However, Facebook announced, back in 2021, that they were going to retire the “Like” button on Pages in favour of a “Follow” button. This was then followed by an announcement that we’d be getting, er both.  But either way, the overlap between this function and the News Feed for Business Pages has been, well, pretty broken the entire time.

With the old Like functionality, adding another Page’s content to your News Feed was relatively simple: you just needed to click the three dots near to the Like button, and choose “Like as Page”.  Easy. This is how it used to look:

Then the Follow buttons appeared, but the “…as Page” option was no more. Clicking on the Follow button simply subscribed your *personal* Facebook feed to that Page. The three buttons were still there, but now, the useful “…as Page” option is lost.

Helpfully (except, in fact, not) Facebook had added a “Suggested for you” section to your actual Business Page newsfeed. How kind! Except their idea of what you should subscribe to may not overlap with yours. As a business who has clients which have nothing in common apart from coming to us for marketing advice, our version of this was as eclectic as it was completely useless. Clicking into the “see more” link just brings more of the same.

Obviously what we need here is a search option, but there isn’t one:

At this stage we did a LOT of googling, and found many tutorials, including this one being featured as an excerpt at the top of Google’s results, which claim that the only way now to add things to the News feed is to accept whatever it is that Facebook is suggesting to you.

Well, after a lot of research and button stabbing, we’re here to tell you that that is wrong. It’s not easy to find, but you CAN actually search for the Business Pages that you specifically want to follow. Here’s how.

First, you need to be within the Meta Business Suite. There are a few ways to access this, but the easiest one for this purpose is to go directly into the “News Feed” link underneath the Meta section of your left hand menu. Do NOT go into the News Feed link which is about  an inch below it, but works differently – full marks to Facebook once again for useability here.

Once you’re in, things initially look the same. Same “Suggested for you” box, so you might not bother investigating it much. BUT. Click the “see more” option and this time….. alleluia! We have a Search box.

Once you have this, you can just search as normal, and each result comes with a “Follow” button that you can use to subscribe to future content. Our guess is that this search box should have been included in the “other” News Feed version, but someone forgot about it. This is where having a way of communicating bugs to Facebook would be helpful to them as well as us but….yeah.

Anyway, that’s a morning of our lives we won’t get back. Hopefully this post will show up in Google and stop everyone else having to waste their time too

First up: Retweeting without reading.

Always, ALWAYS click on the link of anything you’re about to retweet and at least give the content a quick read through. Of course, that should go without saying, because you’re only retweeting items you think are high quality and worth the time of your audience, right?!

Just this morning, I saw two eminently retweetable headlines pop into my feed, from two different very high profile social media-related content creators. Both of them already had multiple retweets, perhaps 5 or 6. I still clicked through to check that they delivered what I was expecting.  The first one lead to a broken link, giving a 404 Page Not Found error.  Oops. So immediately we know that the five previous retweeters hadn’t even got that far, or presumably they wouldn’t have bothered promoting a bad link.

The second was a slightly more subtle issue. The headline referred to “social media best practises” that need to be retired. Sounded interesting, if only as an indicator of how things have changed over the last few years. Clicking on the link, though…not so much. The article was both thin and very much phoned in – the tactics mentioned were about mass following, and automated messaging. These are things most of the industry put to bed years ago, if they ever went there in the first place.  So in that instance, retweeting would be both disrespectful of our audience’s time and intelligence, and also potentially make us look “behind the curve” – “oh look, this agency thinks these are great new ideas”!.

There are other issues that can hide behind those links though, ranging from misleading headlines introducing views you actually wouldn’t endorse at all, to phishing scams or similar.

Always. check.

Secondly: Cross posting to multiple sites – or just failing to customise content

If you’re serving the same audience with the same content on multiple social media sites, it can be very tempting to bulk schedule through one of the third party services, allow one site to cross post to another (eg “share to Twitter” when you create an Instagram post)  or even just copy and paste mindlessly between sites.

Some of the time, it’s possible that nobody will notice. But it’s a risky game, and can have results that will either irritate users or just make it look as though you’re not really that committed to the “afterthought” channel.

The worst example is direct cross posting from sites. Post from Instagram to Twitter, for example, and your users get an annoying link needing clicking, instead of being able to view your image within their Twitter timeline. But some of the bulk scheduling tools aren’t very helpful, either  – as things currently stand, that multi-image post you’ve set up on Hootsuite and scheduled for Insta and Twitter will lose all but the first image when it posts to Instagram. If you’ve referred to the other images in your text, you then have a dead giveaway that something’s gone wrong!

Creating content directly into the channel it’s going to be posted on, will always be the optimum approach. It also allows you to make use of the site-specific functionality – telling your Insta audience to Swipe Left on your post for your additional images (nonsensical in the context of any other site), or tagging other pages  in Facebook (doesn’t work if you try to do this from Hootsuite).

Thirdly: Hashtags on Facebook

A small one, but there are still articles knocking around on Google which suggest this will give you some advantage, so it refuses to die.

The reality is that most users don’t, and never have, use hashtags on Facebook – except occasionally as a joke, a subtextual commentary on whatever they’ve just posted. Nobody is using them for discovery in the way that they might on Twitter or Instagram, simply because most of the interesting content is behind privacy settings anyway.

So really, sticking those hashtags on just tends to suggest a scattergun approach to marketing techniques (chuck some mud, it might stick!) or perhaps that you’re bulk scheduling alongside Twitter and just haven’t bothered to delete the hashtags for the Facebook version of the post.

So those are our suggested areas for improvement – feel free to comment with yours if there are any huge bloopers we’ve missed!

Buying followers for social media: the Pros and Cons, and what you need to know

Companies selling instant Follower or Liker boosts have been around almost since the dawn of social media itself. In the early days, we assumed that these companies would die out as users got more sophisticated and more able to spot those accounts whose “popularity” was entirely faked.  That hasn’t proven to be the case at all; in fact, the industry in fake followers seems to be thriving.

So, can buying followers ever help a business be successful on social media? Are all bought followers the same? What are the implications on the different sites of boosting your account in this way? We know you’re wondering:  here are the answers!

What am I buying?

First of all, it’s important to recognise exactly what you’re buying when you purchase followers. In the vast majority of cases, you’re gaming the number that appears in your account bio – your number of Twitter or Instagram Followers, or Facebook Likers.  The number itself will be bigger, but that is the limit of the benefit you’re getting. The accounts won’t belong to real consumers in any normal sense.

The basic level – bargain basement followers

The organisations selling these followers, often based around “click farms” in parts of the world where labour is extremely cheap, have hundreds of people setting up fake accounts constantly.

The “quality” of those accounts (ie, the effort they’ve gone to to make the account look like a real user) varies from the “egg avatar with randomly generated name” type through to those which would stand up to some very brief scrutiny – that is, they have an avatar pic, something written in more-or-less coherent English in their biographies, and a handful of generic and usually nonsensical posts.

Once you have paid for the number of followers you want, the supplying company will just follow your account with the purchased quota of fake accounts. You should NOT have to supply your password in order for this to happen!

Here are the pros and cons of this cheap’n’cheerful approach:

Pros:

• These accounts will generally continue to follow you, as they’re not being used by real people;
• They make your account, particularly at a quick glance, look more popular than it actually is.

Cons:

• To anyone who bothers to look, it’s usually totally obvious when an account has purchased these followers.
• Apart from the sudden jump in numbers, the accounts themselves just scream “fake” in terms of their meaningless biographies and nonsense posts.

Below is a perfect example of a fake follower account on Instagram. Implausible name – check. Meaningless biography – check. Incoherent and random posts (and only a few of them) – check. Following a high number of people in order to get a few to follow them back – check, and very low ratio of followers to people being followed- check again.

Followers for hire

Another approach that some of the more expensive follower-sellers take, is to incentivise real users to follow your account. This can be just with a payment, or some other kind of incentive such as search credits on a directory site.

Pros:

• As they are actual social media users, there’s a (small) chance that they might read some of your content, and your product or service might happen to be suitable for them;
• They look like real, organically acquired followers to anyone examining the account

Cons:

• As the incentive is for the initial follow, this type of account is likely to unfollow over time as they purge their timelines of content that’s of no interest to them.

The real issue with bought followers

So we’ve looked at the pros and cons of artificially inflating your account’s popularity with different types of users, but of course there are much bigger implications. The only significant, long term benefit of doing this, is that your account looks more popular than it is, which may in turn influence the kind of people who regard that as an important signal. And don’t take a closer look to see who all those thousands of followers are. Therefore, you may gain some followers who wouldn’t otherwise have bothered with you.

The big downside though, is much more potentially significant, and the exact implications vary according to which of the sites you’re buying followers for.

In all cases, the number of additional followers you gain (who are maybe really interested in your product or service) will likely be a small number compared to the number of fake accounts you’ve bought. So you now have a follower base that’s the opposite of what you should be aiming for with social media – engaged advocates who are likely to show a return when you put effort into creating good content.

Now pay us to access those dead end accounts!

And where it really gets bad is if you’re going to do any paid for marketing, which these days is pretty much crucial to your long term strategy.  Twitter and Instagram (to a lesser degree) and Facebook (to a significant degree) all employ algorithms which restrict your access to your own follower base. Putting it simply, there’s no guarantee that a particular piece of content will be seen by all your followers…unless you pay for that to be the case. But unfortunately, none of the sites have a tick box for “just charge me for showing this to my *real* followers“. So you’re stuck with forever paying to show posts to that big set of fake accounts , in order to get to the handful of genuinely interested followers who are mixed in with them.

On Facebook, the situation is significantly worse. Being able to recruit your keenest and happiest customers to your Facebook page, and then market to them *and their friends*, is the real marketing gold. The social network of your existing customers is a wonderfully self-filtering group of people who are much more likely to also enjoy your product, than the average person picked off the street.

As soon as you buy followers, not only are you going to end up paying to show your posts to them, but you either have to stop using the “friends of Likers” options or end up paying to put your content in front of all the accounts who are linked to your fake followers, too. Ouch. Expensive, and self defeating.

And putting a dent in your Algorithm results…

In addition, most of the social media sites give your account some kind of a ranking figure (which you won’t ever be able to access) which influences how much priority your content is given in the timelines of your followers. Exactly how the algorithm works is very much a trade secret, but we’re pretty sure that engagement levels will be a big factor. And engagement levels are calculated by comparing your total follower numbers to the number of likes, comments etc you receive on a typical post.

So, if you’ve gained 1,000 followers organically but then become impatient and bought 10,000 more, the next time you post something, even if Jesus and the angel host are personally on your side, your engagement levels are going to look terrible because 10,000 of your followers are never, ever going to engage. So you are effectively handicapping every future piece of content you post.

(Bear in mind, that if you sign up to a social media agency who buys followers for your account, the same will apply – and you won’t necessarily be able to reverse it without binning your account and starting again from scratch….so watch out for providers delivering implausible growth rates!).

Is it ever worth it?

As with most things, there are some circumstances where buying followers could be a valid strategy – and we’re just talking from a marketing effectiveness point of view here, and leaving aside the ethical issues of cheating / misleading the public…

For example, if you need an account to look impressive in the short term, for whatever reason, and have no intention of doing paid for marketing through that account or building on it long term for genuine engagement.

If it’s on a site where you’re not really expecting commercial returns, but are using it just to influence brand perception (Instagram fits that description for some businesses).

If raising your follower numbers is the “be all and end all” for your management then yes, buying followers will accomplish that goal.

But overall, tread very very carefully. Once you have thousands of non-genuine followers mixed in with your hard-won real followers, it’s difficult to go back.

We’d recommend that you start with a step back, and (if you didn’t already) take a good hard look at what you’d like social media to do for you, whether that’s realistically achievable, and an outline of how that might look – basically, you need a social media strategy. Without this, you are setting both yourselves and your outsourcing partner up for failure.

This process may involve a small investment on your part, to get someone in to work through that with you, but believe us when we say it’ll be a tiny amount compared with the cost of months of badly thought out and ineffective outsourced management.

The other thing you should do is articulate your own expectations and discuss them clearly with any potential provider. For example, you might think that any agency worth their salt would be tweeting for you at least five times a day. That may or may not be right, but if you don’t share that assumption with them, they’re unlikely to guess it.

When outsourcing social media can help you

We’ve also talked in the past about our firm belief that a capable and focused internal employee is, most of the time, going to find it easier to do a great job for your company than a third party. If you’re a very small business or sole trader, times that by ten – you *are* your brand, and you are the best placed person to represent it to the outside world. Unfortunately those are often the  businesses who struggle most to manage their social media presence – consistently.

So that’s our first reason for outsourcing:

To create a consistent presence

Don’t underestimate the value of regular, consistent activity on social media. This is probably the number one reason to consider outsourcing. If you can’t make social media a reasonably core part of your (or one of your employees’) job role, it will get pushed to the bottom of the list and eventually neglected.

So many businesses set up their social media accounts in a flurry of initial enthusiasm, and then find it hard to keep up the activity.  Posts become really sporadic, with lots one week and then none for months. Peer or customer mentions go ignored because there haven’t been any for a while so everyone stops checking for them.  Your audience gets the message that social media is low priority for you.

This issue is easily cured by outsourcing. Provided you have agreed a good range of content topics and sources with them, your provider should be able to keep things moving even during periods where you aren’t able to give them “live” news from within the business. It may not be wildly daring or creative, but the job will get done, and that alone is more than half the battle!

To maintain professionalism / brand standards

If you have the slightest doubt about your grammar / spelling / writing skills, and / or have issues creating respectable graphics, that will reflect really badly on your brand on social media.

In our experience this can be a tricky issue for business owners to recognise, so if you’re in any doubt – ask your most critical and creative friends whether what you’re putting out there enhances or detracts from a prospective customer’s perception of your business. Again, easily cured by outsourcing, as those skills are fundamental to anyone working in social media.

To keep you current and taking advantage of new developments

This one’s a bit harder, and less of a guaranteed fix, because outsourcing alone won’t necessarily allow an agency to maximise everything they could do for you on social media unless you’re able to contribute significant time, money, or both.

But we will say this: even working full time on social media, we sometimes struggle to keep up with the technical changes on the major platforms. Especially now that the advertising aspect has become more central and complex, and there are new bugs / features / workarounds constantly needed.

Combining that particular challenge with another job role is going to be really tough, if you’re doing your own social media.  That may or may not be a big deal for you, as you may just want to accept that you’re going to be working at a more limited level – but be aware that it will be a limitation.

Creativity

Not everyone has the right mindset for creating original and creative social media content, for sure. But equally, not all businesses need it – for many, just doing a good, consistent, engaging job of creating content, and being responsive to customer engagement, is absolutely fine.

If you do feel that your business demands a high level of outstanding content though, and you don’t feel able to come up with the concepts yourself, outsourcing may help you.

We’re only going with “may” here, because there are so many variables which can affect whether you’ll get what you want. Top of the list is that you’re likely to need to invest significant time in working with your social media agency to shape their concepts, because one person’s “original” is another person’s “travesty” – for reference, take a look at the Poundland Elf campaign from December 2018. It’s undeniably original, and equally undeniably we’ve worked with many brands who would be utterly horrified if something similarly risque / crude (depending on your opinion!) was published in their name.

We hope that helps – at the very least, do think through all of those issues before getting in touch with a potential outsourcing partner, and you’ll start out on the right track.

So, on with the stats. This is the 2019 edition of our annual roundup of social media user stats for the UK.  We started these reports because most of our clients are UK focused, entirely or primarily, and Global data can hide pretty much all the useful details. So everything we’re quoting here is United Kingdom specific.

UK Social Media Stats – general thoughts

We’re very happy to report that this year’s post might just feature some of the most complete and up to date figures that we’ve been able to find in quite a while. That’s largely due to some smart use being made of the built in advertising audience tools that are now available from Facebook, Twitter and Instagram – if they want us to be wowed by their ad capacity, they have to tell us who we might be able to reach, right?!  There are also one or two organisations in the UK who are doing their own regular research work which helps a lot, too. We’ve listed all our major sources at the end of this article, and we are grateful to all of them.

That still doesn’t mean the numbers are necessarily perfect (anyone who regularly deals with Facebook’s advertising stats will be choking on their tea right now at the understatement!) but they should at least give us a clear idea of the direction of travel.

Additional note – there’s too much detail in most of the graphics here to be easily read in the thumbnail, but click them and you’ll get a clearer view!

UK social media usage – overview

This is a really nice graphic to show both the relative rankings of the social media sites in the UK, and also where there are major differences from the US. What IS the thing about Pinterest that stops it being as loved by Brits as it is across the pond? Who knows, but it just doesn’t seem to be getting the traction over here.

We should also give a dishonourable mention to Google+, which was finally put to rest in 2018, to the distress of absolutely nobody and the delight of social media agencies who no longer have to explain to clients why it was largely a waste of time..

So, these figures are based on the percentage of adults surveyed who said that they used each of the platforms, and were released in early 2018:

Another interesting aspect that we saw for the first time this year, was a breakdown by Ipsos MORI showing not just age and gender propensity for social media use, but also social grade – look at that peak around the C1 class!

Now moving on to the individual platforms:

UK Facebook Users and Demographics, 2019

We were broadly convinced that Facebook had pretty much done with user base expansion in the UK, as the numbers have been fairly static for a few years now. But.  Figures from the advertising audience tool suggest a total UK base of 39 million users; this is something of an increase from the stats we’ve had in previous years.  Taking into account all the negative publicity around privacy and targeting, and with its “cool” period way behind it, could Facebook really be still taking on users?

As this is the first time we’ve measured the user base in this way what will be most telling is where than number goes in future years. But having said that, if we put the 39 million number in the context of the demographic figures below, maybe it IS correct.  This survey shows a strong level of usage (or perhaps just registration?) amongst the youngest interviewees, and of course a much higher proportion of that age group are online than the older age groups who will be experiencing, shall we say, natural wastage. So maybe, as time goes on and the “less connected” generation die off to be replaced by an “always on” younger generation, the ubiquity of Facebook means that it is still able to show user growth.

UK Twitter Users and Demographics, 2019

Twitter, however, is definitely in the user growth plateau phase. Statista gives us a figure of 13.7 million users for the UK, which is there or thereabouts what we’ve been seeing for years.

The platform has become ever more closely identified with campaigning, politics and causes, which in itself can cause issues around potentially off putting aggressive or inappropriate user behaviour. It has introduced easier ways to report this during 2018, and also reportedly made headways against blatantly spammy behaviour such as multiple identical tweets.

However, many of Twitter’s most prominent users have become frustrated with the way it seems to pick and choose the topics where threatening behaviour is taken seriously. General awareness of bot networks using Twitter to spread misinformation has also become more widespread in the last year or so. As yet it’s hard to tell how or if these issues will impact on user numbers.

In terms of the demographics, we have the below survey-based information from we are Flint;  perhaps the least intuitive figure is the relatively large proportion of younger age groups who are still reporting that they use Twitter, despite the huge inroads of Instagram into that space recently.

UK Instagram Users and Demographics, 2019

Based on Instagram’s stratospheric rise in 2017 and 2018, we might have expected this number to be higher…but we’re getting a monthly active users figure of 23 million for the UK here, which is still enough to place Instagram comfortably ahead of Twitter in the usage rankings:

The introduction of the Shopping feature must have gone a very long way to driving Instagram’s growth this year – from both a user and a marketer’s perspective, providing a direct link feature that (slightly) makes up for the inability to include links in individual posts. It’s still restricted to certain countries though, and has a number of potential barriers – including forcing the seller to load their inventory to the Facebook catalogue.

If you need your demographic fix, here it is: once again, the 15-34 age group is really dominant on Instagram, and it appeals to women significantly more than men.

UK LinkedIn Users and Demographics, 2019

And finally, LinkedIn. Good old LinkedIn, we can always rely on them to release some data straight from the horse’s mouth, and this year was no exception.  Here we have a lovely global dataset which was provided in August 2018, and gives us 25 million plus users in the UK – just pipping Instagram to the post for second biggest UK platform!

It’s also no surprise that LinkedIn are majoring on user registrations and not Monthly Active Users however, as we know from past years that LinkedIn has the highest gap between registered users and regularly active users – industry estimates tend to be between 10% and 25% of registered users who actually log in in any given month. It would be very interesting to know if LinkedIn is working on a cure for that…

There’s also been a major upgrade to LinkedIn’s advertising system in the last year, making it look much more like the google adwords / Facebook Ads manager setup and introducing some richer ad types such as carousel ads and video. Which is great, and would be truly epic if it was possible to increase the visit rate in certain sectors too, so that more of our intended target market would actually see those lovely fancy ads!

Sources

Ipsos MORI , Hootsuite, We Are Social, Statista, we are Flint .

What is Influencer Marketing?

Firstly, the basics. In simple terms, “Influencer marketing” means “finding someone who your target customers pay close attention to, and inducing them to talk about your product or service to that group”.

The way that a business does that might be entirely organic – for example, by providing the influencer with amazing service – but is more usually either by providing them with a covetable freebie  in return for a review, or simply paying them to discuss something specific.

In both of the latter cases, the influencer should disclose that they’re benefitting from the arrangement, although not all of them do.

Can smaller businesses get involved in Influencer Marketing?

At one point, this meant contacting “offline” celebrities and negotiating with them for exposure, and tended to be more the preserve of larger businesses. But since the rise of social media, and particularly Instagram, influencer marketing has become much more accessible to smaller brands.

That’s for a few reasons, but mainly because the pool of “celebrities” has become much larger and more diverse. Instagram has allowed many “ordinary people” who have knowledge and enthusiasm for particular business sectors, to develop large and active followings.  We call these people “micro-influencers”.

So while you might not be able to afford a Kardashian’s fee for promoting your new range of swimwear, there may be a handful of Instagrammers who are realistically accessible to you – and may prove to be more, er, actually influential.

Why are Micro-Influencers different?

Firstly, and most obviously, they tend to have a much smaller number of followers.

You might even be talking about closer to 1,000 followers on Instagram than 100,000.

They’re often more focused in terms of what they post about (for example, skincare for teenagers with acne, or fashion for over 40s) which naturally reduces the pool of potential followers for them – this might be chicken or egg with the follower numbers!

So why might engaging a Micro-Influencer be a better option for a business?

Well, to start with, they’ve already narrowed down their audience – meaning that if they’re a fit for your brand, it’ll be a much stronger fit. So continuing the example of the Over 40s Fashion influencer,  if you’re marketing classic, modest swimwear then their smaller and more focused audience is a bonus for you: it just means you’re not paying for exposure to teenagers who’ll never buy your product.

The smaller size of a micro-influencer’s community also means they tend to be a lot more accessible to, and engaged with, their followers. Plenty of accounts start out by responding to comments and requests for advice from their followers, but as they grow, that often dries up.  So in fact, a huge name in beauty blogging is less likely to achieve a single effective recommendation of your mascara, than someone who has a smaller community.

In fact, the drop-off in engagement levels as an account’s following increases is really pronounced. Have a look at this graphic from Takumi.com:

Of course, regardless of the number of followers, they still need to be highly knowledgeable and respected by those followers.

And finally, Micro Influencers are more accessible to you as a smaller business.  Someone who doesn’t consider themselves a social media superstar is much more likely to be receptive to gifts or review requests, because they probably receive far fewer of them!

What types of business benefit most?

For this to work for your business, you need there to be an active and engaged community around your niche on Instagram. If there isn’t a suitable community, there won’t be micro influencers.

We don’t want to generalise too broadly, but the kinds of niches where Instagram communities exist tend to be those which are discretionary purchases (so a new lipstick rather than a new fridge), often with an element of luxury; lack of transparency in brands’ “traditional” marketing is also a flag for this, as it leaves consumers craving personal recommendations with a higher level of trust. The Beauty sector is an obvious example of this.

Another study by Experticity found that the categories most recommended by micro-influencers are:

• Sporting and outdoor gear
• Fashion and footwear
• Fitness, nutrition and wellness
• Beauty

How do you evaluate a micro-influencer?

So, you’ve identified some accounts who are creating content that’s highly attractive to your niche audience, have a reasonable number of followers, and appear to get some engagement from their followers (ie, most of their posts get Likes and comments).  Before you decide to invest in working with them, there are a couple of other things to watch out for.

Firstly, do a quick sense check of those followers. Click through to some of the followers’ biographies and posting grids; do they look like real people? Buying followers is rife on Instagram and it’s easy for the unwary to be fooled by a fraudent account.

On a related note, look at some of the comments being left on their content. Seeing a large number which are incongruous, inappropriate, or repetitive, may also suggest that the account owner has paid for that activity. (Side note: even the best Instagrammers are afflicted by other users making use of bots to get their attention, so the odd follower who posts “Wow, amazing!” on every post shouldn’t be taken as a black mark – provided the genuine engagement is there too).

Then, look at how the Instagrammer engages. Is the conversation more than superficial? Do they answer questions properly and maybe provide recommendations or advice? Those are your Influencer gold!

And finally, watch out for the “sellout” Influencers. These users may have started out creating content around products that they personally love, but as their following grew, they got sent more and more freebies, until their feed just becomes a litany of random products with no quality opinion, just a parroting of what the manufacturer says. These accounts may have some use but they’re not going to be read as avidly, or be percieved as so trustworthy, as a genuinely passionate user. And while we’re on that subject, you also need to be prepared for the fact that the influencer *may* criticise some aspects of your product or service.  Remember, trust and honesty are their major assets, and are why you wanted to work with them in the first place. So if they don’t like your product that much, they should explain why (and hopefully, who it might be suitable for). But ultimately, you have to accept their opinion.

So, hopefully that has given you a start in understanding Micro Influencers – now, you just need to find that community!

Today’s Ginger Stepchild (apologies to gingers; us anglo-saxon mouse types are just jealous!) is Social Media Companies On Twitter.  And specifically, how far too many of them embody everything that’s wrong with social media (Twitter particularly) much of the time.

But first, a little backtrack. Before throwing any stones, let’s examine our own glass house.

How we use Twitter

Before saying anything about anyone else, it’s only fair to discuss the small matter of the @rosemcgrory Twitter account. This always makes for a fun and thought provoking discussion with our clients, who once in a while ask us in a training session something like “how much business do you get from twitter?”.

So, here are some facts about us on Twitter.

1) The account has to be there; it also has to be active, and have a respectable number of followers. That’s because sometimes,  it may influence the decision of potential clients who don’t yet know how to evaluate the use of social media in particular environments, about whether to contact us. That’s fine, of course we need to be “walking the talk” – even if the actual purpose of the account isn’t what they think it is.

2) In almost 6 years of business, we have got almost zero business directly from Twitter. The people who need our help are either not yet using Twitter actively, and / or do not choose it as a place to go when they’re looking to commission training or strategy services. Again, that’s fine; we get that, and one of the first things we’d urge any company whose primary driver for being on Twitter is “direct generation of leads” to do is have a long hard think about whether that’s realistic for their customers in their market.

Fortunately for us we know where our clients do go, and we have that covered (and no, we aren’t telling, sorry!). And we’ve worked with, and continue to work with, many clients for whom that isn’t the case, and they are able to see real ROI (in various forms, depending on their own objectives) from being active – so this isn’t really a moan about Twitter per se!

3) But….the quality of available content and discussion on Twitter in our particular industry segment is pretty much dreary on a good day. On a bad day, it’s will-to-live-sapping, depressing, enough to put you off of all forms of social media forever.

And it’s #3 that’s grinding my gears today.  Now because of Numbers 1 and 2 above, there’s the odd time where we do things that we might often advise our clients not to do. Repeating content a little too often, having longer than ideal gaps between activity, or being a little too self promoting. But we do try.  We try to always keep in mind that, in amongst those thousands of “need ’em but don’t read ’em” followers on our account, are folk that genuinely have an appetite for our blog articles and thoughts, and respect that accordingly. So that means not blowing up their timelines with endless self promotion, or low grade links to repetitive, poor quality or uninteresting content.

The same can’t be said for a depressingly large number of companies in the social media field. This morning I made one of my rare forays into “what’s going on on Twitter industry-wise”. I hoped to stumble over one or two new accounts to List (not follow; anyone who thinks we’re reading the tweets of our 2k+ followees is kidding themselves badly – and that goes for anyone who’s following more than a couple of hundred accounts. The Listed people get the love, and they’re almost always private lists!).

Here’s what I found. Just a little sample of the timelines of those accounts which come up on the first page when you search “social media” on Twitter (click if you need it a little larger to read!)

I’ve removed the account details because this isn’t about starting a war with any specific Twitter user. But, really? On one, endless self promotion. The second, pointless auto-generated spam that nobody in the whole of time ever cared to read. The third, carelessly put together content without any regard for the Twitter character limit (most likely auto posted to multiple platforms from third party software).

Of those, one account apparently belongs to a “Forbes Top 50 Digital Influencer”. Another has over 30,000 followers – presumably of the kind who never actually read their timelines. All were from a 2 minute perusal of the accounts that Twitter’s own algorithm thought worthy of putting on the first page for my search results – so there’s another issue, right there.

There are a few good accounts out there, but they’re mostly the superstar Mari Smiths and Jon Loomers, or companies like Mashable with colossal resources behind their accounts.  The mid tier of “OK” users has a high proportion of retweets from those accounts and a handful of others. There’s almost no originality or personality to be seen anywhere.

I know, most social media company Twitter accounts are just playing the game. Cranking out a load of content into an internet black hole, following back enough other accounts to bump up our numbers but without any intention of reading them.

But if we as social media professionals can’t show some appreciation of those “real” people we want to be reading our accounts, and maybe even throw in a bit of actual personality once in a while, how can we help our clients to? Used well, Twitter is a fantastic tool that opens up great possibilities. Used lazily and thoughtlessly, it becomes a merry-go-round of users doing almost anything but engaging meaningfully with anyone else. It’s time we all took a stand against that.

From a brand of this size, this is very significant, for a few reasons. Firstly, because they are acknowledging that misleading practices are widespread – and in our own experience, the beauty industry is at least as bad as any in this respect, maybe worse. Secondly, they are admitting that brands have a role in perpetuating that fraud, by creating the demand that “influencers” respond to.

From a marketing professional perspective, this is fantastic news. If more PRs and brand clients had been making educated decisions about who they pay for influence within the social media ecosystem, we would very likely not be having this discussion at all.

But here we are, and mainly because of the longstanding practice of setting influencer payscales mostly or entirely according to their number of followers, rather than, say, rewarding them with a proportion of any sales resulting from their work. As a consequence, it’s wise to regard any social media account with unaccountably large numbers of followers, or whose every banal uttering on Instagram is met with disproportionate enthusiasm, with great suspicion.

That has had a massive and toxic impact on the whole sector. Clients look at these (literally) unachievable numbers, apparently generated by doing nothing particularly clever or out of the ordinary, and they demand that marketers achieve the same thing for them. Potentially, marketers are put in a position of choosing whether to pay their own mortgages or stick doggedly to doing things the right way – which will pay dividends eventually, but often well after a client has lost patience.  Other social media users ( your would-be Influencers) have to choose between a lucrative push-button option to bulk buy followers, and the slow and arduous route of building a genuine following through creating great content.

Everything gets distorted by those “dishonest business practices” that Keith refers to.  I know we as a business will have lost potential clients in the past, because we don’t have an enormous Facebook following. The reason for that is that we have chosen not to invest in the resources required to build one honestly – ie, ongoing high quality content creation in the social media space. That takes time from good people, and those good people need to be paid, and those costs would have to accrue to the fees we charge our clients. We hope that our potential clients will look beyond those particular numbers, take time to chat with us and evaluate our expertise and approach in a more meaningful way – but there’s no doubt that somewhere along the line, some won’t have done. Is there a temptation to cheat the numbers? Of course there is!

The illusion of widespread but inexplicable popularity on social media itself spawns other scams. People who want it to work for them can’t see any explanation for others’ success, which makes them easy prey for practitioners who claim to have a “secret formula” that they can either teach or deploy at will – for a price.  The truth is, there is no secret formula, and success depends on the same basic factors that have been around since God was a boy – understanding your audience, having a great product, consistently generating good quality content that your audience enjoy, and ensuring that you take best advantage of the opportunities for visibility that each platform offers.  Quite often, this news is surprisingly unwelcome…

So where does this leave social media marketing? The thing is, that none of this changes the fundamental uniqueness of what social media marketing can do. There has never been a single, unified communication platform of the size of Facebook or Instagram, since time began. There are real opportunities for effective marketing and laser focused targeting that can’t be found anywhere else, and at a cost which is very hard to equal through other channels.

BUT

As marketers and as clients, we have to be satisfied with “just” those unparalleled opportunities. Stop trying to believe in the unicorns, and take the word “viral” out of your vocabulary (in most cases, at least).

UK Social Media Statistics for 2018

Welcome to our annual roundup of UK specific social media statistics, for 2018.

2017 was the year of Fake News, and a wake-up call for “establishment” media and regulatory agencies that they need to get to grips with the reality of targeting on social media, fast. It remains to be seen how that will affect businesses; in the US, Facebook has already trialled a function which allows users to see all ads related to a Page, which could prove interesting for businesses as well as questionable political users!

And targeting and advertising is likely to be where most of the action is in 2018, with enormous leaps forward in the complexity and power of what the major social media sites are offering….unless it comes to grief around the implementation of the General Data Protection Review, which we feel has the potential to really put the cat among the pigeons for social media marketers.

UK Social Media in 2018: general thoughts

Meanwhile, let’s take a look at where the main social media sites stand at the start of 2018. Let’s begin with a really interesting graph from Statista. We opened last year’s UK stats article by talking about “Users” vs “Usage”, and how it’s possible to have a huge number of registered accounts on a site, but very little active usage – and vice versa.

Obviously this has huge implications for the impact and effectiveness of any marketing.

Take a look at the graph below, which is captioned as “Market Share held by the leading social networks in the UK” and once again highlights that the devil is very much in the methodology detail.

This is based not on user accounts, but on actual activity – page hits – on the site: “Data was gathered based on more than 15 billion hits online per month onto more than 2.5 million tracking Statcounter member sites worldwide“.

And this is what you get:

Interesting, eh? The first thing that really hits you is, surely….wooah, how did LinkedIn end up so far down?!  Followed very rapidly by the startling comparison between Instagram and Twitter hits, or Instagram and the (still relatively small in user terms, last we heard) Pinterest.

Make of it what you will – maybe there is a methodology issue here (not in terms of its validity, but in terms of the suitability of measuring market share by hits)? Wise statisticians, feel free to comment!

UK Facebook Users and Demographics 2018

Globally, Facebook broke through the 2 billion Monthly Active User mark last year, and there’s a fun widget here which lets you see the user count going up by the second.

They’ve not given us much in terms of details below that, although they casually mentioned a figure of 30 million UK users per day on mobile alone, in this infographic pushing the benefits of advertising. That seems to fit in reasonably well with what we know from the past – around half of the UK population has a Facebook account, and the vast majority of registered users are actively using the site.

In terms of the demographics, survey-based data from IPSOS Mori conducted in late 2017 gives us this:

Again, no sign in a significant decline in the youngest group, with around 70% of 16-22 year olds reporting that they use Facebook.

UK Business use of Facebook

Facebook’s advertising offering continues to develop in leaps and bounds, with barely a month going by without another new targeting option or refinement being released. As the advertising environment becomes more competitive (and therefore costly) and more complex, it gets harder and harder for smaller businesses to manage their own advertising effectively. Simply Boosting a post, in many circumstances, just won’t do it any more, and we know that the US and UK are amongst the most expensive markets to target, as more and more businesses make Facebook advertising a core part of their marketing mix.

Although it’s been widely reported that Google and Facebook between them are responsible for almost all of the growth in advertising spend recently, there aren’t many stats available about what an average UK SME is now spending on Facebook – that would be a very interesting piece of research to see!

What we do have some numbers for, thanks to SocialBakers, is the sectors which are thriving the most on Facebook. This is likely to be a combination of the Facebook environment being favourable to these kinds of topics (fun, leisure, visual) and brands within these sectors grabbing the advertising opportunies offered by Facebook with great enthusiasm:

 UK LinkedIn Users 2018

At the start of last year, the Microsoft acquisition of LinkedIn was fresh off the press and we were all waiting to see what difference it would make. The answer so far seems to be “er, not much” – certainly as far as user recruitment is concerned. There’s been yet another of LinkedIn’s periodic redesigns, in which half the menu items you’re used to using randomly vanish (“simplification”, apparently) and the other half move around a bit, but that’s about all.

The most recent big milestone was half a billion users globally,(and that’ll be “registered accounts”, because LinkedIn wouldn’t want to make too much noise about it’s actual MUA figures!), reported during 2017.  That same announcement told us that London is the “most connected city”  – ie, London-based users have the highest average number of connections on LinkedIn, of anywhere in the world:

We didn’t get any update on the previously provided UK user base figure of 21 million from LinkedIn themselves, but the numbersfor the graph below came from the IPSOS Mori research mentioned above.

What’s somewhat odd about this is that IPSOS give a total figure of 13% of all respondants saying that they use LinkedIn – which based on UK population figures, would be closer to half a million than 21 million. We can only guess that perhaps the research question was worded to suggest *recent* usage, rather than having an account, or that the respondants interpreted it that way!

UK Instagram Users 2018

Instagram continues to take on users at an impressive rate globally, hitting 700 million *monthly* users during 2017, which is more than double the total figure from two years ago. The chart below shows just how that solid exponential growth is continuing:

For the UK, the most recent figure we could find came from an eMarketer study, which credited Instagram with 16.7 million monthly users in the UK, up by almost 35% on the previous year.

Oddly named Instagram stats app Napoleoncat gives a figure of 17.2 million, along with the demographic breakdown below:

That chart also really emphasises the dominance of the 18-34 age group on Instagram, once again. It looks as if Instagram advertising will be making a big contribution to parent company Facebook’s revenues very soon – particularly if they increase the “privileges” available to advertisers, such as easier access to link inclusion.

UK Twitter Users 2018

At last! We have a number! For the first time in several years, on of the major stats organisations has pinned a figure to the mast for UK Twitter users. In the same report as above, eMarketer suggests that the UK user base for Twitter is 12.6 million users.

So there we have it – finally confirmation that Twitter has thoroughly lost its place in the Big Three social media sites for the UK. Also, notably, lower than the last official figure provided by Twitter in 2013 (!) of 13 million – so that’s a very long time that Twitter has gone without increasing the user base.

Having said that, it’s still almost 20% of the population, which must easily compete with any of the big daily papers, remains the public discussion platform of choice particularly for “non-visual” topics – politics, science, etc.

The relevant IPSOS Mori data for the demographic breakdown is below. It suggests surely a startlingly high proportion of the youngest age group using Twitter, challenging the common view that Twitter is for older people – and that agrees with the research report we talked about in last year’s roundup.  Is there really a significant cohort of teens using Twitter heavily?!

While Twitter didn’t see fit to give us much more direct information about its UK users, it did let us know what the most retweeted Tweets were for the UK in the last twelve months. Somewhat dispiritingly, first place goes to a plea for free chicken nuggets…

UK Pinterest Users, 2018

So here’s a thing…Pinterest seems to be the only other one of the “established” social media sites that’s still showing strong growth. And it seems to have had a spurt in the last 12 months (unlike Instagram, whose user growth rate has been pretty steady for years).

After quite a while of radio silence, Pinterest broke cover in late 2017 to announce 200 million users worldwide. Which is interesting in itself, but in some ways not as interesting as the comment in the same announcement that this is up “nearly 40%  since last year”.  That’s pretty remarkable.

Pinterest themselves didn’t give much detail about where this growth is coming from, except that it appears to be mostly outside the US (“75% of signups are outside the US”). Gotta love how social media companies divide the whole world into “US” and “everything else” – it’s very common to see stats expressed this way in their announcements!

Graphing up the demographic results from IPSOS again, it’s striking how evenly Pinterest use seems to be spread across all age groups- something unique to this platform.

And that’s it for now, folks! Happy strategy planning for 2018, and if you need help figuring out how to use social media for your business, get in touch!

What is the LinkedIn Insight Tag?

If you’re familiar with Facebook marketing, it’s the Facebook Pixel but for Business to Business marketers. If you’re not: it’s a small snippet of code that you add to your website, which sends a message to LinkedIn whenever one of LinkedIn’s members visits your website. The code looks something like this:

Why do I need a LinkedIn Insight Tag?

Look pretty dull, huh? Well, it’s marketing dynamite. You need that little piece of code because when that LinkedIn member (let’s call her Helen) visits your site, and the Insight Tag lets LinkedIn know about it, Helen is added to a special list. That list is only available to your business, and it will allow you to target adverts directly at Helen, and anyone else who’s visited your site.

This has a ton of advantages, but the biggest ones are 1) you can personalise that ad copy to reference the fact that Helen has visited your site, and even personalise it according to which part of your site she viewed; and 2) you are targeting your ads at a very warm audience (ie, people who are sufficiently interested to have previously visited your site), which means you can afford to spend a little more on them.

And it gets better…

If you’re familiar with the Facebook Pixel, you’ll know that it has been allowing marketers to do that exact same thing for quite a while now. So why is the Insight Tag better? Here’s why.

Imagine that pool of Helens, the people who have visited your website, or maybe just one page about a particular product or service, in the last few months.

Now within that pool, there will be lots of people who aren’t going to be great prospects for you. That could be for lots of reasons, but just a few examples: You have a service that has to be delivered in person, such as consultancy. If your company is in the UK and the website visitor is in, say, Australia – there’s little point in marketing to them. Or, you have a big ticket product that needs buy in from all of the senior team within an organisation, but the person who just visited your site is still a student or a job hunter. They might have been interested in your product for all kinds of reasons, but those reasons wouldn’t include “because they might buy it”.

NOW, this is where the LinkedIn Insight Tag gets more brilliant.  You can filter your pool of Helens so that your adverts are only shown to those within the pool who are in the right geographic location for you, or are sufficiently senior, or are working in a particular sector.

The only tiny “gotcha” around this is that you must have a potential target audience of at least 300 LinkedIn members before your campaign will run, so you have to bear that in mind when setting up your criteria. Having said that, if you set everything up and actually launch the campaign, LinkedIn will start running it when that 300 person threshold is reached – because remember, your initial pool of website visitor is being added to every day. Which brings us to:

Why you need to set up the Insight Tag ASAP

Even if you aren’t planning to do any LinkedIn advertising in the very near future, setting up the Insight Tag sooner rather than later means that that pool of potential advertising targets is starting to fill up, and will be available to you when you do want to. If you wait until the day before you want to run a campaign and then install your Tag, you may (depending on the level of traffic your website gets) be waiting a fair while before the advert starts to get shown.

And one last thing…a cure for the LinkedIn Lurgy

The LinkedIn Lurgy is what we call the nasty surprise that’s waiting for B2B marketers in some sectors, when they try to use  LinkedIn to reach their target audience.  There’s a dirty little secret hidden in LinkedIn’s user figures: a very large proportion of its registered users log in very, very infrequently.  Take a look at the second graph in our UK Social Media Stats for 2016 article.  Whilst around 80% of Facebook’s users log in every single day, that same figure for LinkedIn may be closer to 10%.  Which makes sense, when you think about it; LinkedIn just isn’t such a fun place to be, and for many people, it will sit dormant unless they are actively job hunting.

There are certain sectors and job roles where users are very active – particularly those that involve selling a product or service to other businesses, strangely enough – and professionals in those categories may well use LinkedIn very regularly. So if you are marketing to them, no problem.

If not, how do you use LinkedIn to market to someone who isn’t there? Until now, you didn’t.

But.

A further option within the LinkedIn ad creation progress is to enable something called the LinkedIn Audience Network.  Essentially, that is a set of apps and website where LinkedIn owns, or is leasing, advertising space. Which means that you can use your Insight Tag, plus criteria filtering, to target your perfect prospect – and then market to him or her even if they never actually visit LinkedIn.

LinkedIn says that all the apps and sites in its Audience Network are “Brand Safe” – that is, not adult or otherwise inappropriate for professional content – but as you can see, you can also exclude certain categories if you want to have closer control over where your content appears.

So, there you have it. If you’re a B2B business, you need to get down and cosy with the LinkedIn Insight Tag pronto, and start filling up that lovely pool of warm prospects.