Yes, the internet is vast. Yes there’s a lot of stuff happening on it all the time. When you throw 2.4 billion people on a single network – activity is to be expected. How much activity though? Last year, DOMO created a really nifty infographic showcasing what goes on every minute on the internet. And because they’re such great guys, they decided to do one for this year as well. Here’s the infographic!
Once you’re done pinning it to your social media board on Pinterest (3,472 will be pinned this very minute) or in real life, let’s just take a look at some of the staggering numbers of what happens every minute on the internet shall we?
Some of them, didn’t baffle me as much as the others. When I took a look at the following, I was expecting them to be fairly high:
Pandora Users Listen to 61,141 hours of music. That equates to about 3,668,460 minutes of music. Which in my brain – translates to those many users actually listening to music. Since Pandora has over 200 million users (as of August 2013, should have grown more) – that means about 1.8% of their audience is listening to music. This number should probably be higher actually.
E-Mail Users Send 204,00,000 Messages: I can get behind this. Primarily because this probably also accounts for all that spam sent, all those newsletter, those promotional materials, those invites, those e-mails sent between co-workers and what not. Not that big for a global scale.
Skype Users Connect for 23,300 Hours: This translates to about 1,398,000 minutes – which translates to 1.39 million users on Skype each minute. Keyword here is “connect”. Does this mean an active conversation or a call? Or just being signed on?
Google Receives Over 4,000,000 Search Queries: This should definitely be higher. People ask way too many stupid questions, can we please have this go to more like 40 million queries by next year? Thanks all.
Here are some that made me go, “WHAT?!” when I saw them, and I was a little skeptical.
WhatsApp Users Share 347,222 Photos: That’s just crazy. These aren’t being put up on a “network” for others to see – these are personal photos. That’s a huge amount for every single minute!
Amazon Makes $83,000 In Sales: … how do I get a piece of this action?
YouTube Users Upload 72 Hours of New Video: STOP THE MADNESS!
Vine Users Share 8,333 Videos: For a network that’s not that big with a lot of “lurkers” – this is a massive amount of videos.
Facebook Users Share 2,460,000 Pieces of Content: Every minute? I’m aware that BuzzFeed goes viral every couple of minutes, but this number is crazy. No wonder they had to tweak the newsfeed algorithm.
Of course – most stats there are mind boggling for sure, but for every minute on the internet – these numbers are just… I don’t even know what to say. Incomprehensible? Some of them might just be, but they just show how much humans like to network, share, distribute and be heard.
Now for the million dollar question – how much of that content gets engagement every minute? 😉 The only way to find an answer to this million dollar question is to use a social listening platform that can track engagement on social platforms on a real time basis.
The talk of the town for the last couple of months has been Facebook’s decision to slash the organic reach of brand pages down to about 3-5%. Some have managed to sustain a slightly higher level of organic reach, and most have complained of it being even lower.
There’s a strong belief that organic reach will be down to zero soon. In my mind – it’s already at zero. The debate of how to get more organic reach is one that’s null and pointless, elevating your reach from 1-2% to 4-5% after testing and optimizing over a period of weeks isn’t a triumphant feat, it’s a waste of time.
Courtesy: Marketing Interactive
The message from Facebook is clear – Facebook is pay to play. And while everyone will look to flock to other social networks, LinkedIn included, there’s no reason why organic reach on any other network will be high after their newsfeeds get crowded by marketers.
Now that the message to marketers is clear, the action on your part should be clear as well. If you’re going to continue posting to a Facebook page, make sure you throw a little money behind it as well. Unless you do, barely anyone will see your posts, and if no one is seeing your posts, why should you put them up?
Do one of two things. Post content on your page and put a little bit of money behind it, or don’t post content to your page at all. Cut down posting a piece of content every day, to 2 – 3 pieces a week. And even putting as little as $5 behind those posts to an extremely targeted audience will be wildly beneficial.
Some social media experts have asked many to increase the number of posts they make on their page, not realizing that that very practice is what\’s got us into this mess in the first place.
The very first thing that you’ll be told, or what your gut instinct will say, will be to put money behind the posts that will eventually get sales for your business. After all, why should you spend money on marketing if you won’t get eventual sales?
Remember why you have a Facebook page in the first place. Remember why you’ve always been creating content before the organic reach mayhem. Not all of it was for sales, or to drive your fans to your product. No. It was for brand awareness, for engagement, to understand your audience better, to build a community, and to connect them to you.
At present, here’s how most people think of their spending on content in an era where each piece of content needs a little financial backing.
Posts 2 and 3 here were promoted, one with $5 and the other with $10 – eventually getting the page a massive amount of reach for both those posts. Posts 1, 4, and 5 – weren’t promoted. Now tell me something.
Out of all of these posts – which post did fans like the most? Can there be a definitive answer? Can you, through these 5 posts, tell what kind of content your fans like the most? You can’t. The ones that weren’t promoted barely reached anyone, so there isn’t a big enough sample size to say that yes – this post was liked and my audience likes these posts.
Posts 2 and 3 were promoted, and they reached a huge amount of people – so no matter what the like share comment count on them is, you’ll never know if these posts did well or not because their success here is attributed to the fact that you put some money behind it.
What you should be doing, is putting a certain amount of money behind each and every one of your posts.
So if you put $10 behind every one of your posts, eventually, you’ll end up something like this, right?
Wrong.
What you\’ll actually end up with, will resemble something along these lines:
After putting $10 behind each post and targeting them to the same audience over the same period of time, you’ll get varying results with each of them. Putting a bit of money behind a post will only get it to a certain amount of people. Whether or not a massive chunk of other people see it or not is dependent on these initial people you\’ve targeted.
How people react to it, and whether or not they like, share, and comment on it will be dependent on the quality of your post.
While paying for reach will get you eyeballs, it will not get you engagement and further reach – which at this stage, can be considered organic on top of your paid reach.
Engagement always has and always will depend on the quality of your content. Based on the little experiment above, you should decide to stop creating posts like Post 1 and Post 4, and focus more on creating posts like Post 3 and Post 5 – and maybe experiment a little more with Post 2.
Currently, by exposing posts to 1-3% of your audience and putting a little bit of money behind specific posts, and analyzing that data, you’re taking shots in the dark. You simply don’t have enough data anymore. By putting a little bit of spending behind every post you create, you’re in a far better position to gauge what kind of content your fans still like the best and what excites them the most. It also ensures that in the future – you spend time creating only the content that your fans like and will engage with.
Because the reality of the situation is that organically your posts are reaching no one, and if you’re going to put a little bit of money behind the posts – you should make sure that the posts are worth putting money behind.
In essence, what you\’re doing here is paying a little bit of money to get the old organic reach back for you – and also getting yourself into the habit of creating only good content which your fans will relate to, engage with and help build your brand and following.
Exponential growth is nothing new. With the advent of websites like Upworthy and BuzzFeed, it’s pretty much become the norm these days. Regardless, Instagram\’s trajectory over the last six months seems to be… a little more than just exponential growth.
In a release today, the Facebook owned company announced that they’d hit 200 million active monthly users. If you remember, when Facebook first acquired Instagram – Zuck said that he’d be happy if Instagram hit 100 million users – but now that number has been doubled.
The best part for the company however, is that 50 million of these users, all signed up in the last six months. It’s an extremely healthy growth rate, and given the revenue Instagram is generating via ads on an ever expanding service, not a lot of people feel that Facebook overpaid for Instagram when they shelled out a cool billion.
We put together an infographic that talks about a few of the interesting stats that might interest you about Instagram.
Instagram Hits 200 Million Users.
With this reported increase in the usage of the service, no doubt you\’re thinking about porting your brand over to Instagram and spreading the word about your business. It\’s important to remember however, that the majority of Instagram users are between the ages of 18-29.
So if you\’re looking at generating interest around your mutual fund investment plan, Instagram is probably not for you. Regardless, if you’re still looking at gaming Instagram, here are a couple of things you should keep in mind:
Always find a balance between business and casual posts. Instagram users will not follow you if all you talk about is your business. They also want to take a look at the fun stuff you do, the human stuff you do. I mean, it won’t hurt if you tweet a picture of a Starbucks coffee every now and then.
Use Video. Video is one of the most engaging content formats, it\’s also one of the laziest to view – which is why Instagram’s demographic loves it. Quick, snappy, short videos on Instagram will do so much good for your business.
Run Instagram Contests. Always a good idea to get a new following by generating interest around a contest.
Integrate Facebook and Instagram. While there are tons of ways to do this – the best way is to use Circus Social’s Cover Photo Live app, it allows you to pull images from a particular hashtag on Instagram onto your Facebook page’s cover photo and generate a collage – spiffy.
Please also engage. Don\’t broadcast. Engage with your fans. Make them feel special. It makes me feel silly saying this over and over again – but please do so!
Make Sure You\’re Visual. Don\’t forget Instagram is an incredibly visual network. No one pays attention to the text. It’s images + hashtags – and that\’s where you win your following.
Move with the Trends. Always focus on what\’s trending on Instagram and create timely content around it. No one likes a boring brand.
Have you been using Instagram for a business? What\’s your experience been like and what tips would you give to other social managers?
While many remain skeptical about the popularity or eventual success of Google+, I for one am quite happy with the experience Google+ provides. I’m a part of some interesting communities where I often find interesting discussion taking place, and often it’s a little more fun to go through my Google+ feed rather than my Twitter feed because it\’s a lot more visual.
Today, I noticed that Google+ had taken a leaf out of Facebook’s book, and had changed the way link-shares were being displayed. After sharing an article about Moz, I noticed that the image being shown in the share was a lot larger than I had previously encountered across Google+.
Here’s what the post looks like:
For someone who rejoiced when Facebook started showing larger images in link-share posts, this was one of the pieces in the Google+ puzzle that has given me considerable satisfaction. I won’t quote the 500 stats about how images get shared more than text and all that drivel, because we\’re all well aware of this fact. People like visuals, and Google+ just made that tiny change to give us a more visual feed.
I took a look at some other pages to see what their posts looked like, and sure enough, one of Mashable’s recent shares also has a nice large image attached to the link:
The change doesn’t seem to have affected link-shares posted earlier. Here’s one of my previously shared posts:
As you can see, it still has a fairly small image showing up in the preview, even though the source image is large enough for Google+ to spread it across like it’s doing with newer link-shares.
Previously, I found myself attaching images to Google+ posts just to attract peoplezs attention, but now since the visual is being given a considerable amount of space in the post preview – hopefully we can focus a little more on what truly matters – the content.
Like every other social media content strategist out there, I have Moz’s blog in my RSS feed and I follow them on Twitter. They come up with some pretty nifty content all the time, and at least for me, are the most trustworthy source for SEO information out there. I’ve always held them in high stead for being classy in whatever they do, and yesterday when the Moz site went down, my respect for them didn’t fall and their image in my mind was not tarnished.
If anything, I respect them a little more for how they handled the situation.
To be honest, I wasn’t aware that Moz was down. My Twitter feed threw up the following tweet.
So Moz was down. And they announced it on Twitter – that’s what most people would do. And the Moz community was quite understanding. No one flamed them (as far as I know) – and Moz could have left it at that. Plenty of visitors could have waited.
But you know what Moz did while they couldn’t provide them with engagement on the website? They provided them with engagement anyway.
That was pretty nifty. Users were free to interact with Moz on Twitter, ask them questions and keep them engaged. Instead of the users wandering off onto other websites, and coming back to check Moz later, they could continue to interact with Moz on Twitter, have some casual conversation which otherwise is hard to get with an account as busy as Moz’s.
And that could have been enough – but it wasn’t. They continued.
Instead of just asking fans to interact – Moz started giving their followers some thing to respond to, something humorous, something to entertain them with. And it wasn’t just them broadcasting these messages, they took out the time to respond to their followers and continued to engage with them in replies.
And they continued to acknowledge that the Twitter account interaction was by no means a complete substitute for the website, but just a temporary stand-in.
In fact, even if fans were in desperate need to read an article because they needed to reference it for a client project or for some important research that they were doing to make a decision for their website, Moz provided them with a guide on how they can achieve the same.
By this point, I was thoroughly impressed. They were covering all of their bases, and Moz just reminded me yet again why I hold them in such high stead all the time.
This is an example of absolutely quality customer service and being on the ball. My learnings, summarized:
Acknowledge a mistake from your end. If your website is down, don’t try and get it fixed and leave no trace of it on Twitter. Be gracious to your followers and let them know that you are aware of a problem are fixing it.
Take the time out to keep them engaged on another platform if one goes down. After all, since you forced yourself to have a presence on Facebook, Twitter, Google+, Instagram, Vine and everything else on the planet – this is a great way to leverage those platforms and make use of them.
Don’t engage for the sake of engaging. Respond to their questions and comments, give them fresh content on the other platforms to engage with and keep them occupied.
Don’t forget about the initial problem. Keep providing updates on how the initial problem is being handled, don\’t just shelve it and hope that your fans and followers forget about it.
Hats off to the Moz team for their pro-activeness over the last 24 hours, and turning what could have been a blemish on the Moz image to something that elevates it even higher.
