Social Media Update: Top Social Media Channels By Category

March 29, 2021December 3, 2022 ~ K. Quesenberry ~ 4 Comments

Multichannel social media strategy: Social media is no longer a small experimental part of marketing. Social media spending represents 15% of marketing budgets and is expected to increase to nearly 25% in five years. Social media is also seen as an essential part of digital marketing which has surpassed traditional with digital ad spending reaching 54% of total ad sales. Today brands must go beyond the top three social platforms or simply continue to use current brand social platforms. As social media plans become more sophisticated with a combination of organic and paid content how do you decide among the over 200 social media platforms? To simplify this process the chart below lists social options in eight categories by key characteristics and top platforms per category.

Audience Size and Engagement: Total audience size is important when selecting a social media platform within which to invest your time and money. Yet tradition measures of monthly active users or unique monthly visitors only tell part of the story. A user could visit a platform once a month and be included in audience size. Engagement is another important factor that looks at how active those users are on the platform. How many users are daily users and how much time are they spending per day or session?

Target Audience Demographics: How active is your target audience on each platform? Define target audience by demographic characteristics such as gender, education, income, ethnicity and age. Look for social media platforms popular with your target age group. Be sure to look at both monthly active and daily active users by age. A high percent of Millennials may be monthly users of Facebook but if you look at daily usage they may be spending more time on Instagram. If your target is Gen Y, Snapchat may have the highest daily usage.

Target Audience Psychographics: Not all people in a generation have the same interests, therefore it is also important to define target audience with psychographic variables such as, values, beliefs and interests. People interested in crafts, fashion, the environment, or gaming may be active on other social media platforms where those interests are popular such as Reddit, Pinterest, Forums or Twitch.

Target Business Category: Not all purchase decisions are considered in the same social media channels. Therefore also consider type of business. Is the brand B2C or B2B? What industry is it in? Is it a local or national company? Does the brand offer online sales, in-person or a combination of both? The type of business could make other social media channels more relevant to a plan such as LinkedIn, TripAdvisor or Yelp.

Target Communication Objective: Finally, consider the communications objective. A plan to build brand awareness may work best with Facebook, YouTube and Buzzfeed. A plan to improve customer response may work better in Twitter and Messenger for customer support and Google My Business for customer reviews. A B2B lead generation plan may best leverage Blogs, Podcasts, LinkedIn and Slack. A direct sales plan for a multinational fashion brand could work best with Instagram, Pinterest, WhatsApp and WeChat.

Now that you know what to consider in selecting plans. What are the latest social media channels? Bellow is a list of the top three or more social media channels divided into eight key characteristic categories.

Social Networks: These are the websites and apps that connect people sharing personal or professional interests through profiles, groups, posts and updates. Facebook has 2.7 billion monthly users (1.8 billion active daily) and is by far the largest social media channel of any of the categories. LinkedIn is the dominate business/professional social network growing to 722 million users (260 million active monthly).

Social Messaging: Instant messaging platforms 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 2 billion users (1 billion active daily). Other popular messaging apps include WeChat with 1 billion month active users mostly in the Chinese market. Slack is the business messaging service with 12.5 million daily active users providing opportunities for B2B.

Microblogging: Microblogs are a form of traditional blogging where the posts are limited by content length or file size. The leader in Microblogging continues to be Twitter with 353 million monthly active users (187 million active daily), but this is down 9 million from last year. Pinterest is the social pin board dedicated to visual discovery, collection and sharing that limits posts to single images or video. Pinterest has grown to over 442 million monthly active users. TikTok has grown quickly to 689 million monthly active users. A new entrant in this category is the invite only, real-time, audio-chat app Clubhouse. Clubhouse has grown from 1,500 users in May 2020 to 10 million users in 2021.

Media Sharing: This category is for social media channels developed mainly for the sharing of image or video media. YouTube is the lead video sharing site with 2 billion monthly active users and an average 60 minutes spent per mobile viewing session. Instagram (owned by Facebook) is the quality photo sharing social channel that has grown to 1 billion active monthly users with 500 million active daily. Snapchat is a photo- and video-sharing messaging service in which media and messages are only available for a short time before disappearing. Snapchat’s monthly active users total 283 million with 180 million active daily.

Live Streaming Video: Top live video channels are mainly built into other social platforms. Periscope is integrated with the Twitter app with last reported numbers of 10 million users and 1.9 million daily active users. Facebook Live is a big competitor with Facebook emphasizing live video in the newsfeed. Facebook claims 8 billion video views per day or 100 million hours (includes all video). Instagram Live works in Instagram Stories which has 500 million daily active users. Instagram launched a new long form video platform IGTV, but reports indicate they have struggle to boost user numbers. For niche audiences Amazon owned Twitch is a live streaming platform attracting gamers with 140 million unique monthly users and 30 million active daily.

Geosocial: Geosocial is a type of social networking where user-submitted (GPS) location data connects users with local people, businesses and events. The innovator in this category is Foursquare, but the platform has dropped to 7 million monthly users for location discovery while its app Swarm has only 2.1 million monthly users for checking-in. However, Swarm users spend an average of ten times longer on the app versus Foursquare. Marketers can leverage Google geosocial 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 geosocial feature in Facebook that is good for increasing reach, generating awareness and has ratings and review features. Instagram Location has locations that integrates with Facebook Places. Snapchat offers geosocial features with 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. Yelp is the innovator in crowdsourced ratings and reviews representing a broad range of interests. Yelp has 132 million active monthly users and over 184 million reviews. For travel related businesses TripAdvisor has 463 million active monthly users and 730 million reviews. This social channel provides reviews of travel-related content and travel forums. Amazon attracts 138 million monthly visitors and has been reported as being the largest single source of Internet consumer reviews. Angi is a ratings and review site with crowdsourced reviews of local businesses is merger between Angie’s List and HomeAdvisor than 22 million monthly users. 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. Ratings and Reviews are also important on the video sharing platform YouTube as many a Vlogger reviews products and services on their channels.

Social Knowledge: Social knowledge channels are web-based information exchanges where users 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 1.7 billion unique monthly visitors and over 71,000 active contributors to over 6.2 million articles in English. Brands cannot created their own pages, but should monitor for misinformation. Quora is the question and answer site that focuses on higher quality content and attracts 300 million unique visitors a month. Yahoo! Answers was a popular community question and answer site but shut down in 2021 after 16 years.

Podcasts: Podcasts are a series of episodes of digital audio or video content delivered automatically through subscription. Podcast consumption has grown in the US to 90 million monthly listeners. iTunes is the innovator in Podcasting . Other social platforms to consider are SoundCloud, TuneIn, iHeartRadio, Audible and Spotify. For the video version of podcasts, called a vlog, YouTube is a top destination. A useful podcast directory is PodBean.

This is by far, not a comprehensive list of social channel options, but it does give an update on the top channels by category to choose the best for your social strategy. What social platforms have you found to be the most effective in your social media strategy? A good first step is to Perform A Social Media Audit and as social spending increases Ask These Questions To Ensure You Have The Right Strategy.

2018 Social Media Update: Top Social Media Channels By Category

Guide to Social Media Platform Channel Options

May 23, 2018December 4, 2022 ~ 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.Social 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.

2017 Social Media Update: Top Social Media Channels By Category

June 26, 2017December 4, 2022 ~ K. Quesenberry ~ 2 Comments

This is my yearly update on the latest social media channels. Social marketing 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 has just under 200 in 26 categories. To simplify I have divided social media channels into 9 categories by key characteristics and list the top 3 or more channels in each.

Social Networks: These are the websites and apps that connect people sharing personal or professional interests through profiles, groups, posts and updates. Facebook continues to grow to over 1.9 billion monthly active users and nearly 1.3 million daily users with 85% outside the US and Canada. Facebook updates include live video from a desktop, 360 photos and 360 video, giffs in comments and Workplace by Facebook is for employee communication. Messenger gets a lot of Snapchat like filters, stickers and stories. Facebook ads get more targeted and more options including instream video ads and ad breaks in live stream videos. Facebook Messenger has grown to 1 billion users closing in on WhatsApp’s 1.2 billion users. Messenger gets new features like video with emphasis on customer service and bots. LinkedIn is the dominate business/professional social network growing to 500 million users with opportunities for recruitment, professional networking/development, B2B prospecting, and native advertising to professionals. Since the Microsoft acquisition they have a redesigned desktop to be more like the mobile apps, more engagement analytics and search capabilities, chat-like messaging, a calendar chatbot to set meeting times and easier blogging interface. The feed emphasizes more content and less status updates with new algorithms and editors. Google+ is the much debated social network since its launch in 2011. The latest user stats are 111 million with active Google+ profiles in 2015. This is most likely much lower today, but certain niche groups remain very active. The new Google+ redesign in late 2015 got rid of many of the social network features, which were shut down completely as “classic” mode in January 2017 to emphasize communities. Many have pronounced Google+ dead, but it still remains as an effective channel to build targeted web traffic, high Google rankings, social sharing and overall SEO. I will also mention that MySpace still has roughly 50 million monthly active users and some have pronounced a comeback. It is still popular for music with 14 million artist and 53 million songs on the channel.

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 23.7 billion blog pages a month with top media and marketing publishers including CNN, CBS Radio, TED, TechCrunch, the NFL, and UPS. Tumblr (owned by Yahoo) is the short-form blog focused more on photos and video and less text that has growth to 345 million registered accounts and 738 million unique monthly visitors. Like other social media Tumblr has added native ad options. Blogger was the first major blogging platform and is owned by Google. Recent stats estimate 177 million monthly visitors to blogger.com down from 240 million in 2016. 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 89 million monthly visitors, Typepad has dropped to around 15 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 is growing again up to 313 million monthly active users with 82% of those active on mobile. Every 6 seconds 1,000 tweets are sent which makes the site great for real time news discovery. Twitter is also a second screen for live events and has grown into a mainstay for social media customer service and a place for native ads with new sponsored live video. Twitter updates include 360 photos/video and a giff search library. Photos, videos, giffs and polls are now excluded from character count and the algorithmic timeline will emphasize content user’s interactive with vs. just the latest tweets. 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 175 million monthly active users with much of that recent growth in global markets. The site is dominated by women, but 1/3 of new sign ups are men. Pinterest is the place for certain topics such as holidays, DIY, travel, holidays, event planning, recipes and decorating. New Features include Pinterest Lens visual discovery tool to search related styles/ideas based on what is in your phone camera and new native ads and programs to support business. Vine was the micro-video platform built on 6 second videos. Vine shut down January 2017, but you can still access an archive of videos. Musical.ly is quickly capturing the young teen market with instant music videos growing to 40 million monthly active users and over 200 million app downloads. The app creates 15-second videos and lets you add popular songs, choose speed options and add filters and effects with hashtags. Original shows are being added to Musical.ly via Viacom, NBCU and Hearst. Clammr is a short form (24 second or less) audio sharing social media app. This micro social channel is new and still small but may grow quickly. The idea is to share audio clips from longer programs like Podcasts or record original content. Some have called it Pinterest for Podcast clips.

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, native ads and video bloggers that provide reviews. The channel is good for brand content marketing or influencer marketing with YouTube stars. New efforts include YouTube Music and YouTube TV. Instagram (owned by Facebook) is the quality photo sharing social channel first created as an app that has grown to over 700 million active monthly users as it continues to add Snapchat like features including stories, slideshow, overlaid creative tools, disappearing DMs and Facefilters. It is a good place for fan engagement, native ads and user generated brand content, but has switched to a timeline of users’ photos based on an algorithm versus chronological order. Instagram’s 200 million daily Stories users already outnumber Snapchat’s 166 million total users. Snapchat is the newest channel in this category whose growth has slowed to 166 million daily active users, but this is still higher than Twitter’s daily active users. This channel is more popular with 12-24-year-olds than Facebook, but over 35 users have grown by 224%. Snapchat is great for pictures that can be drawn on, filters, 10 second video and stories that disappear after they are viewed. Snapchat is adding more native ad options and has introduced new 3D lenses that add a AR like objects to your world. Also consider Flickr (owned by Yahoo) which has 112 million active monthly users with 1 million photos shared daily, Vimeo with 170 million monthly active viewers for niche video audiences and LinkedIn owned Slideshare with 70 million users is great for business and content marketing with 80% of traffic coming from search. Live streaming video continues to expand with Periscope emerging as a leader with 10 million users and over 200 million streams. Twitter is pushing the app with further integration introducing a “Go Live” button, Periscope videos showing up in Twitter Trends, autoplay and pre-roll ads. Facebook Live is a big competitor to Periscope with Facebook pushing Live video by paying influencers. Facebook claims 8 billion video views per day or 100 million hours (includes all video), but faces censorship challenges with high profile killings and suicides broadcast live on the social network. 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 has 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.

Geo-location: Geo-location or 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 93 million places. Swarm is a separate app for checking in, but marketers can still reach consumers on Swarm through Foursquare. Foursquare is great for businesses with physical locations and offers many options for native ads and robust location analytics. Marketers can leverage Google geo-location features though Google My Business that gets businesses added 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 nearly 114,000 active neighborhoods and growing quickly with limited native 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. The recent innovation in this category was the success of Pokemon Go. Look for more AR features being added to current social media channels like Snapchat’s new 3D Lenses.

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 which has increased to 183 million active monthly users and 127 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. Top categories include shopping, restaurants, home services, beauty, fitness and entertainment. Yelp offers many native 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. 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. With 12 million active monthly users Angie’s list could grow even more after getting rid of its pay wall to complete with larger networks. Angie’s List also offers native 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 and any other site or app that applies to your product or service such as retail sites like Amazon.com. The ground breaking website in this category was Epinions, but it was closed in 2014 by owner Ebay.

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. It was hard to track down the number of user accounts, but Reddit draws 250 million unique visits a month. 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 native ad solutions with big brands like Coca-Cola, Toyota and Duracell running campaigns. StumbleUpon is the discovery engine that finds and recommends web content to users who can rate web pages, photos and videos. StumbleUpon reports millions of users with the last available number at 30 million unique users. This social channel is good for content marketing, influencer marketing and attracts 120,000 brands leveraging native ads. 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 12 million by 2015. Digg is a good place for content marketing and also native advertising. Buzzfeed is more on the content discovery side of this category but has attracted a lot of attention with over 200 million unique monthly visitors. The big opportunity for marketing with Buzzfeed is native 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 2.5 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. Social Bookmarking innovator Del.icio.us has dropped down to 1.5 million monthly visitors, but may reemerge as new owners continue to try to revive the once famous site.

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 of course with 374 million unique monthly visitors and over 70,000 active contributors to over 5 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 announced 300 million monthly users. 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 100 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 native ads. Ask.fm is a 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 20 million unique monthly users and does offer native ads. Also consider Answers.com, ChaCha, WikiAnswers (now part of Answers.com), and Whale, which is the new video Q&A service attracting a young audience.

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. Also look to the entire category to grow as Podcasts are integrated into new cars.

One other consideration is 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 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.

Paid Social Media: Why You Need It And What Is Available

November 19, 2016December 4, 2022 ~ K. Quesenberry ~ 4 Comments

Paid social media, sometimes known as social advertising or native advertising, is simply paying for distribution or views in social media channels. This can take the form of promoted, sponsored or boosted posts and other types of ads that appear in people’s news feeds or other places in social media channels. Two general terms have emerged to describe paid social media. Social advertising is advertising that relies on social information or networks in generating, targeting, and delivering paid marketing communications. Native advertising is paid marketing communication that delivers useful, interesting and targeted information in a form that looks like the site’s native, or non-ad, content. Some social networks offer other forms of paid such as display ads, text ads, pre-roll, or filters in the network.

The need for paid social has been increasing as organic reach, (percent of followers or fans that see your posts) has been decreasing significantly. Organic reach is the number of unique people who saw a social media post through unpaid distribution. Paid reach is the number of unique people who saw a post as a result of paid distribution. Organic reach is often calculated as a percentage by dividing the total number of users reached by the total number of posts. This is usually collected within a specific time frame such as 30 days. Then the average number of users reached per post is divided by the total number of followers or fans (page Likes). Getting someone to “Follow us on Facebook” doesn’t deliver nearly as much guaranteed exposure today. Below are the average organic reach rates for some of the top social channels:

Facebook Average Organic Reach: 2.27%
Twitter Average Organic Reach: 3.61%
Google+ Average Organic Reach: 0.09%
LinkedIn Average Organic Reach: 20%
Instagram Average Organic Reach: 20%

Of course, these are averages and there are strategies to get above average organic reach. Some manage to maintain amazing organic reach with high engagement or other methods. A recent study found that some smaller Facebook pages are managing to get average organic reach of up to 11% on Facebook. Yet that is still low and for most paid social is becoming a necessary part of the social media plan. The good news is that paid social can be one of the more effective forms of paid advertising. eMarketer reports a survey that found nine out of the top 10 most effective marketing tactics included sponsored social media messages. TV commercials were the only nonsocial marketing tactic in the top 10.

Organic is still very important. As the Adobe blog points out, organic (non-paid) social has the benefits of branding without a budget by lowering marketing costs, building loyal brand communities (measured by engagement rates), and taking advantage of new social networks, early adopters and niche audiences. But adding paid social media to organic posts helps extend your message by increasing reach. Paid social also provides customized targeting, retargeting and improved insights with advanced analytics and testing. Another way to consider the use of organic social media posts is an influencer marketing program, which can take many forms on many platforms.

As established social channels grow more crowded and move towards algorithms like Facebook, Instagram and Twitter the number of paid social opportunities are growing. For a quick guide to the top social channels that offer paid options see the free downloadable chart below:

Here is the current list of the top social media paid options (click on each link for more details of each offering).

In social networks Facebook Business offers Boosted Posts and ads that can appear as Sponsored Posts, Suggested Apps or Display Ads. They also now offer Facebook Messenger ads and WhatsApp ads are on the way. LinkedIn Marketing Solutions offers highly targeted Sponsored Content, Sponsored InMail, Display Ads and Text Ads. LinkedIn Talent Solutions also offers specialized options for hiring such as Recruiter, Job Posts, Job Slots, Career Pages, Referrals and Work With Us Ads.

In blogs and forums Tumblr Business offers Sponsored Posts and Carousel Posts, Sponsored Video and a Sponsored Day that pins a brand on the dashboard with an Explore Page tab with exclusive brand content. Also consider Sponsored Blog Posts which is paying for a post to be written on blogs. Sponsored Post Companies or Communities connect companies with bloggers.

In microblogs Twitter Business offers Promoted Tweets for Clicks, Followers, Engagement or Apps Campaigns. And Pinterest for Business offers ads by Promoted Pins to build awareness, increase engagement and drive website traffic. TikTok Ads offers full-screen ad placements and hashtag challenges.

For media sharing social channels YouTube offers in-stream Pre-Roll Ads, Video Ads and In-Video Overlay, plus Display Ads, and Video Mastheads. Instagram for Business offers Sponsored Posts as Photo Ads, Video Ads or Carousel Ads to increase awareness, visits or downloads. Snapchat Advertising offers Snap Ads, Sponsored Geofilters and Sponsored Lenses. Brands can also sponsor LIVE or DISCOVER stories with publisher partners. Periscope offers Sponsored Live Video Broadcasts through Twitter Amplify that include partner names in broadcast titles and branded video highlights with Pre-Roll Ads.

For geo-location or geo-social Foursquare for Business offers ads to Promote Listings, Existing Messages or create Custom Messages based on location, time or action like a check-in. Nextdoor offers Sponsored Posts that appear in users news feeds and daily digest emails. Snapchat Geofilters could also come under this category. Google also now has Promoted Pins for Google Maps.

In ratings and reviews Yelp for Business offers ads to feature businesses first in Relevant Searches and Competitor Business Pages and incentives such as Yelp Deals or Gift Certificates. TripAdvisor offers Sponsored TripAdvisor Custom Content, Pages, Sweepstakes, Advertorials, Maps, Forums and Display Ads. Angie’s List offers Magazine Ads, Newsletter Sponsorships and dedicated product and category Emails.

For social bookmarking Digg Advertising offers Native Advertising by working with brand partners to display and co-created content to be featured on the platform. Buzzfeed Advertise offers “custom content worth sharing” through Custom Social Posts, Video, Promotion and Story Units plus Social Discovery. The newest option is Reddit which offers advertisers the ability to boost organic content already shared by fans with promoted posts.

In social knowledge channels Quora Advertising offers ads that appear below relevant questions as “Promoted by” with a “Learn More” link. Ask.fm for Partners offers many options for advertising in Apps, Mobile Web and Desktop. Also consider Podcast Advertising which is Sponsoring a Podcast and the host of the show usually reads Promotional Messages for the brand and/or has Special Offers for listeners.

How can you use paid ads to support your social media marketing? Social Media Examiner reports native ads can help build brand awareness by attracting new audiences to new content or gaining a larger audience for previously published posts. Marketers can also create specific campaigns to grow followers, increase engagement and drive website traffic or app downloads.

Unlike traditional online ads, paid social ads have the advantage of building social proof (likes, comments, shares) which increases credibility and trust. Promoted or sponsored posts can also improve SEO generating more awareness which equals more authority (links and social signals) to produce better rankings. Marketers can retarget native ads to people who have come to their website to view a product or service or boost reach of content that was already successful for further exposure to a larger audience.

An added benefit of paid social media is that in most channels marketers only pay for the first interaction. If someone chooses to share your paid post subsequent views and shares are free. Yet, to get those initial interactions that lead to free organic exposure content must relevant, enticing and valuable. Most channels also offer highly targeted audience reach that can deliver native ads based on demographics, search interest, behavior, lists, lookalike audiences, job titles, industry, groups, geographic area, etc. This targeting also helps in creating content that is relevant and meaningful to that specific audience.

Many of the channels also have robust advertising dashboards to create ads, manage campaigns, set up budgets, and track results. These dashboards like Facebook Ads Manager or other third party options can make it easy to set up A/B split tests to test different aspects of ads including offers, visuals, headlines, call to actions or target audience. Detailed analytics helps to optimize paid efforts over time. Also social media monitoring platforms like Hootsuite are now adding social ad integration so brands can create and manage new ad campaigns on major networks such as Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and Pinterest all within The Hootsuite dashboard.

To consider the bigger picture in social media marketing Ask These Questions To Ensure You Have The Right Strategy.