With holiday shopping season around the corner, are you starting to ramp up your marketing efforts? Does social media play a part in that strategy? It definitely should. Social media marketing continues to evolve and provide brands an opportunity to connect with their target audiences. Three social networks (Facebook, Twitter and Pinterest) are showing impressive growth in the social ad space, increasing CTR's and decreasing CPC's, according to Adobe's first annual Social Media Intelligence Report.
The study reports that Facebook's ad clicks, ad impressions and advertisers' return on investment were all higher in 2013 than 2012. Facebook ads were clicked 29% more often in 2013, and the ROI was 58% higher than 2012. The drop in CPC's means that Facebook is becoming a cheaper and potentially effective channel for marketers.
The report also highlighted the importance of growth in Twitter and Pinterest, using the last click attribution model. Both social networks have made strides in referral traffic to retail websites this year. Adobe reports that the revenue per visitor grew 300% for Twitter and 150% for Pinterest.
Along with this, while Facebook's total percentage of visitors dropped 20% last year, Twitter grew 258%, and Pinterest grew 84% YOY!
Here are some additional findings from the study:
- Image posts produce engagement rates 600% higher than text-based posts
- Likes produce over 80% of engagement but comments and shares have been outpacing likes YOY
- Geo targeted posts have seen a rise - up 67% YOY. These posts produce slightly higher engagement rates.
The findings in this report were based on 131 billion Facebook ad impressions, 400 million unique visitors to social networking sites, more than 1 billion Facebook posts, and 4.3 billion social engagements on Facebook.
Key Lesson: Social media is continuously changing the way brands and consumers interact with each other. This means that brands should find creative ways to market and expand their reach - whether it's using Facebook ads or integrating images/videos into the mix. At the end of the day, brands should aim to gain consumer trust and build loyalty.
You can find the entire study here. All data and images courtesy of Adobe.