The best social media platform for brands in 2013
A recent study reviewed different brands on social media that had more than 25 fans, abd it looked at the 4 most popular platforms; Facebook, Twitter, Google+ and Instagram. The study, carried out by SumAll, revealed that Instagram came out on top, for being the best platform for brands.
SumAll is an analytics tool which analyses over a 100,000 businesses on social networks, checking over 290 billion actions a year. “With increases in fan/follower engagement nearly three times that of other networks studied, Instagram is the clear winner for 2013”, SumAll CEO, Dan Atkinson, said. From here, it sounds as if you have a physical and visual product, you should be on Instagram. Otherwise, you'd be missing out on important brand awareness and revenue.
From the study, you can see that Instagram created more new followers in 2013. Brands which were on Instagram have seen on average a growth of 7% on engagement and new followers. U.S brands on Instagram have also said the platform had created an extra 5% in revenue as well. But this wasn't only isolated to the US brands in the UK have found that Instagram has caused nearly a 4% rise in revenue.
However, Instagram isn't the only platform that is solely with the likes of Tumblr and Pinterest being very popular, with Pinterest being the fastest growing network in 2013 and also being the best network at driving traffic to your desired destination. So next year we could be left with a different leader. It justs shows the popularity of theses picture platforms and how well they are doing.
Many critics will then look to Twitter to see that certain brands have millions of followers and post near enough every hour of the day with a mixture of different content from headlines to photo's. This is where it could be the downfall of Twitter, as many users see their favourite celeb promoting a specific product. From here they will now know that this celebrity is endorsing this product and sending the same message out to a huge amount of followers, however, 9 times out 10 these celebs have been paid to promote that product. Which is something everyone will know.
Platforms such as Instagram and Pinterest have created organic engagement which everyone can see it's not fake, which again makes brands even more popular as they are perceived as being well liked by the public.
So, whatever happens in 2014, in 2013 we have learnt that visual stimulation is a great way to create awareness for your brand. However, you may have different preferred platform for your business. The best way to get results is to experiment until you find out what works best for your brand. This could be posting a different range of content, or something specific. Using several platforms or just using a few. The only way to find out what works best is by trying everything.
Alex is part of the marketing team at Social Media Frontiers; he also runs his own blog where you can see this article and others at Alex talks Social Media.
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The best social media platform for brands in 2013
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Reviewed by Alex Carson
on
Monday, December 16, 2013
Rating:
Alex Carson
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