users. The site is dominated by women, but many new signups are men. Pinterest is the place for topics such as DIY, travel, holidays, event planning, recipes and decorating. New Pinterest features center around visual search for consumers and for marketers through Pinterest Ads. Vine was the micro-video platform built on 6 second videos that shut down in January 2017, but you can still access an archive of videos. A non-Twitter owned new video app called V2 (Vine 2) may be coming. Musical.ly has captured the young teen market with instant music videos growing to 60 million monthly active users and over 200 million app downloads. The app creates 15-second videos and lets you add popular songs, add filters and effects with hashtags. Original shows are being added to Musical.ly via Viacom, NBCU and Hearst. It reaches 14% of teen and young adult US consumers. Clammr was a short form audio sharing social media app, but it shut down last summer.

Media Sharing: This category is for social media channels developed mainly for the sharing of image or video media. YouTube is the original video sharing site with over 1 billion users or 1/3 of all people on the Internet with many shifting TV viewing on this channel. YouTube is a great place for content marketing, original shows, social media ads and video bloggers that provide reviews. The channel is good for brand content marketing or influencer marketing with YouTube stars. Also consider YouTube Music and YouTube TV. Recently YouTube added new live streaming tools and features. Instagram (owned by Facebook) is the quality photo sharing social channel first created as an app that has grown to over 800 million active monthly users with 500 million active daily. It is a good place for fan engagement, social ads and user generated brand content. It continues to add Snapchat like features. New Instagram features include redesigning its Explore tab, with Topic Channels to browse by topics, new group video chat, and AR camera effects for photos and video. Snapchat is a photo- and video-sharing messaging service in which media and messages are only available for a short time before disappearing. It has grown its monthly active users to 300 million and its daily active users to 187 million. Snapchat delivers an impressive daily reach of 41% to 18-34 year olds in the US and average time spent per day is over 30 minutes. It offers innovative social ads and has a new design that is easier to use that may attract older users. Also consider Flickr (owned by Yahoo) which has 90 million active monthly users with up to 25 million photos shared a day, Vimeo with 170 million monthly active viewers for niche video audiences and LinkedIn owned Slideshare with 80 million users is great for business and content marketing with 80% of traffic coming from search. Whattpad is a story-sharing app growing in popularity that now has 65 million users. Brands such as Wendy’s are experimenting with the platform creating stories around its summer drinks to reach teen girls.

Live streaming video continues to expand with Periscope  as a leader with 10 million users and 1.9 million daily active users. Facebook Live is a big competitor with Facebook pushing Live video. Facebook claims 8 billion video views per day or 100 million hours (includes all video). Music.ly has also jumped into live video with the Live.ly app for live video with streams viewable in Music.ly and has reported 4.6 million monthly active users. Early innovator Meerkat shut down, but its developers released the new group video chat app HouseParty that is very popular with teens but still only 2 million monthly users. For niche audiences Amazon owned Twitch is a live streaming platform for gamers boasting 140 million unique monthly users

Geosocial: Geosocial is a type of social networking where user-submitted (GPS) location data connects users with local people, businesses and events. The innovator and leader in this category is Foursquare, now called Foursquare City Guide, with 50 million monthly active users and 105 million venues around the world. Swarm is a separate app for checking in, but marketers reach consumers on Swarm through Foursquare. Foursquare is great for businesses with physical locations and offers options for social ads with robust location analytics. Marketers can leverage Google geo-location features though Google My Business that adds businesses to Google location search and Google Maps and includes ratings and reviews. Facebook Check-Ins are the geo-location feature in Facebook that provides valuable benefits to marketers. It is good for increasing reach, generating awareness and has ratings and review features. Instagram Location has added locations with integration to Facebook Places. Both are great ways to increase exposure for businesses and events for search by location versus hashtag. Other considerations in this category are Nextdoor, which is a private location-based social network with 160,000 active neighborhoods with social ad options. Alignable is a more B2B focused social channel. It helps build relationship between local businesses and creates a community around referrals. Other social networks also offer geo-location features such as Snapchat Geofilters.

Ratings and Reviews: Reviews are reports that give someone’s opinion about the quality of a product, service or performance. Ratings are a measurement of how good or bad something is expressed on a scale. The top general social channel in this channel is Yelp with 174 million active monthly users and 155 million reviews. Yelp is the early innovator in crowdsourced ratings and reviews. Founded in 2004 it has grown city by city and can be very influential on sales for many businesses. Yelp offers many social ad options. For travel related businesses TripAdvisor has 390 million active monthly users and 435 million reviews. This social channel provides reviews of travel-related content and travel forums. TripAdisor offers many free and paid tools for marketing. Amazon attracts 80 million monthly visitors, has over 152 million active accounts and offers over 183 million products. Amazon has also been reported as being the largest single source of Internet consumer reviews. Angie’s List is the long time subscription based ratings and review site with crowdsourced reviews of local businesses. Starting with review of local contractors the service has moved on to cover much more such as health care and auto care. Angie’s list first removed its pay wall and now is combining with HomeAdvisor to create more than 22 million monthly users. Angie’s List also offers social ad options. Citisearch is an online city guide that was one of the earliest review sites. However, Citisearch has lost most of its traffic to Yelp. Ratings and reviews should also be tracked on Google My Business. If you are in the human resources or the recruitment industry company reviews on Glassdoor are important. The entertainment industry should consider niche review sites like Amazon owned IMBb.

Social Bookmarking: Social bookmarking sites are online services that allow users to save, comment on, and share bookmarks of web documents or links. Social bookmarking sites have also expanded into content discovery and curation tools. Reddit is one of the top social bookmarking social channels and has 330 million users. If handled correctly Reddit could be a great way for a product, service or organization to get discovered – especially in a specific category or topic called Subreddits. Reddit has also started offer social ad solutions with big brands like Coca-Cola, Toyota and Duracell running campaigns. Digg is the social news site that aggregates publisher’s streams via peer evaluation of voting up content for sharing. Digg has made a rebound since its relaunch growing from under 3 million monthly active users in 2012 to nearly 13 million visitors a month. Digg is a good place for content marketing and also social advertising. StumbleUpon is the discovery engine that finds and recommends web content to users who can rate web pages, photos and videos. StumbleUpon has dropped to roughly 11 million visitors a month. This social channel is good for content marketing, influencer marketing and attracts 120,000 brands leveraging social ads. Buzzfeed is more on the content discovery side of this category but has attracted a lot of attention with an audience or over 650 million. The big opportunity for marketing with Buzzfeed is social ads and the social company is now growing to be a cross-platform network including popular channels on Facebook, Snapchat, and YouTube. Buzzfeed focuses on advertising partners who help create “content that is worth sharing.” Related to Buzzfeed is NowThis News, which creates video news to distribute to other social network feeds. This news for social company started by former Huffington Post heads has grown to 2.6 billion monthly video views and is now expanding into long-form programming, original shows and investigative journalism. Content marketing options may be limited but NowThis has formed partnerships with advertisers such as MEC to make branded marketing videos for agency clients. NowThis and Chase created a campaign targeting Millennials last summer. Social Bookmarking innovator Del.icio.us was officially closed to a read only site in 2017.

Social Knowledge: Social knowledge channels are web-based information exchanges where users can search topics or ask questions and get answers from real people. This includes social sites such as wikis and question and answer websites. Wikipedia is the big one with 374 million unique monthly visitors and over 71,000 active contributors to over 5.6 million articles in English. Marketers should monitor their Wikipedia pages, but cannot make changes themselves. The question and answer sites could be good for content creation, thought leadership and influencer marketing. Yahoo! Answers is a community question and answer site launched in 2005. Yahoo! Answers went mobile for the first time in late 2016 and attracts 317 million visitors a month. Yahoo! Answers Now mobile app has improved features such as notifications and questions sent to experts in categories for better answers. Quora is the newer question and answer site that focuses on higher quality content. This social knowledge channel rose in a short time to 200 million unique visitors a month. This channel could especially be good for building thought leadership. Quora has added an “Ask Me Anything” service called Writing Sessions, offers Knowledge Prizes as incentives for experts to answer questions, a new editor to create more visible and organized answers, and also offers social ads. Ask.fm is a fairly new entrant to this category being bought by Ask.com. This global social site enables users to create profiles and send each other questions. Ask.fm has 10 million unique monthly users and does offer social ads. Also consider Answers.com, ChaCha, WikiAnswers (now part of Answers.com).

Podcasts: Podcasts are a series of episodes of digital audio or video content delivered automatically through subscription. Podcasting provides a great opportunity for content marketing with brands creating their own shows or native advertising where brands can sponsor influencers. Podcast consumption has grown in the US to 67 million monthly listeners. iTunes is the innovator in Podcasting with the name coming from the Apple iPod. Some estimate there are over 200,000 million Podcasts on iTunes – a number that has doubled since 2013. But not all Podcasts are on iTunes. Other social channels to consider are SoundCloud, which is the global online audio platform that enables users to upload, record, promote, and share their original works. SoundCloud now has 175 million monthly active listeners with a lot of Podcast content being produced and shared. iHeartRadio, the internet radio platform owned by iHeartMedia (formally Clear Channel Radio) also features Podcasts. iHeartRadio used to call them Shows On Demand, but has embraced the term Podcast and iHeartRadio has over 100 million registered users. Stitcher is an on-demand internet radio service that provides news, radio and podcasts. Stitcher delivers free online streaming to over 16 million monthly listeners and could grow as it is now available for Apple Car Play. The latest consideration in Podcasts would also be Audible, which is the audio book distribution channel owned by Amazon. This big player in audio books has now branched out into Podcasts. Another option is TuneIn, which has 75 million users and 5.7 million podcasts.

One other consideration is that there are social media channels that are more popular in specific countries. If you are a global brand you want to look into usage by country and consider channel such as QZone, WeChat, VKontakte, Odnoklassniki and others. This is by far, not a comprehensive list of social channel options, but it does give an update on the top channels in each category to choose the best for your social strategy.

For the latest changes consider Asking These Questions To Ensure You Have The Right Social Media Strategy and its a good idea to Perform A Social Media Audit at least once a year.

Fence Me In: How To Use Geofencing To Improve Your Social Strategy.

~ K. Quesenberry ~ Leave a comment

77% of people in the US own a smartphone and now over half of all people in the world use a smartphone. One of valuable features of a smartphone to marketers is the location or GPS capabilities. Yet according to a Search Engine Watch survey only 22% of marketers are using hyperlocal strategies (like geofencing) to its full potential.

A geo-fence is a virtual perimeter set up for a real-world geographic area. Geo-fences can be created as a radius around a store and event or set to predefined boundaries such as a neighborhood or city district. Geofencing must be used via a mobile app with location services turned on or triggered by an event like a geotagged post on social platforms such as Facebook, Instagram or Twitter. Geofences can also be used to trigger mobile adds on popular apps that sell them.

The Salesforce.com blog tells us that the benefits of geofencing include increasing local sales by pushing notifications to customers in the area, improving analytics by measuring location based sales, time and frequency metrics, and adding personalization to highlight offers and messages to local preferences.

Best practices for geofencing.

Best practices for geofencing include not making the fence too large. Keep it to within a 4 or 5 minute travel time. Have a call to action that is concise, locally relevant and requires prompt response. Also, be transparent about privacy by letting customers know what and how their location information is being used. And target messaging by context (relief from downtown crowds), day-part (lunch time specials), and retargeting (customers who haven’t visited in a while).

Yet sometimes the best strategies come from thinking outside of the box. Mobile Marketing expert Rip Gerber suggest fishing where the fish are, which may not be around your store. Thus, other strategies may include building geofences around competitor locations to attract new customers with a special offer or using a geofence around an airport to attract tourists. Also think about using geofences near arenas and events to attract attendees.

More advanced geofilter strategies include adding additional data to make geo messages more relevant. A retailer could use browsing data from an app or website. For example, when a woman who was looking at formal dresses on her phone enters a store she could receive formal dress messages instead of general sales or promotion messages. In addition, consider more helpful messages, such as a hotel, shuttle or rental car app reminding a person before leaving an airport to check in online, book their shuttle or rent a car via the app. Helpful location based reminders could increase brand loyalty.

When offers or promotions are used be sure they are significant and important. Getting interrupted by a mobile notification to save 25 cents may be more annoying than motivating. Also keep track of frequency so that you don’t bug people. Both of these actions could lead to the customer turning off location services on an app, which prevents further location based notifications in the future.

Geofencing in social media apps.

A version of geofencing is Snapchat’s sponsored geofilters. This adds a branded illustration to user’s selfies based on location, which are then shared with friends or followers. These are paid, but small businesses can purchase custom branded geofilters for as little as $5. One strategy could be a promotion where customers must post an image with the brand geofilter to win – ensuring they have visited the location.

Sponsored geofilter ads can now be bought through Snapchat’s advertising API, which enables marketers to pair a sponsored geofilter with a Snap Ad. This enables strategies such as buying a geofilter and then retargeting Snap Ads to people who used it. There is also integration with Snap Ad analytics dashboards to measure performance and geofilter brand templates can be created that then are easily customized for specific locations.

Other location based social strategies include leveraging geotagging in social media platforms to improve social strategies. For example create of geotag location names for local businesses, events or attractions. This can be done for Facebook and Instagram though Facebook Places. Instagram expert Jenn Hermman explains that customers who click on a geotag location see all other posts to the geotag, which can showcase brand products and services and help reach new customers through location search.

Geotagged posts also allow brands to source user generated content (UGC). Reposting these publicly shared brand experiences shows customers the brand is listening, appreciations their contributions, and presents an often more believable perspective of the brand. Just ensure you get permission first before sharing.

Geofencing brand examples.

What brands have used this strategy and practices well? American Eagle used location-relevant messages sent at the ideal time of the day to improve purchase behavior by 65%. Domino’s used geofencing around hotel locations to trigger local mobile ads offering ordering for the nearest locations. And a national fast food pizza chain used geofences around store locations to trigger a two-for-one take out deals. Notifications were delivered during rush hour, limited to users who had previously made online orders, and frequency was capped at a max of one message every three days. The result was an increase of 21% in the daily takeout orders.

How can you use geofencing and geotagging to improve your social media strategies?

For the latest changes in social media strategy consider Asking These Questions To Ensure You Have The Right Social Media Strategy and its a good idea to Perform A Social Media Audit at least once a year.