Social Intelligence Stories that Caught Our Attention: Volume Two

Here’s the stories that caught our attention across the web week of 22^nd April.  This week we've got the death of Like counts, American’s use of Twitter, the inflated importance of social media, marketers making things more difficult than they need to be and the latest market size, status and focus reports.

Pew Research Explore How American’s Use Twitter

22% of U.S. adults use Twitter.  To better understand how they use Twitter, a new Pew Research Centre study asked permission to analyse these Twitter accounts and quantified how they use Twitter.  The research looked at tweets, likes, follower and followings.

This is the Centre’s first study of Twitter behaviour that’s based on a representative sample of U.S. adults who use the platform.  Here’s some highlights:

1. The most prolific tweeters, those in the top 10% by the number of tweets, are responsible for 80% of all tweets created by U.S. adults.

2. Most U.S. adult Twitter users don’t engage much – two tweets a month, one favourite tweet a month, follows 89 accounts and has 25 followers.

3. The most prolific tweeters are likely to be women.

Read more about the study and results here.

Is Social Media All-Powerful Because We Can Measure It?

Those of us who have been working in social media and social data from the start will remember the joyous praise from marketers that came with being able to measure social media engagement.  Engagement, Reach, Impressions and Share of Voice quickly become key KPIs but to what end?

In this Forbes article, Kalev Leetaru believes that the metric-driven society we live in that we naturally gravitate towards the things we can most easily measure.  We have to agree that social media’s rise to stardom has been the ability to access and measure the data, but are we really measuring the right things?

Leetaru questions whether social media is really that influential or that we believe it is more influential than it is because we can easily measure it.  What’s your thoughts?

Swiftly followed on by….

Instagram Thinking About Hiding Like Counts

What’s in a like?  A big dopamine hit and a lot of competition.  And, following from Leetaru’s article, a metric we can measure that might not hold that much importance.

In the spirit of reducing pressure on Instagram and encouraging time well spent, it seems the Like counts will only be seen by the post author.  While not if official testing yet, the new design feature was reported on TechCruch, with Instagram saying:

“we want your followers to focus on what you share, not how many like your post gets.  During this test, only the person who shares a post will see the total number of likes it gets”

They describe the small design change as having a large potential impact on a user’s well-being:

“hiding Like counts could reduce herd mentality, where people just like what’s already got tons of likes.  It could reduce the sense of competition on Instagram, since users won’t compare their own counts with those of more popular friends or superstar creators.  And it could encourage creators to post what feels most authentic rather than trying to rack up likes for everyone to see”

So, what does the change mean for measuring social media engagement?

Are Marketers Making Things Harder Than They Need to be?

Are marketers making things more difficult than they have to when targeting their core customer demographics?

Jim Matorin from SMARKETING thinks so.  In his latest psychographic profiling article across at SMRA he stats that:

“marketers are over processing when it comes to consumer targeting”.

With all the new advances in technology and data analysis, we are entering a new wave of ability to target consumers – through psychographic profiling.

Psychographic profiling isn’t new, but it has been difficult to do and costly, with the advances in technology this is changing, and psychographic analysis can become more mainstream.

With the mountains of data being gathered about consumers, there lies a lack of clarity about what information [and data points] are important in business decision-making, and consumer targeting.  It’s not about analysing all the data but analysing the right data, the question is, do you have the knowledge to know what is meaningful or meaningless?

Social Analytics Marketing Forecasts

A number of market forecast reports have been recently published.

QYReports

The new forecast for 2019-2025 by QYReports looks at the global social analytics for marketing leader market analysis by technological advancement, regional outlook and forecast to 2026.  They profiled learning companies, including, NetBase, Brandwtch, Oracle, Sysomos, Crimson Hexagon, Digimind, Socialbakers, Sprinklr, Adobe, and Synthesio.

Read more about the QYReports here.

Future Market Insights

The new Future Market Insights report looks at the Social Media Analytics Market: Global Industry Analysis and Opportunity Assessment 2017-2027.  Future Market Insights explores segmentation on the basis of social media analysis applications:

- Customer behaviour analysis
- Multi-channel campaign management
- Digital marketing management
- Performance measurement
- Analyzed report generation

Read more about the Future Market Insights report here.

QYResearch

QYResearch released a new report on the Social Media Listening and Monitoring Tool Market Overview and Forecast Report 2019.  Key players mentions are HubSpot, SharpSpring, Zoho social, Wrike, YouScan, Awario, Hootsuite Media, Sprout Social, Salesforce, Mention, Sprinklr, Sysomos, Critical Mention, Digitmind, LexisNexis.

Read more about the QYResearch report here.

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