Recent research released by the Pew Research Center has revealed the latest behavior and preferences favored by the billions of people who use social media platforms on a daily basis. Aside from your SEO marketing strategies, your social media marketing may just be your best weapon for driving traffic and making those conversions. Staying abreast of trends and behavior patterns is important to your overall marketing strategies because it allows you to adapt and tweek for maximum effectiveness. So, what’s going on right now out in social media land?
- While everyone tends to assume that Facebook is the dominant social media platform, it actually ranks second overall in traffic to YouTube. Around 75% of all American adults are out at YouTube at least once a day. Over 300 hours of video is uploaded every minute to YouTube with 95% of the world’s world wide web users watching over a billion hours of video everyday. YouTube reaches 95% of the world’s population because its videos can be watched in 76 languages. While YouTube is dominated by the 18-24 year olds with 99.4% of them out there, even the 60 plus crowd is there with 40% of them using YouTube everyday.
- Facebook demographics pretty much encompass everyone as 60% of all USA adults are out there at least several times a day. It is why most marketers, especially small business marketers, are heavily invested with content out at Facebook. While YouTube and Facebook dominate the social platforms in terms of user numbers, American users are found to engage with at least three of the eight major social media platforms everyday with the 18-29’s using at least four of them on a regular basis.
- The fastest growing social media platform continues to be Instagram. Though most of its demographic is heavily female, its popularity continues to grow steadily. If your products and/or services are looking to capture a huge female following, you need to be out at Instagram. You will also need to check out Pinterest as, it too, has a heavily female audience. Most Instagram and Pinterest users, as well as Snapchat and Twitter users, are out there several times a day as they are with Facebook.
- Finally, the more educated and affluent are more likely to use social media platforms, those living in urban areas are heavier users than those in the suburbs, and LinkedIn is dominated by college graduates and a more affluent and rich demographic. If you are looking for a long term marketing ROI, you really can’t do a whole lot better than social media. You just have to know who you are looking to target and where they tend to hang out.
-Written by Kevin Sawyer
