The freshest social media marketing stats in the world

These stats are pretty beefy

Not to state the obvious again, but marketing on social media is pretty darn important for your business. The social media experts over at Buffer just completed a study of over 100,000 brands and how they use social media. Take notes!

Buffer looked at over 14 million tweets, 2 million Facebook updates, and data from Pinterest, Google Plus, and LinkedIn to “figure out how brands have been sharing to social media over the past 12 months.” They found that Twitter and Facebook are still dominating the social media scene, with almost 80 percent of brands’ online posts appearing on Twitter. This makes sense, considering these social media giants have the largest active user bases of any sites online.

Most popular places to post and engage

Twitter is particularly conducive to posting multiple times per day, and indeed, Buffer found that brands posted an average of 18 posts per week on Twitter. Meanwhile brands are posting to Facebook at a slower rate, about once per day.

Buffer also looked at which types of posts generated the most engagement, including clicks, likes, and shares.

As you might suspect, Facebook video posts are winning the day, with users engaging with Facebook videos three times as often as any other kind of content.

Interestingly, Facebook links generate more engagement than photos, perhaps because, when you post a link on Facebook, the site chooses a large photo and some metadata from the link for the post. This creates a very eye-catching visual for the newsfeed.

Recommendations for the most out of your SM

Despite the fact that Facebook video still leads engagement by a significant margin, brands are still underutilizing video. In fact, less than one percent of posts from brands on Facebook are video. Most posts on Facebook are links, and indeed, on all social media sites, at least 50 percent of brands’ posts are links.

This makes sense, considering that the goal behind most social media marketing campaigns is to lead customers to your website. However, links are still in second place as far as engagement on Facebook and Twitter, so while links will always be a mainstay, Buffer recommends coming up with creative ways to share more videos on Facebook, and more photos on Twitter.

Buffer also points out that other sites like Pinterest and LinkedIn are somewhat neglected when it comes to social media marketing. LinkedIn users seem to be a league of their own – many of them don’t use Twitter or other social media sites, so you may want to consider tailoring a marketing campaign specifically to LinkedIn users.

And don’t forget Pinterest!

Meanwhile, a study by Shopify found that 87 percent of Pinterest users had purchased a product the found on Pinterest, and the brands on Pinterest that post multiple times per day have experienced steady growth in engagement.

In a nutshell: post more videos, and while focusing on Twitter and Facebook, don’t forget to hit up LinkedIn and Pinterest.

#SocialMediaMarketing