Nowadays it is difficult to find someone who does not use social media. Our phones are full of social apps like Facebook, Instagram and Twitter. Social media have of course been used for a long time to achieve marketing objectives. In the meantime, however, these apps are constantly changing, so marketers also have to adjust their strategy. Buffer sought out for 2019 how marketers can best use social media. To do this, they interviewed 1842 marketers from all over the world.
We list the three most important findings here!
1. Stories are becoming increasingly important
Stories is a relatively new social media format, originally developed by Snapchat. Various apps use it. The format is growing in popularity, with more than a billion users worldwide. Previous research has already shown this that consumers prefer to see brand content in their stories rather than in their timeline. Now that stories also offer the option of showing advertisements, the format is even more attractive for companies.
Although 62.9% of Buffer's respondents indicated that they are not yet using story ads, 61% plan to do so in 2019. And rightly so, because stories seem quite effective. More than half of the marketers Buffer surveyed (57.6%) indicated that stories are moderately to very effective as part of their social media strategy. Some of the respondents (35%) could not say with certainty how effective stories were. Only a small percentage (7.7%) felt that strories were not or only slightly effective.
2. Facebook remains the leader for video content
More and more companies are distributing video content. While Buffer saw last year that 25% of their respondents did not use video, this year it is only 14.5%. The majority of companies publish a video monthly (36.7%), while almost a quarter (24.3%) even do so weekly. They often distribute their videos on multiple channels, but Facebook remains the most popular. LinkedIn comes in fifth place, but is a medium to keep an eye on. Get on LinkedIn videos shared more than 20 times more often than any other form of content. When asked why companies do not publish more videos, 66.5% cite lack of time as the reason. At the same time, 35.8% indicate that they consider images and video to be the most important aspect when publishing content.
3. Social media is an important part of marketing strategy
Social media is no longer just a nice extra, social media has conquered its place in the digital strategy. The majority of marketers surveyed (58.8%) see social media as a very important part of their overall marketing strategy. 73% of respondents indicated that social media marketing was moderately to very effective for their business. Although social media plays a key role for most, 19.1% of marketers still indicate that they are unsure how to measure the effectiveness of their social media marketing.
