First up: Retweeting without reading.

Always, ALWAYS click on the link of anything you’re about to retweet and at least give the content a quick read through. Of course, that should go without saying, because you’re only retweeting items you think are high quality and worth the time of your audience, right?!

Just this morning, I saw two eminently retweetable headlines pop into my feed, from two different very high profile social media-related content creators. Both of them already had multiple retweets, perhaps 5 or 6. I still clicked through to check that they delivered what I was expecting.  The first one lead to a broken link, giving a 404 Page Not Found error.  Oops. So immediately we know that the five previous retweeters hadn’t even got that far, or presumably they wouldn’t have bothered promoting a bad link.

The second was a slightly more subtle issue. The headline referred to “social media best practises” that need to be retired. Sounded interesting, if only as an indicator of how things have changed over the last few years. Clicking on the link, though…not so much. The article was both thin and very much phoned in – the tactics mentioned were about mass following, and automated messaging. These are things most of the industry put to bed years ago, if they ever went there in the first place.  So in that instance, retweeting would be both disrespectful of our audience’s time and intelligence, and also potentially make us look “behind the curve” – “oh look, this agency thinks these are great new ideas”!.

There are other issues that can hide behind those links though, ranging from misleading headlines introducing views you actually wouldn’t endorse at all, to phishing scams or similar.

Always. check.

Secondly: Cross posting to multiple sites – or just failing to customise content

If you’re serving the same audience with the same content on multiple social media sites, it can be very tempting to bulk schedule through one of the third party services, allow one site to cross post to another (eg “share to Twitter” when you create an Instagram post)  or even just copy and paste mindlessly between sites.

Some of the time, it’s possible that nobody will notice. But it’s a risky game, and can have results that will either irritate users or just make it look as though you’re not really that committed to the “afterthought” channel.

The worst example is direct cross posting from sites. Post from Instagram to Twitter, for example, and your users get an annoying link needing clicking, instead of being able to view your image within their Twitter timeline. But some of the bulk scheduling tools aren’t very helpful, either  – as things currently stand, that multi-image post you’ve set up on Hootsuite and scheduled for Insta and Twitter will lose all but the first image when it posts to Instagram. If you’ve referred to the other images in your text, you then have a dead giveaway that something’s gone wrong!

Creating content directly into the channel it’s going to be posted on, will always be the optimum approach. It also allows you to make use of the site-specific functionality – telling your Insta audience to Swipe Left on your post for your additional images (nonsensical in the context of any other site), or tagging other pages  in Facebook (doesn’t work if you try to do this from Hootsuite).

Thirdly: Hashtags on Facebook

A small one, but there are still articles knocking around on Google which suggest this will give you some advantage, so it refuses to die.

The reality is that most users don’t, and never have, use hashtags on Facebook – except occasionally as a joke, a subtextual commentary on whatever they’ve just posted. Nobody is using them for discovery in the way that they might on Twitter or Instagram, simply because most of the interesting content is behind privacy settings anyway.

So really, sticking those hashtags on just tends to suggest a scattergun approach to marketing techniques (chuck some mud, it might stick!) or perhaps that you’re bulk scheduling alongside Twitter and just haven’t bothered to delete the hashtags for the Facebook version of the post.

So those are our suggested areas for improvement – feel free to comment with yours if there are any huge bloopers we’ve missed!

Buying followers for social media: the Pros and Cons, and what you need to know

Companies selling instant Follower or Liker boosts have been around almost since the dawn of social media itself. In the early days, we assumed that these companies would die out as users got more sophisticated and more able to spot those accounts whose “popularity” was entirely faked.  That hasn’t proven to be the case at all; in fact, the industry in fake followers seems to be thriving.

So, can buying followers ever help a business be successful on social media? Are all bought followers the same? What are the implications on the different sites of boosting your account in this way? We know you’re wondering:  here are the answers!

What am I buying?

First of all, it’s important to recognise exactly what you’re buying when you purchase followers. In the vast majority of cases, you’re gaming the number that appears in your account bio – your number of Twitter or Instagram Followers, or Facebook Likers.  The number itself will be bigger, but that is the limit of the benefit you’re getting. The accounts won’t belong to real consumers in any normal sense.

The basic level – bargain basement followers

The organisations selling these followers, often based around “click farms” in parts of the world where labour is extremely cheap, have hundreds of people setting up fake accounts constantly.

The “quality” of those accounts (ie, the effort they’ve gone to to make the account look like a real user) varies from the “egg avatar with randomly generated name” type through to those which would stand up to some very brief scrutiny – that is, they have an avatar pic, something written in more-or-less coherent English in their biographies, and a handful of generic and usually nonsensical posts.

Once you have paid for the number of followers you want, the supplying company will just follow your account with the purchased quota of fake accounts. You should NOT have to supply your password in order for this to happen!

Here are the pros and cons of this cheap’n’cheerful approach:

Pros:

• These accounts will generally continue to follow you, as they’re not being used by real people;
• They make your account, particularly at a quick glance, look more popular than it actually is.

Cons:

• To anyone who bothers to look, it’s usually totally obvious when an account has purchased these followers.
• Apart from the sudden jump in numbers, the accounts themselves just scream “fake” in terms of their meaningless biographies and nonsense posts.

Below is a perfect example of a fake follower account on Instagram. Implausible name – check. Meaningless biography – check. Incoherent and random posts (and only a few of them) – check. Following a high number of people in order to get a few to follow them back – check, and very low ratio of followers to people being followed- check again.

Followers for hire

Another approach that some of the more expensive follower-sellers take, is to incentivise real users to follow your account. This can be just with a payment, or some other kind of incentive such as search credits on a directory site.

Pros:

• As they are actual social media users, there’s a (small) chance that they might read some of your content, and your product or service might happen to be suitable for them;
• They look like real, organically acquired followers to anyone examining the account

Cons:

• As the incentive is for the initial follow, this type of account is likely to unfollow over time as they purge their timelines of content that’s of no interest to them.

The real issue with bought followers

So we’ve looked at the pros and cons of artificially inflating your account’s popularity with different types of users, but of course there are much bigger implications. The only significant, long term benefit of doing this, is that your account looks more popular than it is, which may in turn influence the kind of people who regard that as an important signal. And don’t take a closer look to see who all those thousands of followers are. Therefore, you may gain some followers who wouldn’t otherwise have bothered with you.

The big downside though, is much more potentially significant, and the exact implications vary according to which of the sites you’re buying followers for.

In all cases, the number of additional followers you gain (who are maybe really interested in your product or service) will likely be a small number compared to the number of fake accounts you’ve bought. So you now have a follower base that’s the opposite of what you should be aiming for with social media – engaged advocates who are likely to show a return when you put effort into creating good content.

Now pay us to access those dead end accounts!

And where it really gets bad is if you’re going to do any paid for marketing, which these days is pretty much crucial to your long term strategy.  Twitter and Instagram (to a lesser degree) and Facebook (to a significant degree) all employ algorithms which restrict your access to your own follower base. Putting it simply, there’s no guarantee that a particular piece of content will be seen by all your followers…unless you pay for that to be the case. But unfortunately, none of the sites have a tick box for “just charge me for showing this to my *real* followers“. So you’re stuck with forever paying to show posts to that big set of fake accounts , in order to get to the handful of genuinely interested followers who are mixed in with them.

On Facebook, the situation is significantly worse. Being able to recruit your keenest and happiest customers to your Facebook page, and then market to them *and their friends*, is the real marketing gold. The social network of your existing customers is a wonderfully self-filtering group of people who are much more likely to also enjoy your product, than the average person picked off the street.

As soon as you buy followers, not only are you going to end up paying to show your posts to them, but you either have to stop using the “friends of Likers” options or end up paying to put your content in front of all the accounts who are linked to your fake followers, too. Ouch. Expensive, and self defeating.

And putting a dent in your Algorithm results…

In addition, most of the social media sites give your account some kind of a ranking figure (which you won’t ever be able to access) which influences how much priority your content is given in the timelines of your followers. Exactly how the algorithm works is very much a trade secret, but we’re pretty sure that engagement levels will be a big factor. And engagement levels are calculated by comparing your total follower numbers to the number of likes, comments etc you receive on a typical post.

So, if you’ve gained 1,000 followers organically but then become impatient and bought 10,000 more, the next time you post something, even if Jesus and the angel host are personally on your side, your engagement levels are going to look terrible because 10,000 of your followers are never, ever going to engage. So you are effectively handicapping every future piece of content you post.

(Bear in mind, that if you sign up to a social media agency who buys followers for your account, the same will apply – and you won’t necessarily be able to reverse it without binning your account and starting again from scratch….so watch out for providers delivering implausible growth rates!).

Is it ever worth it?

As with most things, there are some circumstances where buying followers could be a valid strategy – and we’re just talking from a marketing effectiveness point of view here, and leaving aside the ethical issues of cheating / misleading the public…

For example, if you need an account to look impressive in the short term, for whatever reason, and have no intention of doing paid for marketing through that account or building on it long term for genuine engagement.

If it’s on a site where you’re not really expecting commercial returns, but are using it just to influence brand perception (Instagram fits that description for some businesses).

If raising your follower numbers is the “be all and end all” for your management then yes, buying followers will accomplish that goal.

But overall, tread very very carefully. Once you have thousands of non-genuine followers mixed in with your hard-won real followers, it’s difficult to go back.

We’d recommend that you start with a step back, and (if you didn’t already) take a good hard look at what you’d like social media to do for you, whether that’s realistically achievable, and an outline of how that might look – basically, you need a social media strategy. Without this, you are setting both yourselves and your outsourcing partner up for failure.

This process may involve a small investment on your part, to get someone in to work through that with you, but believe us when we say it’ll be a tiny amount compared with the cost of months of badly thought out and ineffective outsourced management.

The other thing you should do is articulate your own expectations and discuss them clearly with any potential provider. For example, you might think that any agency worth their salt would be tweeting for you at least five times a day. That may or may not be right, but if you don’t share that assumption with them, they’re unlikely to guess it.

When outsourcing social media can help you

We’ve also talked in the past about our firm belief that a capable and focused internal employee is, most of the time, going to find it easier to do a great job for your company than a third party. If you’re a very small business or sole trader, times that by ten – you *are* your brand, and you are the best placed person to represent it to the outside world. Unfortunately those are often the  businesses who struggle most to manage their social media presence – consistently.

So that’s our first reason for outsourcing:

To create a consistent presence

Don’t underestimate the value of regular, consistent activity on social media. This is probably the number one reason to consider outsourcing. If you can’t make social media a reasonably core part of your (or one of your employees’) job role, it will get pushed to the bottom of the list and eventually neglected.

So many businesses set up their social media accounts in a flurry of initial enthusiasm, and then find it hard to keep up the activity.  Posts become really sporadic, with lots one week and then none for months. Peer or customer mentions go ignored because there haven’t been any for a while so everyone stops checking for them.  Your audience gets the message that social media is low priority for you.

This issue is easily cured by outsourcing. Provided you have agreed a good range of content topics and sources with them, your provider should be able to keep things moving even during periods where you aren’t able to give them “live” news from within the business. It may not be wildly daring or creative, but the job will get done, and that alone is more than half the battle!

To maintain professionalism / brand standards

If you have the slightest doubt about your grammar / spelling / writing skills, and / or have issues creating respectable graphics, that will reflect really badly on your brand on social media.

In our experience this can be a tricky issue for business owners to recognise, so if you’re in any doubt – ask your most critical and creative friends whether what you’re putting out there enhances or detracts from a prospective customer’s perception of your business. Again, easily cured by outsourcing, as those skills are fundamental to anyone working in social media.

To keep you current and taking advantage of new developments

This one’s a bit harder, and less of a guaranteed fix, because outsourcing alone won’t necessarily allow an agency to maximise everything they could do for you on social media unless you’re able to contribute significant time, money, or both.

But we will say this: even working full time on social media, we sometimes struggle to keep up with the technical changes on the major platforms. Especially now that the advertising aspect has become more central and complex, and there are new bugs / features / workarounds constantly needed.

Combining that particular challenge with another job role is going to be really tough, if you’re doing your own social media.  That may or may not be a big deal for you, as you may just want to accept that you’re going to be working at a more limited level – but be aware that it will be a limitation.

Creativity

Not everyone has the right mindset for creating original and creative social media content, for sure. But equally, not all businesses need it – for many, just doing a good, consistent, engaging job of creating content, and being responsive to customer engagement, is absolutely fine.

If you do feel that your business demands a high level of outstanding content though, and you don’t feel able to come up with the concepts yourself, outsourcing may help you.

We’re only going with “may” here, because there are so many variables which can affect whether you’ll get what you want. Top of the list is that you’re likely to need to invest significant time in working with your social media agency to shape their concepts, because one person’s “original” is another person’s “travesty” – for reference, take a look at the Poundland Elf campaign from December 2018. It’s undeniably original, and equally undeniably we’ve worked with many brands who would be utterly horrified if something similarly risque / crude (depending on your opinion!) was published in their name.

We hope that helps – at the very least, do think through all of those issues before getting in touch with a potential outsourcing partner, and you’ll start out on the right track.

From a brand of this size, this is very significant, for a few reasons. Firstly, because they are acknowledging that misleading practices are widespread – and in our own experience, the beauty industry is at least as bad as any in this respect, maybe worse. Secondly, they are admitting that brands have a role in perpetuating that fraud, by creating the demand that “influencers” respond to.

From a marketing professional perspective, this is fantastic news. If more PRs and brand clients had been making educated decisions about who they pay for influence within the social media ecosystem, we would very likely not be having this discussion at all.

But here we are, and mainly because of the longstanding practice of setting influencer payscales mostly or entirely according to their number of followers, rather than, say, rewarding them with a proportion of any sales resulting from their work. As a consequence, it’s wise to regard any social media account with unaccountably large numbers of followers, or whose every banal uttering on Instagram is met with disproportionate enthusiasm, with great suspicion.

That has had a massive and toxic impact on the whole sector. Clients look at these (literally) unachievable numbers, apparently generated by doing nothing particularly clever or out of the ordinary, and they demand that marketers achieve the same thing for them. Potentially, marketers are put in a position of choosing whether to pay their own mortgages or stick doggedly to doing things the right way – which will pay dividends eventually, but often well after a client has lost patience.  Other social media users ( your would-be Influencers) have to choose between a lucrative push-button option to bulk buy followers, and the slow and arduous route of building a genuine following through creating great content.

Everything gets distorted by those “dishonest business practices” that Keith refers to.  I know we as a business will have lost potential clients in the past, because we don’t have an enormous Facebook following. The reason for that is that we have chosen not to invest in the resources required to build one honestly – ie, ongoing high quality content creation in the social media space. That takes time from good people, and those good people need to be paid, and those costs would have to accrue to the fees we charge our clients. We hope that our potential clients will look beyond those particular numbers, take time to chat with us and evaluate our expertise and approach in a more meaningful way – but there’s no doubt that somewhere along the line, some won’t have done. Is there a temptation to cheat the numbers? Of course there is!

The illusion of widespread but inexplicable popularity on social media itself spawns other scams. People who want it to work for them can’t see any explanation for others’ success, which makes them easy prey for practitioners who claim to have a “secret formula” that they can either teach or deploy at will – for a price.  The truth is, there is no secret formula, and success depends on the same basic factors that have been around since God was a boy – understanding your audience, having a great product, consistently generating good quality content that your audience enjoy, and ensuring that you take best advantage of the opportunities for visibility that each platform offers.  Quite often, this news is surprisingly unwelcome…

So where does this leave social media marketing? The thing is, that none of this changes the fundamental uniqueness of what social media marketing can do. There has never been a single, unified communication platform of the size of Facebook or Instagram, since time began. There are real opportunities for effective marketing and laser focused targeting that can’t be found anywhere else, and at a cost which is very hard to equal through other channels.

BUT

As marketers and as clients, we have to be satisfied with “just” those unparalleled opportunities. Stop trying to believe in the unicorns, and take the word “viral” out of your vocabulary (in most cases, at least).

UK Social Media Statistics for 2018

Welcome to our annual roundup of UK specific social media statistics, for 2018.

2017 was the year of Fake News, and a wake-up call for “establishment” media and regulatory agencies that they need to get to grips with the reality of targeting on social media, fast. It remains to be seen how that will affect businesses; in the US, Facebook has already trialled a function which allows users to see all ads related to a Page, which could prove interesting for businesses as well as questionable political users!

And targeting and advertising is likely to be where most of the action is in 2018, with enormous leaps forward in the complexity and power of what the major social media sites are offering….unless it comes to grief around the implementation of the General Data Protection Review, which we feel has the potential to really put the cat among the pigeons for social media marketers.

UK Social Media in 2018: general thoughts

Meanwhile, let’s take a look at where the main social media sites stand at the start of 2018. Let’s begin with a really interesting graph from Statista. We opened last year’s UK stats article by talking about “Users” vs “Usage”, and how it’s possible to have a huge number of registered accounts on a site, but very little active usage – and vice versa.

Obviously this has huge implications for the impact and effectiveness of any marketing.

Take a look at the graph below, which is captioned as “Market Share held by the leading social networks in the UK” and once again highlights that the devil is very much in the methodology detail.

This is based not on user accounts, but on actual activity – page hits – on the site: “Data was gathered based on more than 15 billion hits online per month onto more than 2.5 million tracking Statcounter member sites worldwide“.

And this is what you get:

Interesting, eh? The first thing that really hits you is, surely….wooah, how did LinkedIn end up so far down?!  Followed very rapidly by the startling comparison between Instagram and Twitter hits, or Instagram and the (still relatively small in user terms, last we heard) Pinterest.

Make of it what you will – maybe there is a methodology issue here (not in terms of its validity, but in terms of the suitability of measuring market share by hits)? Wise statisticians, feel free to comment!

UK Facebook Users and Demographics 2018

Globally, Facebook broke through the 2 billion Monthly Active User mark last year, and there’s a fun widget here which lets you see the user count going up by the second.

They’ve not given us much in terms of details below that, although they casually mentioned a figure of 30 million UK users per day on mobile alone, in this infographic pushing the benefits of advertising. That seems to fit in reasonably well with what we know from the past – around half of the UK population has a Facebook account, and the vast majority of registered users are actively using the site.

In terms of the demographics, survey-based data from IPSOS Mori conducted in late 2017 gives us this:

Again, no sign in a significant decline in the youngest group, with around 70% of 16-22 year olds reporting that they use Facebook.

UK Business use of Facebook

Facebook’s advertising offering continues to develop in leaps and bounds, with barely a month going by without another new targeting option or refinement being released. As the advertising environment becomes more competitive (and therefore costly) and more complex, it gets harder and harder for smaller businesses to manage their own advertising effectively. Simply Boosting a post, in many circumstances, just won’t do it any more, and we know that the US and UK are amongst the most expensive markets to target, as more and more businesses make Facebook advertising a core part of their marketing mix.

Although it’s been widely reported that Google and Facebook between them are responsible for almost all of the growth in advertising spend recently, there aren’t many stats available about what an average UK SME is now spending on Facebook – that would be a very interesting piece of research to see!

What we do have some numbers for, thanks to SocialBakers, is the sectors which are thriving the most on Facebook. This is likely to be a combination of the Facebook environment being favourable to these kinds of topics (fun, leisure, visual) and brands within these sectors grabbing the advertising opportunies offered by Facebook with great enthusiasm:

 UK LinkedIn Users 2018

At the start of last year, the Microsoft acquisition of LinkedIn was fresh off the press and we were all waiting to see what difference it would make. The answer so far seems to be “er, not much” – certainly as far as user recruitment is concerned. There’s been yet another of LinkedIn’s periodic redesigns, in which half the menu items you’re used to using randomly vanish (“simplification”, apparently) and the other half move around a bit, but that’s about all.

The most recent big milestone was half a billion users globally,(and that’ll be “registered accounts”, because LinkedIn wouldn’t want to make too much noise about it’s actual MUA figures!), reported during 2017.  That same announcement told us that London is the “most connected city”  – ie, London-based users have the highest average number of connections on LinkedIn, of anywhere in the world:

We didn’t get any update on the previously provided UK user base figure of 21 million from LinkedIn themselves, but the numbersfor the graph below came from the IPSOS Mori research mentioned above.

What’s somewhat odd about this is that IPSOS give a total figure of 13% of all respondants saying that they use LinkedIn – which based on UK population figures, would be closer to half a million than 21 million. We can only guess that perhaps the research question was worded to suggest *recent* usage, rather than having an account, or that the respondants interpreted it that way!

UK Instagram Users 2018

Instagram continues to take on users at an impressive rate globally, hitting 700 million *monthly* users during 2017, which is more than double the total figure from two years ago. The chart below shows just how that solid exponential growth is continuing:

For the UK, the most recent figure we could find came from an eMarketer study, which credited Instagram with 16.7 million monthly users in the UK, up by almost 35% on the previous year.

Oddly named Instagram stats app Napoleoncat gives a figure of 17.2 million, along with the demographic breakdown below:

That chart also really emphasises the dominance of the 18-34 age group on Instagram, once again. It looks as if Instagram advertising will be making a big contribution to parent company Facebook’s revenues very soon – particularly if they increase the “privileges” available to advertisers, such as easier access to link inclusion.

UK Twitter Users 2018

At last! We have a number! For the first time in several years, on of the major stats organisations has pinned a figure to the mast for UK Twitter users. In the same report as above, eMarketer suggests that the UK user base for Twitter is 12.6 million users.

So there we have it – finally confirmation that Twitter has thoroughly lost its place in the Big Three social media sites for the UK. Also, notably, lower than the last official figure provided by Twitter in 2013 (!) of 13 million – so that’s a very long time that Twitter has gone without increasing the user base.

Having said that, it’s still almost 20% of the population, which must easily compete with any of the big daily papers, remains the public discussion platform of choice particularly for “non-visual” topics – politics, science, etc.

The relevant IPSOS Mori data for the demographic breakdown is below. It suggests surely a startlingly high proportion of the youngest age group using Twitter, challenging the common view that Twitter is for older people – and that agrees with the research report we talked about in last year’s roundup.  Is there really a significant cohort of teens using Twitter heavily?!

While Twitter didn’t see fit to give us much more direct information about its UK users, it did let us know what the most retweeted Tweets were for the UK in the last twelve months. Somewhat dispiritingly, first place goes to a plea for free chicken nuggets…

UK Pinterest Users, 2018

So here’s a thing…Pinterest seems to be the only other one of the “established” social media sites that’s still showing strong growth. And it seems to have had a spurt in the last 12 months (unlike Instagram, whose user growth rate has been pretty steady for years).

After quite a while of radio silence, Pinterest broke cover in late 2017 to announce 200 million users worldwide. Which is interesting in itself, but in some ways not as interesting as the comment in the same announcement that this is up “nearly 40%  since last year”.  That’s pretty remarkable.

Pinterest themselves didn’t give much detail about where this growth is coming from, except that it appears to be mostly outside the US (“75% of signups are outside the US”). Gotta love how social media companies divide the whole world into “US” and “everything else” – it’s very common to see stats expressed this way in their announcements!

Graphing up the demographic results from IPSOS again, it’s striking how evenly Pinterest use seems to be spread across all age groups- something unique to this platform.

And that’s it for now, folks! Happy strategy planning for 2018, and if you need help figuring out how to use social media for your business, get in touch!

The challenges around recruiting and engaging a prospective customer audience, and then “nudging” them to take action, are going to be utterly different if you’re promoting a wedding venue versus selling funeral insurance.

The second is that the devil is always, always, always in the detail – which is why generic advice can often seem so plausible and yet be so frustratingly unhelpful when you try to apply it to your specific business.

This is beautifully illustrated by this recent post: You can’t buy love: stop wasting money on Google Adwords. It’s a great article, the kind I wish there were more of on marketing blogs these days – specific, detailed and honest. Matthew says

Over the course of two years I spent more than £25,000 on AdWords…but I never managed to get a cost of customer acquisition below the average first year’s revenue per customer.

Believe me, I tried to make it work. I optimised my ads, tweaked my landing pages and redesigned my website. Even after reading countless articles and a 500-page book on how to ‘do’ AdWords, I resorted to hiring an AdWords ‘consultant’. None of it made any difference.

Many of us have been there. Putting in hours and hours of work and significant amounts of budget, only for the ultimate measure (revenue vs cost of acquisition) to keep failing. Plus, the actual process is painful:

Most online advice about AdWords will tell you spend more time or money making it work. But Google AdWords is so complicated, wrapped in a geeky illusion of data and control, that it takes a long time to realise you’re lost.

Yes. Ouch. The data blindness is real!

And while some of that rang very very true for me personally, some of it didn’t, and Google Adwords absolutely has worked for my business and for *some* of our clients.

So that got me thinking about what the difference was. And guess where that devil is? yeah. The detail that leapt out to me is that for Adwords to work, there has to be a link between the customer’s search behaviour and a buying intent.  There are things that, I would speculate, people just don’t know they want to buy so never go searching for them on Google. A gorgeous piece of furniture, say – you might not *need* it, but if you saw it pop up on a social media feed, you might be tempted. (Conversely not too many people get tempted into a new car batttery because it pops up on Facebook – you either need it or you don’t, and if you do, you want the best value option!)

Then there are things that prospective customers do know they want, but Google just isn’t their chosen research option, for whatever reason (example: builders, plumbers, SEO providers. Google search results are so awful / manipulated for those things that I’d not bother with it at all, which also knocks out the advertising opportunity. I’d always and only go for personal recommendations for those things. Might be just me, but you see what I mean!).

Then there are products and services that, for whatever reason, people do tend to check out on Google. Social Media training is one of those things, so in the early days we benefitted very much from being able to have a “quick win” of paying to get in front of those buyers. We don’t use it much these days (the data pain got really old, as did the arbitrary “trademark” restrictions – suddenly we can’t use “Facebook” in our ads, but our competitors somehow still could! – and the escalating costs) but it was effective for a particular task at a particular time. I have similar stories from other clients.

The wider point here is, that when you’re planning your marketing, you absolutely have to question the details and the reality for YOUR specific business.

This is even more true with social media marketing, where nuances around the type of product, market positioning, price point, target market demographics, how mature the company is, and many other elements, can make a huge difference as to whether a strategy works or not.

When you’re making calls about how to allocate your budget, a working knowledge of how those factors interact with the characteristics of the main social media platforms is hugely helpful. And finally: you’re allowed to ignore the generic “Ten No Fail Ways to Skyrocket your Twitter sales” articles and not feel bad about it, either.

So far, so standard. Later in the conversation we were talking about “business as usual” social media, and the client was asking at what point they should reduce the Facebook budget and start working on all that engagement and organic growth they’d heard so much about in the past.

At which point, we ran through the usual primer on the Facebook algorithm, and the likely reach they’re going to achieve in 2017 if a post is left to its own, organic, devices.

“But“, said our client “in that case, what is the advantage to me of building that audience? I’m going to be paying Facebook each month in order for anyone to see my content, regardless of whether I’ve recruited any particular prospect to my Facebook page or not“.

Which, we have to say, is a fair point in some ways.

Actually there is an advantage to getting interested prospects to Like your Page, and it is still well worth while doing that: at the very least, when you then pay to boost a post to your existing Likers, you at the very least know that close to 100% of those seeing it should have some interest. Whereas using any other method of targeting it’s a “best guess” as to how likely any individual user meeting those criteria is to be interested in what you do.

Her query though, did raise an interesting point, which is the degree to which the emphasis of Facebook marketing has shifted from engaging content, conversation, and relationship building, to ever more sophisticated ways of making the most of your Facebook advertising budget.

The restrictions on accessing your Facebook audience caused by the more recent versions of the algorithm, make an emphasis on ongoing conversations almost redundant. Unless you are paying to boost every single post to your Likers, most people are not going to see most of what you post.

And rightly or wrongly, for most businesses, the content they are prepared to pay to extend the reach of tends to be the kind that has a closer relationship to the bottom line – announcements about a seasonal sale or a new product, rather than a funny meme related to their sector.

With hindsight, this has significantly affected the way that businesses use Facebook in the last year or two.

We’d even go as far as to say that with a good understanding of the Facebook advertising suite, businesses can and do use it primarily as an advertising platform. A uniquely powerful one, for sure, with unique ways of targeting and magnifying their message. But still, compared to the “be social. it’s like being in the pub with your clients” message that underpinned most Facebook marketing strategies five years ago, how far have we come?

UK Social Media Statistics for 2017

The tree is down and the tinsel is wilting, so it must be time for our annual review of social media use in the UK at the start of 2017.  We do this for two reasons: one, because statistics that focus purely on UK based users can be hard to come by, and two, because it also helps us clarify our own “hunches” about how things are going for each of the major sites, and use that information when we’re working with our business and third sector clients in the UK.

There’s also some good news: UK specific statistics have become a little easier to find this year. Props must go to agency We Are Flint for carrying out their own primary research during 2016, complete with actual transparency about how the research was carried out (link below to the entire report) and Statista.com is also offering a decent amount of open source information. We’re grateful to both organisations for those contributions, as well as the other source sites linked within this post.

UK social media in 2017: general thoughts

We talked in our last annual update about the fact that the mainstream social media market is now mature. Nothing has changed there; there haven’t been any significant upsets this year, and it’s been a while since a genuinely “new” entrant offered anything different. The “Big 3″ in the UK (Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn) have more or less stayed static in user terms for several years. Apart from a potentially interesting Twitter vs Instagram clash, the only action is around the smaller players and ancilliary apps like Snapchat which we see more as utilities than social networks.

We’re going to kick off this year with two charts that we think contain the most crucial information for social media strategy planning if you’re a UK business: Total UK Users by Site (based on the current “best estimate” as described below, where the site has not provided figures), and the percentage of those users who log in daily.

Remember, a registered user who never goes onto the site isn’t going to be a viable target for your marketing!

UK Facebook Users 2017

So let’s kick off our indepth review with the Big Daddy, Facebook. Once again the overall number hasn’t budged all that much; we’re looking at around 32 million user accounts in the UK. That’s been pretty steady for around three years now. We Are Flint’s report puts the proportion of over 18s in the UK who use Facebook at 78% – so still, after all these years, probably the single most consolidated channel available to marketers for accessing most of the population in one place (after snail mail, which surely only those printing their own money can afford these days!).

We also have, courtesy of Statista.com. a nice breakdown of the demographics within that figure, which does offer some interesting observations. No, Facebook probably isn’t “cool” any more. My ageing Samsung Galaxy, if it was ever cool, certainly isn’t now either, but that doesn’t stop me using it constantly.

Looking at these stats, the same is true of Facebook: the largest demographic is the 20-29 year olds, clearly showing that it’s not just everyone’s Mum using Facebook these days.

With organic post reach now sitting at around a measly 10%, the major area of interest for businesses using Facebook now is the development of new types of advertising, and the fluctuation in cost. This year we’ve seen enhancements or new introductions in ever more sophisticated ad targeting – Lookalike Audiences, Dynamic Ads and a whole suite of options around remarketing to website visitors. For large ecommerce sites this is a godsend. For smaller businesses, anecdotally it seems as though the cost of reaching the standard 1,000 eyeballs, or achieving a good volume of link clicks, is on the increase. This may be partly due to the more targeted types of advertising being more costly, which is not unreasonable if the results match up to their promise.

There are numerous studies showing that social media advertising is by far the cheapest medium.  Ad Espresso tell us that overall CPM on Facebook actually declined during 2016, but there are so many factors influencing what any individual business will spend that it’s almost inevitable that your mileage will vary. As an aside, if you’re interested in what factors affect your ad spend, and how they affect it, Ad Espresso have a superb report here covering every aspect, from ad placement to the demographic being targeted, and the day and even hour that the advert runs in.

UK LinkedIn users 2017

Like all the mature sites, LinkedIn’s growth is also slowing, but there is still some growth. Last year we had a figure of around 19 million UK users; this year the figure is 21 million. You can see LinkedIn’s own global figures here.

When planning your strategy, though, it’s important to remember that the average user uses LinkedIn very different to the way Facebook’s average user uses Facebook. And that’s why you won’t see too much emphasis on metrics such as “monthly active users” or time spent on the site in an average month. Unless they are actively job hunting, or actively using LinkedIn as part of their job role (think Enterprise software sales execs), we believe that most people who are registered with LinkedIn, don’t necessarily touch that account for weeks at a time.

Again we’re going on anecdotal evidence with a pinch of common sense – by its very nature, LinkedIn’s content offering doesn’t begin to compare with how compelling Facebook’s is, where users are on the site multiple times each day exchanging banter with their social networks or just surfing for something to cheer themselves up.

UK Instagram Users 2017

Instagram themselves haven’t released any new data since that which we used in last year’s report, giving us 14 million Monthly Active Users in the UK, from a global MAU figure of 300 million. The global figure was updated in December 2016 to an impressive 600 million, but it would basically be a total guess as to whether the UK’s growth has kept pace with the global growth.

It’s hard to tell at this point whether Instagram is continuing to cannibalise Twitter’s market, particularly among the younger demographic – that seemed to be the case in previous years, but the research that we’re referencing here doesn’t really support it.  Which is good from a marketing point of view, because the lack of native “retweet” function and inability to include links in a post, means that driving anything other than general brand awareness is harder work on Instagram!

The We Are Flint survey suggested that 29% of UK adults use Instagram, which would give us a figure around the 19 million mark.  The same report also gives a proportion of 64% of users as being under 30 – but gives the same figure for Twitter, which has generally been considered to be an older demographic thus far. Even more interestingly, Instagram has something of a peak in the higher income brackets (though not as much as Twitter does); 46% of users reported a household income of over £48k per annum.

From a general strategy point of view, Instagram has joined Facebook and Twitter this year in filtering which of your followed accounts’ posts you actually see. That seems a clear pointer that in the not too distant future, you can expect to be paying Instagram for any kind of guaranteed reach at all, in the same way we now have to pay for reach on Facebook.

UK Pinterest Users 2017

We’ve not had anything directly from Pinterest this year on the subject of UK user numbers, so the stats below come from third party research.

All the indications though are that Pinterest’s early period of stellar growth has definitely stalled.  Although Pinterest did tell us that their global MAU figure was up to 150 million in October of 2016, just 5% of the UK population log in to Pinterest on a daily basis.

Interestingly, at some point the Pinterest user demographic has got a LOT younger. In the US, and in the early days of UK use, older (as well as more affluent) users were in the majority. In 2017 however, research from both Statista and We Are Flint suggests that 50%+ of Pinterest users are in the 18-29 age bracket.

The female gender bias has persisted however, with 38% of women who are online reporting that they use Pinterest, whereas only 20% of men say the same thing.

In terms of how people are actually using the site (which should give you some clues as to whether your business will be commercially successful there), here’s a useful summary from Pinterest’s CEO, Ben Silbermann :

Pinterest is more of a personal tool than a social one. People don’t come to see what their friends are doing. (There are lots of other great places out there for that!) Instead, they come to Pinterest to find ideas to try, figure out which ones they love, and learn a little bit about themselves in the process.

UK Twitter Users 2017

Twitter did provide a very minimal status update around the middle of last year, which gave a global MAU figure of 313 million, and 79% of those accounts being outside the US. That would be sufficient to keep them ahead of Instagram in the global rankings, just.

Other independent research gives us figures of 45% of UK Online Adults using Twitter, with 37% of those account holders logging in daily.  Using the ONS figure of 45.9 million for the UK’s online population, that would give us a user base of around 20 million.  That seems plausible, if maybe a little generous, compared to the last “official” UK figure of 13 million which was provided in 2013.

The same research reports a surprisingly young demographic, too: 64% of users are 18-29, 57% 30-49, and 33% 50-61.  The more affluent citizens are also over-represented on Twitter, with 62% in the 48K+ household income bracket – bearing in mind that the median UK household income this year was just over £26k.

If you’re interested in how people are actually using Twitter, there’s a really good, and up to date, report here from the BBC.  From that we learn that a relatively small number of highly active users dominate in terms of posting content – 1% of accounts are responsible for 20% of all tweets, and 85% of all tweets are accounted for by just 15% of total accounts.

The number of actual tweets sent each day has remained almost constant since 2013, despite increases in monthly active users. So, if you’re planning a campaign on Twitter, be aware that there are a *lot* of users out there who read but never post!

So there we have it: the social media landscape for the UK in 2017. As ever, we hope it’ll help you plan your strategy – and if you need some help figuring out what you should be using and how, get in touch!

Credits

https://weareflint.co.uk/uk-social-media-demographics-2016

www.statista.com

www.social-media-co.uk

It’s that time again! Welcome to our fifth (yikes!) annual roundup of all the stats we can find for you, on specifically UK-based use of social media as we go into 2016. As we work mainly with UK businesses and third sector organisations, the commentary here will once again be mainly focusing on the implications for them.

We’ve also thrown in a few other interesting titbits regarding trends in social media use in the United Kingdom, and our own thoughts about where things are heading.

UK Social Media in 2016

We opened last year’s stats post by talking about how social media is now mainstream amongst UK businesses; what we see now is that the majority of businesses are engaging with social media in some form, and consider it to be a long term part of their marketing mix. Having said that, in certain sectors there’s a huge lack of proper integration of social media to the business as a whole, and limited value on offer to the consumer.

From a consumer point of view, there’s increasing discrimination about the rewards of engaging with businesses on social media. The novelty factor has long since worn off, and in many ways it’s harder than ever to satisfy increasingly savvy audiences.

Before we go any further, here’s a very informative chart from some recent research by Statista, showing the reasons why consumers follow businesses on Facebook or Twitter. It’d be very interesting to have answers to the same question for LinkedIn and Instagram, but business marketers should note that the proportion stating “I just like their content” is pretty small; on the whole, the “what’s in it for me” topics (giveaways, news updates, a strong personal interest in the product or service) dominate.

Leading reasons for interacting with companies on social media platforms in the United Kingdom (UK) in 2015, by network:

So, below is what we know in detail about the statistics for individual sites. Wwe’ve included a Monthly Active Users (MAU) figure in some places; where it’s available, this is a more helpful figure than the “Users / Accounts” statistic, particularly for sites which are in a mature phase of development, ie largely at saturation point in terms of user accounts, but with changes in activity levels within that account base.

MAU does exactly what it says on the tin; shows you how many people actually logged in and were active on the site, rather than how many people have accounts. Consider how unlikely people are to actually delete their Facebook account, despite (for example) having moved most of their social media activity to Instagram, and you can see the importance of the MAU figure over the Accounts number.

UK Facebook statistics 2016

On the whole, there’s very little to see here. We’ve seen nothing to suggest that user numbers aren’t remaining steady at around the 30 million mark; sites which give higher figures are generally basing them on projections against past growth.

So, there’s not much happening in terms of increasing the UK user base. This is where MAU figures, ideally broken down by demographic bands, would really tell us the whole story. Because the population shifts all the time…so if there’s very little increase in the overall user figure, something must be happening within that. Younger people aren’t bothering to register? Or they are, but sufficient others are leaving the site to cover up the number. We just don’t really know.

In November, we were given a MAU figure for Facebook of 1.5 billion globally – but again, ongoing huge increases in use in places like India could potentially be covering a drop in usage in the more established markets (US and UK).

However, as we said last year, Facebook’s status as by far the #1 social media platform globally remains unchallenged, and B2C businesses ignore it at their peril.

From a marketer’s perspective,  Facebook’s monetisation strategy is now fully established. Or to put it another way, the average business has to commit to paid promotion in order to exploit Facebook as a marketing channel, as organic post views continue to fall.  That also makes it more important than ever that your organisation’s audience recruitment strategy is carefully thought out and only attracts genuine potential customers – otherwise you’ll be paying to market to those non-prospects for as long as they (and you) are on Facebook.

Facebook’s advertising offering continues to get more and more sophisticated, with the recent introduction of video and carousel ads to the UK, along with excellent tracking facilities, provided your website is set up to allow you to take advantage of them. Taken together, the reduction in organic reach and increasing paid for options predict an increasing emphasis on smart use of advertising rather than winning timeline space by providing amazing content – although quality content is still just as important for creating long term consumer relationships.

UK Instagram Statistics 2016

In celebration of Instagram providing us with UK specific user stats for the first time ever, we’ve promoted them to the second site on our rundown!

In July, they announced a figure of 14 million Monthly Active users for the UK.  To try and give that some context, we are also being told that the global MAU figure is 300 million, vs Facebook’s 1.5 billion. So still not a challenger for the top spot, but definitely a challenger to Twitter – of which, more below.

There’s one research study reported which gives some limited demographic breakdown on UK Instagram users, although we’re put off by the “Instagram has overtaken Facebook as the most used network” headline (it hasn’t; the data doesn’t support that, just a 7% drop in Facebook’s use vs a 14% increase in Instagram’s. If they started from the same number then that would be correct, but they REALLY don’t – see the MAU figures above for the size of the gap!). Anyway assuming the rest of the data has been accurately reported, we learn the following:

• Instagram has a much younger audience, 39% of its UK users are aged 16-24.
• Facebook’s 16-24 demographic are just 16% of UK users.
• 64% of Instagram users are female vs 56% of Facebook users.

There’s also evidence that Instagram will benefit commercially from being able to piggyback on the sophisticated advertising solutions already being run by its parent company Facebook, which will generate additional resources to improve the offering and continue to drive growth.

UK Twitter statistics 2016

Once again, Twitter are suspiciously quiet on user numbers. The last official UK figure we had from them was at the end of 2013 – 15 million.

A research study conducted by We Are Social in the UK in early 2015 gives us the table below. This suggests a figure of 12.4 million based on a 19% proportion of the UK’s 65million population – assuming that the sample interviewed were representative.

Aside: Two other interesting things about the above chart: the Instagram figure would equate to 5.2 million, vs the 14-odd million given by Instagram just 6 months later. And secondly, how far ahead Facebook Messenger still is above Snapchat, despite a lot of talk about the latter!

Anyway, assuming we believe that data, then Twitter appears to be the latest victim of static (or slightly declining) user numbers in the UK. It seems plausible that Twitter is the most likely victim of Instagram’s success; the way Twitter is typically used (relatively anonymous, networks developed by interest rather than “real world” links, etc) is closer to Instagram than Instagram is to Facebook, and Instagram’s user interface and glossy filters is perhaps more seductive than Twitter – especially to a younger audience.

From a marketing perspective, Instagram remains more challenging than Twitter for many businesses. Not all are lucky enough to be working in a sector that provides lots of attractive visuals, and the lack of a curation feature (essentially, you can’t easily “re tweet”) on Instagram removes an avenue for content which is often successful on Twitter.

Plus, as of right now, the lack of support for multiple Instagram accounts within the app remains a pain in the backside! Despite all of that, the Twitter / Instagram battle is going to be worth keeping an eye on this year.

 UK Pinterest Statistics 2016

2015 was the year that Pinterest appointed a UK specific country manager, and while being a little coy about the exact numbers, it claims to have doubled its UK user base in 2015.

A ComScore report quoted here suggests a Monthly Active User figure of around 10.4 million, which again is more than enough to establish Pinterest as part of the UK Major League of social media sites!

A couple of other useful titbits from Pinterest’s co founder regarding the UK Pinterest audience:

DIY and Recipes are the top topics for UK Pinterest users, with 52% and 46% having searched for those subjects respectively.

We’re told that the top reasons for users curating their own boards are 37% planning home decorations, 17% a holiday and 14% a wedding.

In a strong contender for Most “errrr, whaat?!” Facts of 2015, Pinterest recently published a blog article in which they state that the top searches in the UK are “… Pork pie, Broken-glass nails, Alternative Christmas trees, Dr Who crafts, Toad in the hole, James Bond, Meat-free Mondays, Alexa Chung haircut, Men’s undercuts and Lancashire hotpot.”. Right, then.

Where’s Pinterest headed this year? Well, they continue to stress the strong links between Pinterest and user engagement – for example here, 70% of users going on to act in some way on the content they find.  Buyable Pins are a recent arrival in the US, and we’d expect to see them arriving for UK users this year, continuing Pinterest’s move towards uber-online-shopping-directory.

 UK LinkedIn statistics 2016

Once again, LinkedIn are our shining stars for ongoing transparency, user wise! LinkedIn’s own permanent, and regularly updated, press page includes a current figure of 19 million UK users, showing steady growth from last year’s 15 million. And two years previously the number was 10 million, so the growth is only accelerating. Ah, the joys of companies who provide standard, trackable, easy to find stats!

The clear and ongoing growth is reflected by the demand we’re seeing for LinkedIn training, too.  More and more organisations are recognising the need to have (at least!) a constructive, useful presence on LinkedIn for the company and its key staff, and many are exploiting it well for lead generation and / or a core communications platform to staff, customers and prospects.

We still think that LinkedIn has a very, very long way to go to match the “stickiness” of other social media sites; in an unrepresentative survey, 100% of our LinkedIn trainees in 2015 answered “er, NO” to the question “do you ever wake up in the morning and think “ooh, I must check LinkedIn!””. In that respect, LinkedIn is almost not a social media site at all; the impulses that drive users to be there are more about career hygiene factors and basic usefulness (essentially, being the biggest online directory of other professionals ever, for free…) than about interest or enjoyment. And maybe that will continue to be enough, but it would be interesting to see a genuine “social” side take off!

So that’s it: the state of play for social media in the UK as we enter 2016. We hope it’ll be helpful to you in planning your strategy for this year.

Disclaimer: we’re neither academics nor statisticians, and although we do our best for accuracy we’re reliant on publicly available sources. So while we admire the chutzpah of more than one student who called us up in 2015 requesting evidence of our academic qualifications “So that I can quote your article in my thesis“, all we can say to these people is – do your own research, mate. You have more time on your hands than we do

But if that number suddenly goes down rather than up, how concerned should you be?

Is it a disaster to lose followers or likers?

As with so many things in social media, “it depends“. And the main thing it depends on is what industry sector you’re in, and the type of relationship your business will typically have with a customer. This is often overlooked when businesses set their social media strategy, and particularly when looking at performance metrics, but it’s absolutely fundamental to how you can expect your audience to develop. To explain:

The relationship lifecycle – and why it matters

“Customer journey” is a term that was red hot in marketing, and particularly in Public Sector modernisation projects, a few years ago. Maybe not so much these days, but it’s a really good concept to understand, and it’s very straight forward. It just means thinking about how and when your customers’ relationship with you is developed, from the first time they become aware of you to the point where they hand over cold hard cash, and beyond. How do they find out about you? When do you first hear from them? What contact do you have with them after that? What happens after they buy?

The key thing I want to consider here is the “What happens after they buy” part.

Why? Because some businesses can reasonably hope to have a relationship with their customers which will last a lifetime, or close to:  examples might include supermarkets and  leisure facilities. There are others which, while not quite in the “lifetime” category, should be able to expect repeat custom if they do a good job: clothing retailers, holiday resorts, photographers, car dealers.

At the other end of the spectrum, there are some businesses where, once a customer has bought your product or service, it’s extremely or relatively unlikely that they’re going to buy from you again. Driving instructors are a great example of this. For many people, wedding services providers are another.

If you’re in the kind of sector where this is the case, it’s far from all bad news, though; those products and services are often associated with intense interest in the topic, if only for a relatively short space of time, and your clients are often great passionate advocates.

Brides-to-be are probably the biggest stereotype for going through a phase of talking about little else on social media, but most sixth formers also know who everyone else’s driving instructor is; and for the period that they’re involved, they have a big appetite for both consuming content related to the subject, and discussing it with others.

Having said that, that phase will pass. Maybe not immediately; newlyweds probably retain an interest in “how everyone else is doing it” for perhaps 6-12 months after the event, but eventually they are going to move on. And at that point, they are unlikely to want to go on receiving content from you, and will very likely unfollow. This is no reflection at all on the quality of your social media presence, it’s just a fact of life, and one that you need to allow for when you’re analysing your statistics.

Bear in mind, too, that you may get a false “surge” in unfollowers for the same reason: you began recruiting your social media audience at a point in time, and depending on which techniques you use to build that audience, they may all be at a very similar stage in their journey. Which means many of them may hit the point of disinterest simultaneously, giving you a spike in unfollowers which can be very worrying but is actually totally explicable!

When you SHOULD worry about losing followers

Most businesses are going to fall somewhere in between the driving instructor and the supermarket. A customer might change car brands for many reasons, or stop using a particular holiday resort or travel company because they now have several small children and are looking for something catering specifically to that. So it’s reasonable to assume that even if your social media presence is fantastic, your followers will fluctuate over time, and even more so if you recruited a large proportion of them together via a particular method.

But there certainly are times when a drop in followers is a warning flag. Some of those are:

– Over a reasonable period (6 months or more) you are losing a significant number of followers, or you are losing more than you are gaining.

– You see a sharp peak in Unfollowers after a change of approach – a new content strategy, tone, or much more frequent posting, for example.

– The losses are from a particular demographic that you want to target. You won’t always know this, but a periodic review of your Facebook Insights will flag up any major change in demographic, and this can be seen on LinkedIn analytics also.

If you’re seeing any of the above, it might be time for a review of what you’ve been posting, how often, and / or  how you’re recruiting new followers.