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.

What is Influencer Marketing?

Firstly, the basics. In simple terms, “Influencer marketing” means “finding someone who your target customers pay close attention to, and inducing them to talk about your product or service to that group”.

The way that a business does that might be entirely organic – for example, by providing the influencer with amazing service – but is more usually either by providing them with a covetable freebie  in return for a review, or simply paying them to discuss something specific.

In both of the latter cases, the influencer should disclose that they’re benefitting from the arrangement, although not all of them do.

Can smaller businesses get involved in Influencer Marketing?

At one point, this meant contacting “offline” celebrities and negotiating with them for exposure, and tended to be more the preserve of larger businesses. But since the rise of social media, and particularly Instagram, influencer marketing has become much more accessible to smaller brands.

That’s for a few reasons, but mainly because the pool of “celebrities” has become much larger and more diverse. Instagram has allowed many “ordinary people” who have knowledge and enthusiasm for particular business sectors, to develop large and active followings.  We call these people “micro-influencers”.

So while you might not be able to afford a Kardashian’s fee for promoting your new range of swimwear, there may be a handful of Instagrammers who are realistically accessible to you – and may prove to be more, er, actually influential.

Why are Micro-Influencers different?

Firstly, and most obviously, they tend to have a much smaller number of followers.

You might even be talking about closer to 1,000 followers on Instagram than 100,000.

They’re often more focused in terms of what they post about (for example, skincare for teenagers with acne, or fashion for over 40s) which naturally reduces the pool of potential followers for them – this might be chicken or egg with the follower numbers!

So why might engaging a Micro-Influencer be a better option for a business?

Well, to start with, they’ve already narrowed down their audience – meaning that if they’re a fit for your brand, it’ll be a much stronger fit. So continuing the example of the Over 40s Fashion influencer,  if you’re marketing classic, modest swimwear then their smaller and more focused audience is a bonus for you: it just means you’re not paying for exposure to teenagers who’ll never buy your product.

The smaller size of a micro-influencer’s community also means they tend to be a lot more accessible to, and engaged with, their followers. Plenty of accounts start out by responding to comments and requests for advice from their followers, but as they grow, that often dries up.  So in fact, a huge name in beauty blogging is less likely to achieve a single effective recommendation of your mascara, than someone who has a smaller community.

In fact, the drop-off in engagement levels as an account’s following increases is really pronounced. Have a look at this graphic from Takumi.com:

Of course, regardless of the number of followers, they still need to be highly knowledgeable and respected by those followers.

And finally, Micro Influencers are more accessible to you as a smaller business.  Someone who doesn’t consider themselves a social media superstar is much more likely to be receptive to gifts or review requests, because they probably receive far fewer of them!

What types of business benefit most?

For this to work for your business, you need there to be an active and engaged community around your niche on Instagram. If there isn’t a suitable community, there won’t be micro influencers.

We don’t want to generalise too broadly, but the kinds of niches where Instagram communities exist tend to be those which are discretionary purchases (so a new lipstick rather than a new fridge), often with an element of luxury; lack of transparency in brands’ “traditional” marketing is also a flag for this, as it leaves consumers craving personal recommendations with a higher level of trust. The Beauty sector is an obvious example of this.

Another study by Experticity found that the categories most recommended by micro-influencers are:

• Sporting and outdoor gear
• Fashion and footwear
• Fitness, nutrition and wellness
• Beauty

How do you evaluate a micro-influencer?

So, you’ve identified some accounts who are creating content that’s highly attractive to your niche audience, have a reasonable number of followers, and appear to get some engagement from their followers (ie, most of their posts get Likes and comments).  Before you decide to invest in working with them, there are a couple of other things to watch out for.

Firstly, do a quick sense check of those followers. Click through to some of the followers’ biographies and posting grids; do they look like real people? Buying followers is rife on Instagram and it’s easy for the unwary to be fooled by a fraudent account.

On a related note, look at some of the comments being left on their content. Seeing a large number which are incongruous, inappropriate, or repetitive, may also suggest that the account owner has paid for that activity. (Side note: even the best Instagrammers are afflicted by other users making use of bots to get their attention, so the odd follower who posts “Wow, amazing!” on every post shouldn’t be taken as a black mark – provided the genuine engagement is there too).

Then, look at how the Instagrammer engages. Is the conversation more than superficial? Do they answer questions properly and maybe provide recommendations or advice? Those are your Influencer gold!

And finally, watch out for the “sellout” Influencers. These users may have started out creating content around products that they personally love, but as their following grew, they got sent more and more freebies, until their feed just becomes a litany of random products with no quality opinion, just a parroting of what the manufacturer says. These accounts may have some use but they’re not going to be read as avidly, or be percieved as so trustworthy, as a genuinely passionate user. And while we’re on that subject, you also need to be prepared for the fact that the influencer *may* criticise some aspects of your product or service.  Remember, trust and honesty are their major assets, and are why you wanted to work with them in the first place. So if they don’t like your product that much, they should explain why (and hopefully, who it might be suitable for). But ultimately, you have to accept their opinion.

So, hopefully that has given you a start in understanding Micro Influencers – now, you just need to find that community!

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).

What is the LinkedIn Insight Tag?

If you’re familiar with Facebook marketing, it’s the Facebook Pixel but for Business to Business marketers. If you’re not: it’s a small snippet of code that you add to your website, which sends a message to LinkedIn whenever one of LinkedIn’s members visits your website. The code looks something like this:

Why do I need a LinkedIn Insight Tag?

Look pretty dull, huh? Well, it’s marketing dynamite. You need that little piece of code because when that LinkedIn member (let’s call her Helen) visits your site, and the Insight Tag lets LinkedIn know about it, Helen is added to a special list. That list is only available to your business, and it will allow you to target adverts directly at Helen, and anyone else who’s visited your site.

This has a ton of advantages, but the biggest ones are 1) you can personalise that ad copy to reference the fact that Helen has visited your site, and even personalise it according to which part of your site she viewed; and 2) you are targeting your ads at a very warm audience (ie, people who are sufficiently interested to have previously visited your site), which means you can afford to spend a little more on them.

And it gets better…

If you’re familiar with the Facebook Pixel, you’ll know that it has been allowing marketers to do that exact same thing for quite a while now. So why is the Insight Tag better? Here’s why.

Imagine that pool of Helens, the people who have visited your website, or maybe just one page about a particular product or service, in the last few months.

Now within that pool, there will be lots of people who aren’t going to be great prospects for you. That could be for lots of reasons, but just a few examples: You have a service that has to be delivered in person, such as consultancy. If your company is in the UK and the website visitor is in, say, Australia – there’s little point in marketing to them. Or, you have a big ticket product that needs buy in from all of the senior team within an organisation, but the person who just visited your site is still a student or a job hunter. They might have been interested in your product for all kinds of reasons, but those reasons wouldn’t include “because they might buy it”.

NOW, this is where the LinkedIn Insight Tag gets more brilliant.  You can filter your pool of Helens so that your adverts are only shown to those within the pool who are in the right geographic location for you, or are sufficiently senior, or are working in a particular sector.

The only tiny “gotcha” around this is that you must have a potential target audience of at least 300 LinkedIn members before your campaign will run, so you have to bear that in mind when setting up your criteria. Having said that, if you set everything up and actually launch the campaign, LinkedIn will start running it when that 300 person threshold is reached – because remember, your initial pool of website visitor is being added to every day. Which brings us to:

Why you need to set up the Insight Tag ASAP

Even if you aren’t planning to do any LinkedIn advertising in the very near future, setting up the Insight Tag sooner rather than later means that that pool of potential advertising targets is starting to fill up, and will be available to you when you do want to. If you wait until the day before you want to run a campaign and then install your Tag, you may (depending on the level of traffic your website gets) be waiting a fair while before the advert starts to get shown.

And one last thing…a cure for the LinkedIn Lurgy

The LinkedIn Lurgy is what we call the nasty surprise that’s waiting for B2B marketers in some sectors, when they try to use  LinkedIn to reach their target audience.  There’s a dirty little secret hidden in LinkedIn’s user figures: a very large proportion of its registered users log in very, very infrequently.  Take a look at the second graph in our UK Social Media Stats for 2016 article.  Whilst around 80% of Facebook’s users log in every single day, that same figure for LinkedIn may be closer to 10%.  Which makes sense, when you think about it; LinkedIn just isn’t such a fun place to be, and for many people, it will sit dormant unless they are actively job hunting.

There are certain sectors and job roles where users are very active – particularly those that involve selling a product or service to other businesses, strangely enough – and professionals in those categories may well use LinkedIn very regularly. So if you are marketing to them, no problem.

If not, how do you use LinkedIn to market to someone who isn’t there? Until now, you didn’t.

But.

A further option within the LinkedIn ad creation progress is to enable something called the LinkedIn Audience Network.  Essentially, that is a set of apps and website where LinkedIn owns, or is leasing, advertising space. Which means that you can use your Insight Tag, plus criteria filtering, to target your perfect prospect – and then market to him or her even if they never actually visit LinkedIn.

LinkedIn says that all the apps and sites in its Audience Network are “Brand Safe” – that is, not adult or otherwise inappropriate for professional content – but as you can see, you can also exclude certain categories if you want to have closer control over where your content appears.

So, there you have it. If you’re a B2B business, you need to get down and cosy with the LinkedIn Insight Tag pronto, and start filling up that lovely pool of warm prospects.

If you’re creating Facebook content which includes a link, and suddenly find that the options to edit the automatically generated preview (the image, title, and description that comes with it) have gone away, you’re not alone. A Facebook “update” which removes this functionality is due to come into force today, 17th July.

What is Facebook Link Preview modification?

When you include a web URL in a Facebook post, the Link Preview is the box that comes up below it showing you how the link will be represented in your final post.  By default, it pulls the content that populates this from the metadata of the originating website.

So, the auto-generated information may or may not be a) attractive or b) accurate, depending on how the site you’re linking to is coded.

Previously, you could click into each of the various areas of the Link Preview and manually edit them to be something more informative.

So, a Link Preview might start off like this:

But you want to tailor that title, description and image to the particular audience you’re addressing, or to highlight one aspect of the article you’re linking to. So your edited version might look like this:

Leading to a published post which looks like this:

Once this function is deprecated (deleted, basically!) by Facebook, you’ll no longer be able to do this.

What we’re seeing as of today is that you can still click into the various areas and edit them, but when you Publish the post, they revert to the metadata. No clues, no error message, not very helpful –  and there will probably be a lot of frustrated social media managers out there today!

Why are Facebook making this change?

According to their own statement, it’s to cut down on misleading previews being posted. So presumably, spammers are creating links to inappropriate or other commercial sites and then editing the link options to make it look as though the link goes to an article very different from the actual content.

It’s a shame that they can’t deal with this issue some other way – for example, allowing people to report misleading posts individually and then banning the creators – but maybe that’s just too resource intensive. Anyway, for now the spammy users are spoiling things for everyone else!

How can I get around it?

If your own website, or the site you’re posting a link to, doesn’t have metadata which is appropriate for creating an attractive auto-preview, there should be a workaround – but it’s likely to involve giving up some of the benefits of the Link Preview function.

This MAY change at the same time as the Link Preview function is altered, but currently, if you upload images to your post PRIOR to pasting in the URL you want to use, Facebook won’t initiate the Link Preview function at all but will just leave your link as a basic, but clickable, text link.  That may be the best way for most users to control this for now; you won’t get as attractive a result as you would with the old function, but at least you won’t have a bunch of messy or irrelevant metadata  getting pulled into your post every time.

It’s also possible that some third party social media tools will create their own workarounds for this in due course, as Facebook’s announcement linked above suggests that the door may be left open for this. As of now, it appears that Hootsuite at least aren’t implementing any alternative . Please feel free to leave a comment if you have a better workaround or have spotted a third party tool which has a better solution!

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 the first mainstream example of integrating the “real world” with a highly addictive game; Google Map-derived location technology is incorporated into your game experience, so that you have to physically be in a location in order to interaction with the parallel game-world version of that place.

So, getting out of the house and moving around is a key part of the game experience.

Permanent connectivity comes of age

The game itself may or may not stand the test of time, but it does seem likely that this kind of Virtual Reality online / real world integration is just the start. Now that few of us ever leave the house without our smartphones, and decent strength data connections are widely available, there’s enormous potential available to marketers doing a little lateral thinking.  So, this post is going to take a look at how businesses can exploit these principles for marketing purposes.

What we’re going to look at here are two different approaches: some clever ways of “piggybacking” on the popularity of Pokemon Go, and some broader thoughts about the basics of integrating your online presence with the “real world”.

This is particularly valuable for any business that has a passing trade element – where, if a consumer is within a small radius, it’s possible to significantly increase the chances of them making a purchase.

Luring the Pokemon Go consumer

Firstly, let’s consider a few more or less ingenious ways that marketers have used the Pokemon Go craze to their advantage.

The story of the Muncie Animal Shelter’s appeal to its dog walkers has been somewhat over exaggerated online, but the story is still based on facts.  The shelter created some clever marketing,  pointing out that combining walking their shelter dogs with hunting Pokemon was a win win for everyone.

Here’s their original social media post; you can see for yourself by the Share and reaction figures how incredibly successful it was, as the combination of cute dogs and Pokemon took Facebook by storm.

A second example, shared by @ohjefframos on Twitter, may be slightly more tongue in cheek, but exploits the same idea: you need to move around, we need people moving around, why not join us?!

Both of these are entertaining (but highly effective, at least for the animal shelter) examples of looking for overlap between the behaviours that the game encourages, and behaviours that are beneficial to the organisation concerned.

As a more straightforward approach, the game also allows any player to purchase Lures, which for a given period of time will attract any Pokemon in the local area. Any number of players can catch the same critter, so there’s an obvious use of this for bars, coffee shops, restaurants – anywhere where encouraging a consumer to hang out there for a while will likely result in a purchase.

So, the business buys some Lure modules, advertises the fact with boards in the nearby area, and waits. There’s a nice case study of a Pizzeria in Queens achieving a 30% increase in sales, based on $10-worth of Lure purchases, here. Of course, you do need to be in a built up area, ideally a decent sized town or city, for this to work well. But it’s open to anyone using Pokemon Go on their phones, and as a cheap and smart marketing option for retail and food businesses in cities, it’s surely worth a try!

Bringing the Online World offline: other things to try

The whole power of  Pokemon Go is that it integrates the online and offline worlds.  This is something that we talk to businesses we work with about all the time, and it’s still under utilised.

Here are just a couple of ways that you can help consumers to make that link. They may not be quite as sexy as Pokemon Go, but they can be just as effective.

Tell ’em about it!

We’ve lost count of the number of high street type businesses we’ve seen who have a great social media presence – a thriving Facebook page, chatty Twitter feed or inspirational Instagram account – but when you visit their actual premises, the place where the money changes hands, there’s no sign of it.

At the very least, put up some posters. Better still, offer an incentive at a time when consumers are fiddling with their phones anyway – “We’ll give you 50p off of your pizza if you’ve Liked our Facebook page before you get to the cash register”. Even better,  put some cards around inviting happy customers to post a photo or review while they’re there, for a voucher or discount.  With a little Muncie-style lateral thinking, there will be ways of exploiting online social media from within your premises, which will be unique to you and hugely effective.

Lure ’em in

Your retail or food business is registered with Google Maps, right? Good. You’ve got some great reviews? Even better. Now, start sweating those assets as a Lure to draw in passing traffic.

We all have far too many decisions to make each day, and many people will keep going back to their lunch or tea break favourites rather than “risking” trying somewhere new. Or they’re visiting your town for the day, and have to choose between a familiar, predictable chain option and your business.

Here’s one way to make that choice a little easier for them. Put a poster in the window, or a sandwich board on the pavement, inviting passers by to check out your reviews before choosing where they have their lunch or tea break. It’s simple, and they don’t have to take your word for it that you’re serving the best Flat White in town!

Now, put your brainstorming hat on, and start thinking about how you can exploit the Pokemon fad – and use the same principles to skyrocket the value of your social media assets, too.[/fusion_text] ]]> http://www.rosemcgrory.co.uk/2016/07/25/marketing-lessons-pokemon/feed/ 0 http://www.rosemcgrory.co.uk/2016/03/23/twitter-advertising-business/ http://www.rosemcgrory.co.uk/2016/03/23/twitter-advertising-business/#comments Wed, 23 Mar 2016 15:14:10 +0000 http://www.rosemcgrory.co.uk/?p=3614

Can you get clear results from Twitter advertising if you’re a small business? You certainly can, but that’s not to say you definitely will. We’ve been working with Twitter advertising for a while now, and have recently had a particularly successful campaign for one of our outsourced social media management clients.

Here’s a short case study to share with you what worked, why, and what kind of results you can achieve.

The twitter ad campaign basics

The campaign was run for one of our longstanding clients, Urban Front Doors. Urban Front make gorgeous, contemporary hardwood external and internal doors like the ones in the header for this post – the kind of thing you see on Grand Designs (and often do, actually!).

Their designs are generally bought by architects and interior designers, obviously in consultation with their own clients, high end developers, and direct by clients who are project managing their own self build or refurbishment.

We have spent a long time building up a very targeted audience on Twitter – this is what we get from an analysis of the accounts who follow them, and it’s exactly what they’d want it to be:

We have run campaigns for them a few times previously, which has enabled us to build up a good understanding of what targeting is effective.

Earlier this year, they had a lovely promotional video created, which emphasised their core USPs of British manufacture and good craftsmanship. We thought this would be a good opportunity to try out a video based ad campaign on Twitter.

Setting up the campaign

In order to run a video ad, you have to upload the complete file directly to Twitter – you can’t just point it at a Vimeo link, for example. Once the file is available in the Videos

section of the Twitter advertising platform, you are able to customise the accompanying title and text, the “cover” image (what people will see until they play the video), and a relevant URL.

We decided to create a custom cover graphic featuring the #doorcouture hashtag that captures their product positioning perfectly.

The video will play “natively” within users’ timelines, without having to load an outside site – hence having to load the entire file to Twitter initially.

In terms of targeting, this was a mix of existing followers and similar users, with users who follow some other carefully chosen Twitter accounts. We’ve found this feature to be often very effective in “pre-segmenting” people who are very likely to be interested in the product. We also have a fair amount of data on exact click-through rates of followers of each account from previous campaigns, allowing us to prioritise those most likely to engage with the advert.

The campaign ran for just under a week – a Sunday afternoon through to Friday evening, to capture both professional and personal user traffic.

The results:

The campaign delivered just under 171,000 impressions; 2,089 views of the video, and almost a thousand clicks through to the website.

The total spend was just £250.

In addition, they gained around 200 additional followers during the week – a normal week might see around 10-15, so we can reasonably attribute most of those to the campaign.

We think that is a pretty good result, and the client agrees. It’s hard to imagine how else you could achieve that level of interest from targeted potential customers with such a small spend.

Quick takeaways

A few takeaways on the key things that contributed to this campaign being such a success:

• Build up the right follower base to start with. There was no follower buying, and no high volume following to get the numbers up done on this account. Their follower numbers aren’t huge – just over a thousand – but they ARE targeted, and particularly for a relatively niche, premium item, this is a much better approach. When we then came to target that base in an ad campaign, it pays off all over again.
• Fine tune targeting using data from previous campaigns. This level of effectiveness didn’t just come out of a first time shot in the dark. Having, and making use of, engagement data from past campaigns really helped.
• Consider every aspect of the copy and images – including the cover image for video. Working with some great content – in this case the video – obviously provides a big head start. But just leaving the default cover image means you lose an opportunity to get a key message across, and it’s just as important to copywrite the title and accompanying text well enough to tempt users into playing the video.

If you’re thinking about using Twitter’s paid ad platform, our advice would be a) experiment and b) track and analyse your data thoughtfully. You could end up with the best cost to exposure ratio you’ll ever get.

As well as being relevant for your personal use, this is something that organisations would benefit from explaining to their Facebook followers, too. Your Likers are there because they want to hear from you, so provided you are posting valuable content, and not swamping Likers’ feeds with constant and / or uninteresting posts, it’s reasonable to assume that they’d prefer not to have Facebook filter you out of their feed. So, sending them to this article will help them actually see what you’ve posted.

(If you didn’t realise that Facebook is deciding which posts you get to see? there’s a little more background from a business point of view here).

So, here’s a really quick tip that you can pass on to your Likers, which will ensure that not only do they definitely see your posts, but they’ll see them at the top of their feed.

Getting your whole News Feed – 3 easy steps

Step 1: go to the Facebook Page of the organisation whose content you want to prioritise. We’re using The Daily Mash here.

Step 2: Look for the drop-down icon next to the “Liked” button (you’ve already Liked the page, right?!) as shown by the whopping great arrow below:

Step 3: Click on the icon, and choose “See First” in the menu below:

And that’s it! You should now see posts from that organisation right at the top of your feed whenever you log in to Facebook.

If you change your mind, just repeat the above but this time choose “Default” from the same dropdown.