Tag Archives for " Social Media "

5 Unique Ways to Engage With Your Fans on Social Media

Social media provides you with a unique opportunity to engage with your fans and followers. For most businesses, the amount of face-to-face time you get with your customers in limited, and for some companies that operate entirely online, they never meet their customers in real life.

Engaging with prospects and customers online is a way to showcase your brand’s unique identity and personality and to build the kind of meaningful connection that will lead customers to repeat and refer your business, rather than drifting off to the competition.

But in a crowded online space, what can you do to stand out? It’s time to get creative about your social media engagement. Here are five ways to raise your social profile and engage with fans effectively.

1. Go Live

The results are in: Video is the way that people want to consume their content nowadays. There are mountains of surveys and statistics that show video is a highly effective tool for reaching people and holding their attention.

Lots of marketers are getting in on the video trend, but why not take it a step further and take advantage of live video on your social channels? Live video is great for a number of reasons. Because it’s something that’s happening in real time, you generate excitement around the content—catch it now before it’s over! It also allows you the opportunity to interact with fans in real time. You can give shout-outs to those who are watching, and they can ask questions and leave comments, which you can respond to on the spot.

Some business owners are a little nervous about going live. Having an unscripted conversation on the internet can be intimidating! But when you go in with a plan, it’s easy to make it a success. Hosting a Q&A on a specific topic is a great place to start. This is the kind of video that makes sense in a live format (you’re there to answer questions and engage with viewers), and when you pick a topic within your area of expertise, you don’t have to be worried that you’ll run out of things to say.

Send an email out to your mailing list inviting them to participate, and promote the session on your social channels in advance. Think about having a few friends or colleagues join for the first few sessions, until things really take off, so that you’ll be guaranteed some questions from friendly faces.

2. Create Friendly Competition

Online contests are a great way to generate buzz around your business. Contests allow you the opportunity to get creative and have fun, and that positive energy is contagious.

Take some time to develop a contest that makes sense for your business. If you’re launching a new product, ask fans to submit ideas for the product’s name. A photo or video challenge can work in a variety of scenarios. You might also create a challenge around a national day related to your business. If you own a bakery, run a competition on June 7 in honor of National Donut Day or on Pi(e) Day (March 14, of course!).

These contests work best when you encourage your fans to take an active role. You also want to establish a hashtag for the contest. This not only allows you to track entries, but it also helps to generate interest among those who might not know about your business but keep seeing the hashtag pop up online. They’ll likely click on it to see what it’s all about, and then you’ve grabbed the attention of a new potential fan!

And of course, you want to announce the winners of your challenge, give them a fabulous prize, and share the results and photos of the victors on your social channels.

3. Stage a Social Takeover

Social media is all about building that one-on-one connection, so why not use it as an opportunity to introduce your fans to your team? Arrange a series of social media takeover days, where various members of your team helm one of your social accounts for the day and give followers a behind-the-scenes look at a day in the life at your company.

Not only is this a fun way to get your wider team involved in marketing efforts, it also builds a personal connection between your brand and your fans. It allows your fans to put a face to the company name, and gives them an opportunity to see the level of care and attention your entire team puts into their job. It’s that individualized attention consumers can get from a small business that leads them to pick you over some large national company, so why not help to foster that sense of connection by allowing your team to speak for themselves on your business’s social channels?

4. Get in on Fun Fads

Your website is the place for you to show off your professional side, but social media is an opportunity for you to let your hair down and show you brand’s personality a bit more.

This will of course mean different things for different businesses—a CPA can’t post the same kind of content as a music store. But that doesn’t mean the CPA can’t have a little bit of fun! Who doesn’t need a little levity from their CPA in the throes of tax season?

Incorporating memes, gifs, and emojis is an easy way to show that your business has a more lighthearted side. You might also get in on the latest viral challenge (think mannequin or ice bucket). Of course, whenever you’re dabbling with pop culture references and challenges online, you want to make sure that you fully understand what you’re sharing and that it’s work- and brand-appropriate.

5. Open the Door to a Conversation

When you have someone who’s already engaged with your content, you want to keep them talking. Replying with a “Thanks!” or simply a thumbs up will mean the end of communication. Instead, why not respond by asking a question? That’s a great way to get a back-and-forth going.

Let’s say you own an antiques store. You share a blog post about proper care and maintenance for old wood furniture and one of your followers responds, “Great tips!” Rather than a simple thumbs up, follow up with a question. Ask them about the furniture they’re trying to care for and offer specific tips for the care of that piece.

Not only does this technique allow you to hold onto your follower’s attention for a little longer, it also helps to establish your business as an authority on the subject at hand. The next time that person has a question about an antique, maybe they’ll send you a message on Facebook or stop by your shop rather than typing a search term into Google. They’d much rather get advice from someone they already trust than risk taking the word of a stranger on the internet.

Social Media engagement is the best way to begin to build a personal connection with your prospects and customers. When you create content that showcases your brand’s personality and take the time to respond meaningfully to comments and reactions from your followers, you can help your business stand out in a crowded online field.

How to Use Social Media for Your Marketing Efforts in 2018

Marketing Podcast with John Jantsch About Social Media

I thought I’d drop in and give you my take on where we are with social media. It hasn’t gone away, it hasn’t died out, it has a place, and it’s here to stay, but let’s talk about how to use it in 2018.

It’s kind of funny, but some of the questions that I got when social media was brand new I’m still getting today:

• How do I find time to do it?
• What’s the ROI?
• How do I make it pay?
• Can I sell?

Those are the things that people asked in 2012 and 2013, but those issues haven’t gone away because people still see social media as this disconnected piece of marketing that you have to go figure out and play in.

The one thing that I said in 2012 and I’ll say it today, is that you need a strategy for social media.

Social media is just another channel, it is another part of marketing. So how does it fit into your overall objectives? You may actually end up realizing that you are wasting your time in a lot of what you’re doing with social media because it doesn’t help get your objective of growing your business or getting more clients or the things that we tend to want to do in marketing. I think a lot of people bought into, “I have to be there, I have to be in all these new places or I’ll be left behind.” In some cases, your clients aren’t there and you can’t physically participate and do well there without watering down your other efforts.

Why businesses use social media

Let me ask you this, what’s the main reason you use social media today? My guess is, some of you are going to say, “I don’t really know,” and I think that’s probably the most honest answer. I can tell you that brand awareness and community engagement and content distribution are the biggest reasons that people use social media today. Sales, lead generation, and customer support are not far behind because those are the things that we want to do the most, but I think you have to realize that there’s a place for social media today and you just have to understand where that is.

On the flip side, I read a statistic recently that 46% of consumers made a purchase as a result of watching a brand video on a social network, so it does have the power to help you meet your objectives. I think the thing that has become painfully clear today that maybe wasn’t a few years ago, is that it’s really not about the tools or the platforms. It’s really all about meeting your objectives.

Meeting business objectives with social media

So how could social media meet your business objectives? Well, first you have to outline what those objectives are. Is it to get a certain number of new clients, is it to launch into a new service area? Is it to launch a brand or a new product campaign?

If you think about those as some of your objectives then you could start saying, “Okay, well how could we tie that then to marketing objectives,” because sometimes it’s very difficult to go from launching a new product to how does Twitter help us do that? If you think about some of the marketing objectives, like:

• Increasing awareness
• Driving traffic
• Re-engaging current customers
• Generating leads
• Growing revenue
• Boosting engagement
• Building community
• Social selling

Those are marketing objectives that actually can be accomplished quite nicely through the right use of social media today.

Think for a minute. What would be your top three marketing objectives for 2018? Once you have those, it’s simply a matter of saying, “Okay, how could social media help me do that? Okay, here’s a list of specific tactics that we are going to use in order to have social media do that.”

Let’s say, you want to expand into a new market segment. Well, the strategy for that might be to use social media to discover and build relationships with influencers and so then you could just break that down to a project. Create a list using Twitter lists or using something like BuzzSumo.

Find the influencers, make it a plan to reach out to 10 of them a day about potential partnering. You just break it down into very specific things and just ask yourself again and again, “How can social media help me do that?” You may have noticed by now, I haven’t mentioned a single platform yet. I will actually get to that but I think that this is the element that is missing, that we don’t understand how we’re going to use it and why we’re going to use it so that we can make these proper decisions about when and where. What are some of the tactics or some of the things that you can do in social media based on the stages of the buyer’s journey?

For example, for our stages, I talk about the Marketing Hourglass; know, like, trust, try, buy, repeat, and refer. I’ll even add an eighth step to that. For a lot of companies, social media can be great for hiring as well. Paid social, paid Facebook ads, and paid LinkedIn ads can be a really great way for people to come to know you or know about your content. There’s no question that showing a personal side on a social platform is a way for somebody to kind of identify with or like your brand.

Telling stories in social media is a great way to build trust, which is a step we need. You can make offers for certain types of businesses having a special or a sale or a holiday event as long as you are providing value and engagement in other forms. This is a very legitimate way of using social media. Doing things once somebody buys from you, like creating a Twitter video and just saying, “Hey Bob, we really appreciated working with you.” Or, “Hey Bob, here’s your finished product. We’re shipping out today.” That kind of stuff is a great use of social media to generate repeat business.

Then, there are all kinds of ways that you can use social media. Say, creating a Facebook group of your customers or your champion customers and creating something special or different or unique or custom for them. Then from a hiring standpoint, the greatest thing is most of your employees are on social media so you can use their networks, in some ways, to help recruit and maybe create some sort of formal program. If you think about using social media not as just this megaphone that gives you an audience but for your very specific marketing objectives, business objectives, and then meeting certain intent throughout the customer journey, you can develop a strategy that makes some sense.

How I use social media

I’m going to wrap things up by just talking about a couple things that I’m doing. People, for some reason, like to know what tools I’m using or what platforms I’m using. I will say, for a marketing consulting business like mine today, we are focused primarily on Facebook and Instagram. We certainly participate in LinkedIn, but Facebook and Instagram are the ones that we spend more time because we feel like we can get the best type of engagement. We have limited resources so we want to go deeper in a couple places.

With the days of auto-publishing everything and going out and curating hundreds of posts, and making sure that you’re posting three times a day, Facebook has basically said, “We don’t want that. We don’t think that’s worth very much. If you do that we’re not going to show your content to very many people.”

Really, the approach that we have taken in Facebook is we want to promote on the business page. I have a personal page and a business page and those two both serve a business function for me. The personal page is more on the personal side of John Jantsch, the author, where the business page is meant to be more straight up Duct Tape Marketing stuff. Now, there’s some crossover upon occasion but that’s how we try to split it up. Now, as far as content goes, about 30% of the content is our ongoing content, the content that we’re producing on a daily and weekly basis.

About 25% is curated content from other sources, 25% is straight up business goals so we’ll promote a product, I’ll promote a webinar, I’ll promote something that I’m doing that I want people to take advantage of because they may opt-in. It’s straight up business goals that we’re trying to meet. We will boost or advertise most of the content. Then, we like to look at, say, another 25% is about people, and culture, and personal observation. We round that out with our ongoing content that is on our editorial calendar. A fourth is curated from other sources, a fourth is aimed at meeting our business goals, and about a fourth is just people, culture, goofy stuff. That’s the mix that we like to go with on Facebook right now. Seems to be a good mix to create engagement and to create views, and to create comments. Then, we do put routine or consistent advertising into Facebook as well, primarily as the two categories of our own ongoing content and of the content that supports our business goals.

As far as Instagram goes, Instagram recently introduced a business page type of account. You get some more insights and you get access to the advertising platform. I was on Instagram very, very early on and so I had an account that I just called Duct Tape Marketing. I used it as much as anything as a personal account but it had the Duct Tape brand.

I converted that to a business page and then I created a new page, John Jantsch, that I am sharing my primarily personal rambling of travel pictures and things of that nature and then sticking with promoting things much like we do with our Facebook content on Instagram on the business page. I recommend that you look into creating an Instagram business page if that is a platform for you.

Helpful tools to consider

As far as tools go, I am and have been for many, many years a big fan of Buffer. I think Hootsuite is still a great tool for publishing your content as well. I find myself actually publishing directly on the platforms now. It’s not maybe as efficient but I think you get the most bang for your buck.

Facebook seems to like you to do that, especially if it’s videos or native videos or native photos that you’ve uploaded from your computer. Those seem to get shown more than anything else. Facebook and Twitter actually have some pretty good insights. Now when you go over to the business side on Instagram you’ll actually get some analytics there. Really, from an engagement standpoint, either Buffer or Hootsuite are really great tools to monitor and respond and things of that nature.

That’s kind of my take on where we are in social media. It’s all still about meeting objectives, both business and marketing objectives, and looking at the platforms that really allow you to do that. Again, I think half of these tools that are out there will do most of what you want and so it’s a matter of making a determination about the business objectives and marketing objectives you’re trying to meet. Just set up campaigns, set up tactics that are based on your strategy and you will ultimately win.

Answer this one question if you’re trying to make a decision about social media today: is the use of this tool or this practice or this tactic going to benefit my customers? I think if you can say “yes” to that, then you will always find a return on investment.

Subscribe: Apple Podcasts | Android | RSS

How to Use Social Media in 2018

Marketing Podcast with John Jantsch About Social Media

I thought I’d drop in and give you my take on where we are with social media. It hasn’t gone away, it hasn’t died out, it has a place, and it’s here to stay, but let’s talk about how to use it in 2018.

It’s kind of funny, but some of the questions that I got when social media was brand new I’m still getting today:

• How do I find time to do it?
• What’s the ROI?
• How do I make it pay?
• Can I sell?

Those are the things that people asked in 2012 and 2013, but those issues haven’t gone away because people still see social media as this disconnected piece of marketing that you have to go figure out and play in.

The one thing that I said in 2012 and I’ll say it today, is that you need a strategy for social media.

Social media is just another channel, it is another part of marketing. So how does it fit into your overall objectives? You may actually end up realizing that you are wasting your time in a lot of what you’re doing with social media because it doesn’t help get your objective of growing your business or getting more clients or the things that we tend to want to do in marketing. I think a lot of people bought into, “I have to be there, I have to be in all these new places or I’ll be left behind.” In some cases, your clients aren’t there and you can’t physically participate and do well there without watering down your other efforts.

Why businesses use social media today

Let me ask you this, what’s the main reason you use social media today? My guess is, some of you are going to say, “I don’t really know,” and I think that’s probably the most honest answer. I can tell you that brand awareness and community engagement and content distribution are the biggest reasons that people use social media today. Sales, lead generation, and customer support are not far behind because those are the things that we want to do the most, but I think you have to realize that there’s a place for social media today and you just have to understand where that is.

On the flip side, I read a statistic recently that 46% of consumers made a purchase as a result of watching a brand video on a social network, so it does have the power to help you meet your objectives. I think the thing that has become painfully clear today that maybe wasn’t a few years ago, is that it’s really not about the tools or the platforms. It’s really all about meeting your objectives.

How to meet business objectives with social media

So how could social media meet your business objectives? Well, first you have to outline what those objectives are. Is it to get a certain number of new clients, is it to launch into a new service area? Is it to launch a brand or a new product campaign?

If you think about those as some of your objectives then you could start saying, “Okay, well how could we tie that then to marketing objectives,” because sometimes it’s very difficult to go from launching a new product to how does Twitter help us do that? If you think about some of the marketing objectives, like:

• Increasing awareness
• Driving traffic
• Re-engaging current customers
• Generating leads
• Growing revenue
• Boosting engagement
• Building community
• Social selling

Those are marketing objectives that actually can be accomplished quite nicely through the right use of social media today.

Think for a minute. What would be your top three marketing objectives for 2018? Once you have those, it’s simply a matter of saying, “Okay, how could social media help me do that? Okay, here’s a list of specific tactics that we are going to use in order to have social media do that.”

Let’s say, you want to expand into a new market segment. Well, the strategy for that might be to use social media to discover and build relationships with influencers and so then you could just break that down to a project. Create a list using Twitter lists or using something like BuzzSumo.

Find the influencers, make it a plan to reach out to 10 of them a day about potential partnering. You just break it down into very specific things and just ask yourself again and again, “How can social media help me do that?” You may have noticed by now, I haven’t mentioned a single platform yet. I will actually get to that but I think that this is the element that is missing, that we don’t understand how we’re going to use it and why we’re going to use it so that we can make these proper decisions about when and where. What are some of the tactics or some of the things that you can do in social media based on the stages of the buyer’s journey?

For example, for our stages, I talk about the Marketing Hourglass; know, like, trust, try, buy, repeat, and refer. I’ll even add an eighth step to that. For a lot of companies, social media can be great for hiring as well. Paid social, paid Facebook ads, and paid LinkedIn ads can be a really great way for people to come to know you or know about your content. There’s no question that showing a personal side on a social platform is a way for somebody to kind of identify with or like your brand.

Telling stories in social media is a great way to build trust, which is a step we need. You can make offers for certain types of businesses having a special or a sale or a holiday event as long as you are providing value and engagement in other forms. This is a very legitimate way of using social media. Doing things once somebody buys from you, like creating a Twitter video and just saying, “Hey Bob, we really appreciated working with you.” Or, “Hey Bob, here’s your finished product. We’re shipping out today.” That kind of stuff is a great use of social media to generate repeat business.

Then, there are all kinds of ways that you can use social media. Say, creating a Facebook group of your customers or your champion customers and creating something special or different or unique or custom for them. Then from a hiring standpoint, the greatest thing is most of your employees are on social media so you can use their networks, in some ways, to help recruit and maybe create some sort of formal program. If you think about using social media not as just this megaphone that gives you an audience but for your very specific marketing objectives, business objectives, and then meeting certain intent throughout the customer journey, you can develop a strategy that makes some sense.

How I approach social for my business and myself

I’m going to wrap things up by just talking about a couple things that I’m doing. People, for some reason, like to know what tools I’m using or what platforms I’m using. I will say, for a marketing consulting business like mine today, we are focused primarily on Facebook and Instagram. We certainly participate in LinkedIn, but Facebook and Instagram are the ones that we spend more time because we feel like we can get the best type of engagement. We have limited resources so we want to go deeper in a couple places.

With the days of auto-publishing everything and going out and curating hundreds of posts, and making sure that you’re posting three times a day, Facebook has basically said, “We don’t want that. We don’t think that’s worth very much. If you do that we’re not going to show your content to very many people.”

Really, the approach that we have taken in Facebook is we want to promote on the business page. I have a personal page and a business page and those two both serve a business function for me. The personal page is more on the personal side of John Jantsch, the author, where the business page is meant to be more straight up Duct Tape Marketing stuff. Now, there’s some crossover upon occasion but that’s how we try to split it up. Now, as far as content goes, about 30% of the content is our ongoing content, the content that we’re producing on a daily and weekly basis.

About 25% is curated content from other sources, 25% is straight up business goals so we’ll promote a product, I’ll promote a webinar, I’ll promote something that I’m doing that I want people to take advantage of because they may opt-in. It’s straight up business goals that we’re trying to meet. We will boost or advertise most of the content. Then, we like to look at, say, another 25% is about people, and culture, and personal observation. We round that out with our ongoing content that is on our editorial calendar. A fourth is curated from other sources, a fourth is aimed at meeting our business goals, and about a fourth is just people, culture, goofy stuff. That’s the mix that we like to go with on Facebook right now. Seems to be a good mix to create engagement and to create views, and to create comments. Then, we do put routine or consistent advertising into Facebook as well, primarily as the two categories of our own ongoing content and of the content that supports our business goals.

As far as Instagram goes, Instagram recently introduced a business page type of account. You get some more insights and you get access to the advertising platform. I was on Instagram very, very early on and so I had an account that I just called Duct Tape Marketing. I used it as much as anything as a personal account but it had the Duct Tape brand.

I converted that to a business page and then I created a new page, John Jantsch, that I am sharing my primarily personal rambling of travel pictures and things of that nature and then sticking with promoting things much like we do with our Facebook content on Instagram on the business page. I recommend that you look into creating an Instagram business page if that is a platform for you.

Tool to consider

As far as tools go, I am and have been for many, many years a big fan of Buffer. I think Hootsuite is still a great tool for publishing your content as well. I find myself actually publishing directly on the platforms now. It’s not maybe as efficient but I think you get the most bang for your buck.

Facebook seems to like you to do that, especially if it’s videos or native videos or native photos that you’ve uploaded from your computer. Those seem to get shown more than anything else. Facebook and Twitter actually have some pretty good insights. Now when you go over to the business side on Instagram you’ll actually get some analytics there. Really, from an engagement standpoint, either Buffer or Hootsuite are really great tools to monitor and respond and things of that nature.

That’s kind of my take on where we are in social media. It’s all still about meeting objectives, both business and marketing objectives, and looking at the platforms that really allow you to do that. Again, I think half of these tools that are out there will do most of what you want and so it’s a matter of making a determination about the business objectives and marketing objectives you’re trying to meet. Just set up campaigns, set up tactics that are based on your strategy and you will ultimately win.

Answer this one question if you’re trying to make a decision about social media today: is the use of this tool or this practice or this tactic going to benefit my customers? I think if you can say “yes” to that, then you will always find a return on investment.

Subscribe: Apple Podcasts | Android | RSS

Why We’re All Still Talking About Social Media

Marketing Podcast with Rebekah Radice
Podcast Transcript

Social media didn’t go away – it just moved. It moved to become another strategic element of marketing where it belongs.

The fact is, if you plan to benefit from social behavior, you must alter your thinking around the proper use of social media for each stage of the customer journey.

My guest for this week’s episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast is Rebekah Radice. She is a marketer and founder of RadiantLA, a training and development company helping business professionals use online marketing strategically. Radice is also the author of Social Media Mastery: A Comprehensive Guide to Strategic Growth. She and I discuss why social media needs to be a part of your strategic approach to marketing.

Radice is an award winning marketer whose entrepreneurial roots, instincts and unstoppable energy create a powerful force for strategic business growth. She has been blogging since 2004 on one of the top social media blogs, rebekahradice.com – voted a “2015 and 2016 Top 10 Social Media Blog” by Social Media Examiner.

As a recognized leader and influencer, Radice has been featured on CBS, at the NATO Leadership Summit, and was recently listed as a Top Marketing Influencer by Brand24, and as one of the Top Ten Social Media Marketers and Top 40 Content Marketers by Onalytica.

Questions I ask Rebekah Radice:

• What does Social Media Mastery: A Comprehensive Guide to Strategic Growth add to the conversation given that there is so much on the topic?
• What is the role of social media in the big picture of marketing?
• What do you tell small business owners who are against social media?

What you’ll learn if you give a listen:

• Where social media fits into the customer journey
• How to use social media to get clients
• How to use social media to drive offline conversations

Key takeaways from the episode and more about Rebekah Radice:

• Learn more about Rebekah Radice.
• Read Social Media Mastery: A Comprehensive Guide to Strategic Growth.
• Connect on Facebook.
• Follow on Twitter.
• Connect on Linkedin.
• Subscribe to YouTube channel.
• Email rebekah@rebekahradice.com.

Like this show? Click on over and give us a review on iTunes, please!

Are you in need of WordPress support? If so, I highly recommend using WP Fix It. They provide 24/7 instant WordPress Support and now have a plugin that allows them to access your WP install while you’re in it. It’s pretty convenient! Be sure to check them out.

Are you an independent marketing consultant or an agency owner? If so, you may want to check out the Duct Tape Marketing Consultant Network. It is a growing group of independent marketing consultants and agencies that are partnering and collaborating using the Duct Tape Marketing tools, and really scaling their businesses. Check it out at ducttapemarketingconsultant.com.

Subscribe: Apple Podcasts | Android | RSS

The State of Social Media Usage in America Today

I recently partnered with The Dash to find out how America’s most popular social networks compare, including Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, Pinterest, Twitter, and Snapchat. I’m not going to lie, there are a few surprises that you might find interesting. Below are some of the insights, but I encourage you to check out the full dashboard here.

Facebook continues to dominate

Facebook’s penetration among global populations across demographics is just extraordinary, as is its enduring domination of other social media. That’s nothing new—but it really resonates through the visuals within the dashboard (example below). Not only does the platform have the highest number of users, it has the highest engagement of the other platforms within the dashboard with 76% of its users logging in daily (compared to Instagram with the next highest engagement of 51% of its user logging on daily – it should be mentioned for perspective that Instagram is also owned by Facebook). Let’s just say Facebook isn’t going anywhere anytime soon.

The international landscape

I was surprised by the portion of international vs. U.S. users. The numbers below represent the percentage of users that are outside of the U.S. for each platform:

• 85% for Facebook
• 80% for Instagram
• 79% for Twitter
• 70% for LinkedIn
• 53% for Pinterest

On an international scale, the usage between men and women on the majority of the social channels is about 50/50, aside from LinkedIn which is more heavily skewed towards men, and Pinterest with 2/3 of its users being women.

A look at usage within the United States

Within the United States, the most popular social media platform for adults by far is Facebook with 68% of the population using the platform. The average of the other platforms hovers around 25%, reiterating my point earlier that Facebook continues to dominate.

Another finding with U.S. users is that generally speaking, the wealthier and more educated you are, the more likely you are to use social media.

The rise of Pinterest

Pinterest is a force quietly rising, now matching or exceeding other platforms (except Facebook) in a number of statistical categories. And from a marketing perspective, the platform is far more female and American than its counterparts.

Pinterest has some new advertising options that are getting more and more appealing for businesses. This form of advertising, called Promoted Pins, are just like regular Pins, only you pay to have them seen by more people. The benefits of this type of advertising include:

• The ads look and feel natural. According to Pinterest, 75% of Pins saved to Pinterest come from businesses, showing they are genuinely helpful for users.
• The audience is receptive, meaning by sharing your brand’s ideas, you can actually receive, big, measurable results.
• Ads continue to perform. When a person saves a Promoted Pin, other people see that Pin in their feeds, which can drive additional sales.

This form of advertising is proving to be an effective method for getting your message in front of the right audience. Moral of the story: If you aren’t currently using Pinterest as part of your marketing efforts, it’s worth reconsidering.

Social media usage continues to increase

No matter how you look at it, whether it be age, gender, education, or income, social media adoption continues to expand, and it’s not just in the United States. In fact, the United States is ranked 8th for its portion of adults who use social media.

Mobile is taking over

Social media users are accessing social media on their mobile devices at a growing rate as desktop use declines, meaning people are constantly connected to these platforms as they’re on the go. This is not only an interesting fact as it relates to social media, but marketers need to take note of this trend and brainstorm ways to get in front of their audiences at the right time when they’re out and about.

If there’s one thing we know, it’s that social media is here to stay and continues to change at a rapid rate. Do any of the stats above surprise you? If you took a look at the complete dashboard, what information did you find most interesting and how do you plan on applying it to your marketing strategy?