Social Media Marketing Facts
It’s no secret that social media marketing is important to the success of any business in 2019. Here are some social media marketing facts that will change the way you think about social media!
1. 70% of the U.S. has a profile on at least one social media site. Social media marketing can connect your business with a large portion of the population. Typically, social media advertising comes at a lower cost than other forms of advertising like newspaper, television, and radio.
2. 79% of Americans are on FaceBook. This makes FaceBook the single most popular social media platform! If you’re looking to expand your marketing efforts to include social media, FaceBook is the best place to start. Social media marketing facts also show that the average Internet user has 7.6 different social media accounts.
3. 71% of consumers who have had a positive experience with a brand on social media are likely to recommend that brand to their friends and family. Social media presents an amazing customer service opportunity that you should not ignore. You should always check your accounts daily and respond to all comments, mentions, and messages, even if it’s just by “liking” them. People don’t like being ignored. Showing that your brand actually pays attention to its followers and interacts with them can go a long way in terms of building positive relationships with them and potential customers.
4. Social media marketing facts show that only 2% of website visitors make a purchase on their first visit. Retargeting ads can be used on FaceBook to target the other 98% and turn them into paying customers. Retargeting works by using a pixel to track your website visitors, then using data to create an audience of people who have visited your site without making a purchase. Since retargeting ads are only shown to people who have already visited your website, they have a much higher conversion rate than ads with a cold audience.
5. Only 15% of FaceBook users watch videos with the sound on. When you create a video for FaceBook be sure to use subtitles or make the video easy to understand without the use of sound. If you scroll through your newsfeed, you’ll notice that most viral videos will get the point across with or without sound.
6. More than 50 million small businesses are currently using FaceBook to connect with their customers. We can already guarantee your competition is on FaceBook. Your business must have a FaceBook page if you wish to compete. Plus, with two billion active monthly users the odds of reaching the correct audience are above and beyond.
7. Generally, FaceBook posts with images receive more than twice the engagement than posts without images. You should always use bright, high-resolution pictures in your content. A bonus tip is to use images with people’s faces in them. The human eye is naturally predisposed to recognize faces, so images with people’s faces in them are more likely to catch someone’s eye. Just beware of cheesy stock images. Those can turn your audience off by coming off as phoney or generic.
8. While posts with images may receive more engagement than those without, FaceBook posts with videos gain the most engagement of all. Video posts gain on average five times more engagement than posts with images. Want more social media marketing statistics on videos? Over 8 billion videos are watched on FaceBook every day! Fun fact, more than 500 million hours of video are watched on YouTube every single day! That’s a whole lot of videos.
9. FaceBook posts with emoticons receive 33% more engagement than those without. So, to recap, video posts with emoticons in the captions should receive the highest engagement.
10. Reputable social media marketing facts suggest that adults aged 18-34 make up 95% of the people who follow brands via social media sites. If your target audience is children or the elderly, consider targeting their parents or caretakers to get an audience that falls in that age group.
11. 78% of users who complain to or about a brand on Twitter expect a response from the brand within one hour. This shows how important it is to regularly monitor your accounts for questions, comments, and concerns. Ignoring Twitter complaints from angry customers can fuel their frustration with your brand while responding quickly with information to appease them can actually turn disgruntled consumers into repeat customers. Furthermore, users with similar opinions may see your response and have a favorable reaction as well.
12. Posts tagged with other users or locations have a much higher engagement rate on Instagram. Tagging users can increase engagement by 56% while using the geotag feature to tag locations can increase engagement by a massive 79%.
13. 91% of all social media users access social channels via mobile devices. Likewise, almost 80% of time spent on social media sites occurs on mobile platforms. It is highly recommended to address a mobile audience and to make sure any social ads you run appear on mobile devices in a smartphone-friendly format. FaceBook Ads Manager includes a feature that allows you to track which types of devices the majority of your ad clicks come from so you can adjust your target audience accordingly.
14. Instagram earns roughly $595 million in mobile ad revenue per year and is expected to reach almost $7 billion in ad revenue by the end of 2019. Instagram ad revenue is rapidly increasing, making this one of the most valuable advertising platform you won’t want to miss out on.
15. Research on social media marketing facts show that roughly 59% of Americans with social media accounts believe that social media has made customer service faster and easier than ever before. They think social media has helped get questions answered and issues resolved more quickly and efficiently than traditional customer service routes. Make sure to respond to comments and questions you receive on social media. Even negative comments or reviews from disgruntled customers can be handled in such a way that leads to a positive experience overall, which can lead to more customers in the future. The image below is a great example of how to properly handle complaints on social media and turn them into customer service opportunities.
16. 93% of Pinterest users are on the platform to make purchases or plan future purchases. While Pinterest tends to have lower engagement rates than most other social media platforms, it can be a useful tool for generating sales.
17. On the same subject, Pinterest drives an astonishing 25% of all retail website referral traffic. Again, if you have an e-commerce site, you should definitely consider Pinterest to generate sales. Beyond posting boards and pins, Pinterest also has a sophisticated ad platform similar to Twitter and FaceBook.
18. 56% of adults with internet access use more than one social media platform. As mentioned earlier, FaceBook is currently the most popular social media site, but it’s a good idea setting up accounts on several different platforms for your business. FaceBook, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn, and Pinterest are the most important ones.
19. Surveys show that 46% of social media users will unfollow a brand for posting too many promotional messages. We highly recommend keeping promotional messages to about one third of your brand’s total social media posts. Another third should be article shares on relevant topics and the last third should be posts that either encourage engagement or solidify your brand as an information source.
20. 60% of marketing professionals identify “measuring ROI” as one of their most difficult social media marketing challenges. Calculating your social media ROI is actually quite simple.
21. The percentage of marketing budgets spent on social media is expected to more than double over the next five years. Even if you already have a social media marketing budget, you should consider expanding your budget in the coming years. As long as you have a positive ROI, you have nothing to lose and, according to social media marketing statistics, your competitors are likely already raising their budgets.
22. Approximately 22% of all social media marketing activities are executed by social media marketing agencies. Are you considering hiring an agency for your social media marketing needs?
23. According to social media marketing statistics the amount of money projected to be spent on social media is on pace to outgrow TV ad spend in the near future. TV advertising may have been revolutionary for businesses in the past, but you can’t get anywhere near as close to reaching your target audience with television ads as you can with social media ads that include specific targeting options. Plus, TV and movie streaming services like Netflix in conjunction with pre-recorded TV options that allow viewers to skip commercials make TV advertising much trickier. If your primary focus in the past has been to advertise through TV commercials, it’s time to consider switching your advertising efforts to social media.
24. 96% of small business owners have reported using social media to market their companies.
25. Customers report spending 20% – 40% more money on brands that have interacted with them on social media. Some people may consider social media followers a vanity metric that does not relate to more profits, but this statistic proves that simply isn’t true.
26. 49% of people in the 18-29 age range report purchasing something after seeing a social media ad for it. Furthermore, 77% of millennials report making a purchase either online or in-store after seeing a product on FaceBook. If your ads aren’t resulting in purchases, don’t become discouraged with social media advertising as a whole. You may just have to change your approach to start receiving the outcome you want. Some optimization tactics include editing your audience based on analytics of the demographics of your website visitors, switching to a lead generation campaign to gather email addresses or phone numbers for potential customers so you can reach out to them directly, or running retargeting ads aimed at turning previous website visitors into customers.
27. 90% of active Instagram users are younger than 35 years old. If you want to target millennials, you have to be on Instagram according to these social media marketing statistics. Despite being owned by FaceBook, Instagram is threatening to dethrone FaceBook as the most popular social media platform in just a few years.
28. On average, users spend two hours on social media sites every day. As a business owner, you’ll definitely want some of that time to be used viewing your posts and/or ads. Most social media platforms integrate ads directly into a users news feed. The ads are designed to closely resemble regular posts, so they are not as easily blocked or ignored as other types of website ads might be.
29. On FaceBook, 510,000 comments, 293,000 statuses, and 136,000 photos are posted every 60 seconds! Post regularly on your business page to keep up with this fast-paced platform. Most business post two to ten times per week.
30. 77% of Twitter users report feeling more positive towards a brand when their tweet has been replied to by the brand’s Twitter account. This speaks to the importance of monitoring not only replies and retweets but also mentions. Be sure to regularly check any hashtags associated with your brand and respond to tweets accordingly.
31. According to Statista, Instagram stories has grown up to 500 million on a daily basis this January. This was an incredible increase compared to the data from two years ago with only 150 million daily stories.
32. By the end of 2019, the number of posts from influencer marketing will grow up to 4.95 million. And influencer sponsored posts are projected to increase a million each year, thus reaching up to 6.12 million in 2020.
If you’re still on the fence about adopting social media marketing for your business, hopefully this list of surprising social media marketing facts has put you on the right path! Want to learn more or get started? Contact us because we’d love to tell you all about how our social media agency can help your business succeed!
