I have to admit, Im a total neat freak when it comes to my phone. Especially in regards to apps. I seem to constantly have hundreds of unused free apps on my phone which I downloaded for some reason or another and never used and so periodically, I like to go through everything and clear them out. Which is when it occurred to me – I have one whole page of social media applications (16 apps)!
Screenshot of social media apps currently on my phone as proof!
Granted, I don’t use all of these, but I couldn’t bring myself to delete any of them, just incase I did get a notification. At this point I had a thought – What If I had to choose only one social networking site? And then I had a slightly more serious thought. What about businesses? On average in costs $4,500 to outsource Facebook and Twitter management (Contentfac, 2011), and so what if a company only had enough money to invest in professionally managing one, what should they choose?
The obvious choice is Facebook, it seems that almost everyone in the western world has an account, and the site pretty much includes all of the best bits from its competitors. Facebook has over 1.3 billion active, monthly users, which is a billion more active users than its closest, western competition – Instagram, which has 300 million active users (yes, Facebook owns Instagram but lets look at platforms rather than organisations for now). This is then followed by Twitter 284 million active users (Statista, 2015). However, this doesn’t mean Facebook is the best, Whatsapp has 600 million active users yet, at the moment they are unreachable by brands and whose to say that users on Twitter don’t interact with brands more than those on Facebook?
Adweek (2015) looked into this and found that brand engagement was twice as strong on Instagram as it was on Facebook, with 6,932 actions per post on Instagram compared to 2,396 on Facebook. Another study by Smith (2012) looked at brand interaction between Facebook, Twitter and youtube but this time found Facebook to have the highest response to marketer action, followed by twitter. These statistics are interesting although should be taken with a pinch of salt, as the process of liking a photo on Instagram or Facebook is much less valuable to a brand than a re-tweet on twitter (Traphagen, 2015).
Another aspect to bare in mind when choosing one social network is price. Now, many smaller businesses are happy to just do this on their own, but there are a growing number of agencies who will manage social media accounts for you. This includes writing messages, creating photos and planning campaigns however all of this costs a lot. Contentfac (2011) found that to outsource the creation and management of A Twitter account companies pay on average between $2,000 – $4,000 a month and $2,500 – $5,000 for Facebook management! This is a lot of money and it could be argued that its not worth spending the extra money for a Facebook campaign compared to Twitter, especially when Smith (2012) found that Facebook generates only 4% more responses from its audience.
The last thing that needs to be thought about before leaping into the social networking stratosphere is, is the platform right for my industry? Facebook and Twitter are the most open with Facebook especially targeting everyone from teens to the elderly. Things like Instagram however are slightly more targeted. Fashion, food and luxury brands work great on Instagram, gaming companies – not so much. Sites like Linkedin are even more targeted and only really appeal to advertisers targeting other businesses. As a rule of thumb its probably best to stick to the more open sites unless your product really fits within another platform.
Its hard to say if there is a best social network but the thought behind this post is valid, as companies are surly reluctant to shell out a minimum of $2,000 per month for every social network they want to be present on. Looking at everything I’ve seen today, I’d have to say Facebook is the most important. I know its expensive and I know not everyone is willing to engage with brands but the potential audience is leaps and bounds above the rest and at the end of the day thats whats most important, right? Besides, you can always mirror your Facebook posts across platforms at no extra cost. Or at least until you have a little more of a marketing budget to shell out on the other social networks!
References
Contentfac, (2011). How Much Does it Cost to Outsource Social Media Marketing? . [online] Available at: http://www.contentfac.com/how-much-does-social-media-marketing-cost/ [Accessed 9 Feb. 2015].
Heine. C, (2015). Instagram Marketing Is Quickly Catching Up to Facebook. [online] Available at: http://www.adweek.com/news/technology/instagram-marketing-quickly-catching-facebook-159249 [Accessed 9 Feb. 2015].
Smith, A., Fischer, E. and Yongjian, C. (2012). How Does Brand-related User-generated Content Differ across YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter?. Journal of Interactive Marketing, 26(2), pp.102-113.
Statista (2015). Social networks: global sites ranked by users 2015 | Statistic. [online] Statista. Available at: http://www.statista.com/statistics/272014/global-social-networks-ranked-by-number-of-users/ [Accessed 9 Feb. 2015].
Traphagen, M. (2015). Why Engagement DOES Matter As A Social Media Metric. [online] Marketing Land. Available at: http://marketingland.com/engagement-matter-social-media-metric-114497 [Accessed 9 Feb. 2015].