The growth of social media

Social media around the world

Social media has become a central part of modern life around the world. Our planet is well connected, with half of the world’s population considered a social media active user.

Smartphone adoption also continues to rise, particularly in less developed countries. We now have over 5 billion unique mobile users.

Facebook and Instagram

As of 2019, 96% of Facebook users access the platform on their mobile phones or tablet.

Despite being the protagonist of some major privacy scandals, Facebook continues to expand in all geographical regions and age ranges. It is estimated it will soon reach 2.5 billion monthly active users (MAUs).

Facebook and Instagram’s advertising reach continues to grow, whilst Twitter and Snapchat have seen a decline. Nonetheless, all key platforms remain highly viable and effective means of reaching specific audiences with targeted messages.

Spreading awareness of your brands

As the world spends an increasing amount of time in online social spaces, you should take the opportunity to be part of this conversation and add value to people’s lives.

In doing so, you can spread awareness of your brand and drive valuable actions such as engagement, data capture and sales.

The rules of engagement

However, as social media has matured into an established media channel the rules of engagement have moved on, and not all brands have caught up.

Essentially, your mission is to provide value to the people who discover your content. This means that your posts on social media can no longer be solely about you, your company or your products. This is not what people want and it will not generate engagement.

How to attract interest

To attract interest, your content should be one of two things – useful or entertaining. You can either meet the informational needs of your audience, providing them with how-to tips, showing them new things they didn’t know about or sharing your unique knowledge.

Or, you can entertain them, by sharing media that fascinates, amuses, emotes or tells a story.

That doesn’t necessarily mean that you can never be promotional. Many marketers work to the ’80/20 rule’; posting content that asks for nothing 80% of the time, then promoting your products or services the remaining 20% of the time.

Although, even this approach is feeling increasingly inflexible and outdated.