Social Media Training for Marketers

Between November 2013 and January 2014, a long list of so-called “social publishers” saw their traffic dip substantially, according to comScore. Traffic to Upworthy dropped 51 percent. Traffic to Elite Daily dropped 47 percent. Traffic to Vice dropped 22 percent, to BroBible by 17 percent, to Huffington Post by 16 percent. Between December and January traffic to Distractify and Thought Catalog dropped 30 percent and 7 percent, respectively.

According to comScore, Facebook directed much less traffic to sites like Elite Daily and Upworthy in January compared to December,

we looked at four post types: link posts, video posts, photo posts and status updates. When paid media is applied to an organic post, it can significantly increase Facebook metrics – from impressions (obviously), to conversions – so we removed all posts with paid impressions from the analysis. For both time periods, we took the total reach for each post type and divided it by the total post count for that post type to get the average reach per post type for the given time frame.

As expected, the average reach per post on status updates decreased after the algorithm change. Significantly.

Photo and video posts had no discernible change in reach after the algorithm change as we would expect. This is good news for marketers who already regularly integrate rich media into their post strategies as it is well documented that images and video generate greater fan engagement – and from this research, it looks clear that they will continue to do so.

With each subsequent Tweet of an existing blog post, Tom noticed that he got around 75% as many Retweets as the time before. What was really interesting here is that even though he got more Retweets each time, this was directly proportionate to the number he got originally.

2. Hit multiple time zones

3. Reach your new followers

Twitter ads generate clicks at a significantly higher rate than Facebook. As a result, the firm found, advertisers are significantly dialing up their Twitter ad spending.

“Business & Consumer Services” saw its Twitter ad spending soar by 361 percent in the fourth quarter over the third quarter, versus Facebook’s still huge 211 percent increase. Over the course of 2013, Twitter ad spending for the ”Business & Consumer Services” ballooned 297 percent, found Resolution.

Why is Twitter growing despite a much smaller audience? For one, Twitter has rolled out several compelling new offerings that connects its ads directly to TV shows and commercials, Resolution’s report notes.

Now using the Twitter iPhone or Android app, users can tag up to 10 people in an image in a tweet. An important part of this feature is that tagging people doesn’t affect your character count — tweeters will still have 140 characters to play around with.

Users can now share up to four photos in a single tweet that automatically arrange themselves in a grid. Users can just tap to get a preview and can then  slide through to the full images.

100 characters is the engagement sweet spot for a tweet. 

But 40 is the magic number that Jeff Bullas found was most effective in his study of retail brands on Facebook. He measured engagement of posts, defined by “like” rate and comment rate, and the ultra-short 40-character posts received 86 percent higher engagement than others.

The ideal length of a headline is 6 words

Cable subscriptions are becoming less essential for teens at home, while online streaming is more critical.

Instagram ranked as the most important social network, exceeding Twitter and Facebook for the first time in survey history

What we found is that Twitter is viewed much like Facebook was in the summer of 2012: While many advertisers use it as a marketing channel, only a minority actually place ads there.

Among the respondents, 70% currently use Twitter as a marketing channel and 80% say they plan to use Twitter in the next 12 months. But only 46% say they've ever bought an ad on Twitter, whether a promoted tweet, trend, account or an "Amplify" TV deal.

In the coming year, 59.2% said they expect their Twitter advertising budget to "modestly increase" or "significantly increase."