At the beginning of 2018, social media scheduling app Buffer teamed up with Social Media Week to poll 1,700 marketers about how they approach social media. There are definitely some interesting pieces of data that turned up! Here are a couple things we thought you might be interested in.
1. Investing in Ads = More Social Effectiveness
When polled about the effectiveness of their social media campaigns, respondents were twice as likely to say that their campaigns were “very effective” if they invested in advertising.
To refute this, businesses that don’t invest in ads were also twice as likely to rate their social media marketing campaigns as “uncertain” or “very ineffective.”
Conclusion: It’s worth it to try investing in advertising on social media, if that’s not something you’ve tried yet or haven’t done enough of.
2. Everyone wants to hop on the video wagon.
We all have wishes and wants for our social media accounts. We can always improve, and it turns out many people want to improve by posting more video content.
The biggest two factors holding businesses back from creating that video content: lack of time and budget. According to the Aberdeen Group, video marketers get 66% more qualified leads per year. That’s a big number!
Conclusion: Clearly, putting time and budget into video production can pay off.
3. Companies are planning on running more ads in 2018.
As we saw in #1 above, those who are running ads are more likely to conclude that social media campaigns are effective. So, it’s no surprise that companies are planning on running more social ads in 2018.
After Facebook’s announcement about the News Feed updating to include less content from businesses, advertising budgets will most likely need to be raised anyway to reach more people.
Conclusion: If your customers are on social media, now is the time to raise your budget to reach them.
4. Live video isn’t catching on, but it should.
At the beginning of this year, Facebook’s Head of News Feed gave marketers a tip when he said that live video on his platform gets, on average, six times more views than regular video. Six times more views! That’s a pretty substantial amount. Live video, though, is something a lot of marketers haven’t figured out yet.
Conclusion: The time for live video is this year. How can you take advantage?
