Which social networks have the most user engagement these days?

Changes in the social media world

Getting the most out of your social media strategy means that you need to pay attention to the demographics of the average user. Social media is the biggest way to interact with your customer on a regular basis because so many people utilize it.

While Facebook continues to dominate the market, reaching 81 percent of the population, just in the United States. Its users spend nearly 230 billion minutes on the site. That is 18 times the amount of the next biggest network, Instagram, which incidentally, Facebook acquired in 2012.

In a survey released by comScore, the 2105 U.S. Digital Future in Focus, they examined the digital trends of social media, by looking at how the companies stack up against each other today. Google+ reaches 38 percent of the digital population, which is similar to Twitter (36 percent), LinkedIn (37 percent), and Instagram (34 percent), but the engagement in minutes by the population shows a much different story.

Instagram’s users have over 12,000 million minutes where they are engaged with the app. LinkedIn users – 1,697 million minutes. Google+ 2,426 million minutes. Twitter – 6,649 minutes. Although LinkedIn has a greater percentage of reach, its users do not engage with it as often as just about every other social network that was surveyed.

Audience penetration and engagement are just one part of the story

Every social network has a different target audience. If you want to reach professionals and college graduates, LinkedIn is the place to go. Instagram tends to be popular with the younger generation. Just recently, Slate reported that teachers are using Pinterest to find ideas for presenting material to their class. There are plenty of analytics available to see who is being reached through a particular social media site.

When your business is creating a marketing strategy for social media, you need to know what your target audience is, and what the outcome of your strategy is. You can measure goals and see a better return on your investment when you make the right choices based on who you want to reach. Don’t evaluate sites on just the number of users it has.

Facebook may be the biggest network, but you could get lost in the sheer number of ads and posts that run through it every day. Make sure that you are looking at the entire picture.

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