Social media has come a long way from the days of needing a college email address to sign up for a Facebook account and using hashtags to search tweets. Social network sites like Facebook, Twitter and Pinterest are daily destinations for millions of consumers across multiple generations. Increasingly, new and exciting ad products are coming online offering hyper-targeting capability based on specific demographics, social connections, interests and behaviors.
What can brands expect now as social media continues to elbow its way into the planning table? A fractured media landscape where few digital channels offer any scale, while social networks offer an array of large growing audiences with a plethora of data on interests and behaviors that would make any marketer drool. By 2017, forecasts call for over $10 billion in annual social media spending with an increasing amount of those dollars heading toward native content. This is an increase from the $4.7 billion spent in 2013.
Social media advertising is a growing market. Today promotion of social content represents between 1% and 10% of ad budgets, but huge growth potential is expected as more and more traffic shifts to mobile. As we have seen with clients’ content marketing strategies, there is a need for front-and-center social media and advertising strategies where the marketing is focused around the mobile consumer and their social behaviors online.
Ask yourself, “Where is social media in our marketing strategy?” If you answered it doesn’t exist or the intern named Jeremy handles it, then get back to the drawing board because there is a lot you’ve missed in targeting your potential audience or market segment.
Based on the statistics, the marketing direction moving forward is clearly defined as becoming more prominently social media and mobile. Social media statistics:
– Both Facebook and Twitter have passed 50% mobile usage
– Mobile accounted for 11% of Facebook’s ad revenue in 2012 and 23% in 2013
– Americans spend on average 12 hours per month on social media networks
– The key demographic of 18-24 year olds spend 20 hours per month on social media networks
– 90% of the world’s data was created in the last two years thanks to social media
Combined, we will for the first time be able to tell a story across multiple social media channels and devices. Effectively telling your story as your target moves from Facebook to Twitter and finally to Pinterest or Tumblr, will entice your audience to turn to the next chapter. As social media continues to mature you will see it take the center stage of content marketing.
The numbers prove it. No longer can social media be the “little brother” side project or an advertising medium no one understands. Instead social has grown up, becoming the gateway to the mobile generation and data that allows hyper-accurate content and pinpoint targeting. After all, what other medium do you know that can deliver, on demand, the story you want to read and serve it to those that you want to read it?
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