Findings from the Pew 2018 Teens and Social Media Report

It seems to be a common refrain that teens are on social media constantly, and are more wired than any generation that came before. But what does that really mean? The Pew Research Center recently published a new report about teens and social media use that illuminates this group's real habits on social media and attitudes toward technology.

One of the most interesting findings to me was the distribution of what social media networks that US teens aged 13-17 actually used. Other reports showed that Facebook was losing traction among younger demographics, and this finding was supported by the Pew report. Of the teens surveyed, 85% said they used YouTube, 72% Instagram, 69% Snapchat and only 51% used Facebook. Snapchat was the most used platform for 35% of the teens, followed by 32% who favored YouTube and 15% Instagram. In Pew's last teen survey, in 2015, 71% of teens were on Facebook.

This report also highlighted teen's typical technology use. A staggering 95% of teens had access to smartphones, up from 73% in 2015. An increased amount of teens (45%) in 2018 also stated that they were "almost constantly" online, up from 24% in 2015. The teens also voiced a mixed view on how social media had influenced their lives. Of those surveyed, 40% of teens felt that social media made it easier to connect with friends and family, while 27% felt that social media made it easier to spread rumors and bullying messages. For more findings and the complete report, visit Pew's website.

Top 5 Social Media Scheduling Tools

it's easy to feel overwhelmed when managing your social media presence, especially when you are managing multiple sets of networks, sites and accounts. The top way I've found to make things easier to handle these overlapping demands is to utilize a scheduling tool. These tools allow you to schedule posts in advance to multiple social media networks and to assess your posts' performance. What's not to like?

There are many options out there to help you schedule your social media posts, but here are some of my favorites. Each of these programs listed below has a free trial as well as paid options, and can publish to the major social media networks (Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and LinkedIn), but there are some important ways in which each of these tools differ. Do you use a social media scheduling tool?

• Buffer. Buffer is probably the simplest and most intuitive social media scheduling tool to use of the bunch. If you have never tried social media scheduling, I would recommend that you start here. You can schedule and analyze posts across networks with ease, and the analytics (which focus on engagement) are easy to understand. Additionally, Buffer has a smart scheduling feature that picks the optimal times of day to publish, based on past post performance.

• Hootsuite. Hootsuite was the first social media scheduler I ever used many years ago, and it is still is at the top of the pack. One of its unique value propositions is that you can do bulk scheduling by uploading as many as many 350 posts at once from an external .csv file. Additionally, Hootsuite is also compatible with a wider range of social networks than pretty much any other tool (30+ app integrations).

• CoSchedule. CoSchedule focuses on content in addition to scheduling, which is a bit different from other social media schedulers, and you can categorize, analyze, re-post and sort the content you utilize. CoSchedule also has a particularly robust content calendar where you can organize your entire marketing calendar and projects (seen above).

• Sprout Social. In Sprout Social you also have the ability to create teams with different access levels, and a calendar that gives you a view of all your upcoming posts graphically. However, where Sprout Social really excels is with its reports, which are sophisticated and in-depth. You can even produce individual-level performance reports.

• AgoraPulse. In addition to scheduling, AgoraPulse excels at helping you manage customer relationships, with a suite of tools for social media monitoring. You can answer messages within the tool (including comments on ads) and keep track of customer interactions on each social media network with ease.

What are the most popular social media sites in 2017?

The social network landscape is always in a state of flux, however certain sites seem to have stabilized as clear user favorites over the years. As of 2017, many of the top social media sites have been around for several years (Instagram, Snapchat), and many have been around for a decade or more (Facebook, Youtube, Twitter). So who reigns supreme in terms of popularity in 2017?

The Pew Research Center conducted a comprehensive survey of social media site use, and found that Facebook was the most popular social media site for online Americans overall at 79% (it is also the most popular social media network worldwide). Facebook was followed distantly by Instagram and Pinterest at around 30% each. LinkedIn and Twitter reached 29% and 24% respectively. However, there are some differences in social media site use among different age groups, as you might expect. Pew found that Facebook use was high among all demographics that had internet access, but had reached the highest level of use among the youngest age group (88% of 18-29 year-olds). However, even the 65+ age group had 62% Facebook users (among those who were online).

Sprout Social surveyed a cross-section of study of 1,000 Millennials, Gen-Xers and Baby Boomers, and the results are telling. In terms of most popular social networks, Facebook came out on top for all 3 demographics, though, Facebook was not favored as strongly by millennials (33% chose Facebook as top pick), followed by Instagram (22.2%) and Snapchat (15.8%). It is also interesting to note that even within demographics, there was a divergence in opinions. Younger millennials - those aged 18-24 - favored Instagram over Facebook.

Of course, use of multiple networks is the norm, and Pew found that a majority of internet users are on at least one social media network, a finding corroborated by Tracx. Do these statistics ring true with your experience? Do you think Facebook still reigns supreme?

How do different generations interact with brands on social media?

When we hear about the latest trends in social media, it is sometimes hard to know exactly who the findings apply to. Does everyone behave in a certain way? Just millennials? Or Baby Boomers? Fortunately, some recent studies with larger sample sizes have helped demystify the demographic breakdowns of certain social media behaviors. Sprout Social recently conducted a study of 1,000 Millennials, Gen-Xers and Baby Boomers to see if there were similarities and differences in the way that they interacted with brands on social media. Marketing Sherpa surveyed 2,000 people across generations on their brand interactions in a similar study in 2015.

Sprout found that Millennials and Gen-Xers were twice as likely to follow a brand on social media than Baby Boomers (around 50% vs around 25%). I am a little surprised to see that at most only 50% of people self-report as following brands, but I suspect that the classification of a "brand" is blurred, especially with influencers on social media promoting brands through their personal accounts. Marketing Sherpa found a higher percentage of brand followers: 35% of those 55-64 and 35% of 65+, compared to 95% of 18-34, 92% of 35-44 and 85% of 45-54. The overall trend of younger generations being more tapped into brands on social media continues in terms of interaction levels. In Sprout's findings, about 30% of Gen-Xers and Millennials interact with brands on a monthly basis vs. 14% of Baby Boomers. 

Though it is sometimes hard to translate social media activity to sales, each demographic in Sprout's study said that they were more likely to purchase a product from a brand they follow on social (67% Gen-X, 60% Millennials and 51% of Baby Boomers). Across the board, 71% of those surveyed said that a positive interaction with a brand on social would make them more likely to buy from that brand in the future. On the flip side, brand behavior that was viewed unfavorably would result in an unfollow. Baby Boomers reacted most negatively to what they perceived as spam, while all demographics took exception to offensive posts or those deemed "annoying." The types of posts that appealed most to all demographics, according to Marketing Sherpa, are coupons, and other similar incentives. A major takeaway from each of these studies is that online interactions really do matter, and positive brand experiences extend to social media, a finding backed up by other research. 

How to conduct a social media audit

Before you or you company is join a new social media network or launch a social media marketing campaign, it is a good idea to do a social media audit. So what is a social media audit? Despite the intimidating name, the social media audit process is basically just taking stock of all of your social media properties and assessing how well you are doing on each of them. Here are 5 easy steps to get you well on your way to completing a social media audit.

1. Take stock of all of your social media accounts

The first step is to create a spreadsheet with all of your social media accounts, their URLs, the last date you have posted, the frequency of posting, and the number of followers. You may also include other columns related to metrics you may be tracking on each platform, like referrals to your website, or changes in followers over time. You can create your own custom spreadsheet, but you can also find examples of social media audit templates online. Buffer has shared a great Google Doc that you can copy for your own audit, as seen below. This step of the process is also a good time to consolidate all of your passwords for every social media account, and if you are working with a team, verify who has access to each platform and who is responsible for updating each account.

2. Perform a search on social media and Google.

Though you probably will be up to date with the social media accounts that you are updating regularly, there may be some accounts that have fallen by the wayside over the years (Tumblr, Flickr, etc.). During a social media audit, it is important to do a search on social media networks to check to see if you are missing any accounts that may have gone dormant or have been started before you joined the team. If you have a larger company, others (both affiliated with the company or not) may have even started unofficial pages, or these may have been automatically created.

3. Check your branding

It is important at this stage to make sure that your visual and content branding is consistent across all social media networks. Make sure you have the most current logo and brand identity on each page. It's also important to make sure you have appropriately sized backgrounds and headers for each social media network - since these sizes actually change pretty often. Sprout Social has an always-updated guide to these social media picture sizes. Beyond images, it is useful to make sure your contact information and biography are up-to-date and that your tone is consistent across platforms.

4. Assess how these sites are reaching your desired targets

This part is a bit more qualitative and requires that you engage with your current social media strategy. Example questions you and your team may want to ask are:

• What is the target market for each of these sites?
• Who are we hoping to reach? Are we reaching them?
• How will we know if we are successful? 
• What are our goals on each platform?

You can check how you are doing on your goals, by checking your metrics for each of the social media networks you are active on. Twitter and Facebook, for example offer detailed, downloadable analytics from within their own dashboards.

5. Revise your plan...or not

At this stage you may find that some of your social media platforms could use some work, or perhaps you may be able to identify a gap that would be filled by joining another social media network. Through this audit process you will be able to make more informed decisions on next steps for your current networks, as well as when it is time to expand or consolidate your social media efforts. There is also no singular way to conduct an audit, and a lot of the process depends on your specific objectives and goals.

Developing a social media audit may seem like an involved process, especially depending on how detailed you want to get with metrics - but it is manageable! And it is worth it for the added peace of mind before making any big social media decisions. If you or your company needs any help conducting a full social media audit - New Median can help!

How much time do people spend on social media?

Social media seems to be ubiquitous - but just how much of a factor is it in an average person's daily life? According to the 2016 Nielsen Social Media Report - it turns out that Americans spent an average of 36% more time on social media in 2016 than they did in 2015. Statista also corroborated that time spent on social media is on the rise, and those surveyed spent an average of just under 2 hours per day on social media in 2016, an amount that has increased each year. Global Web Index places the time spent on social media in 2016 at 1 hour and 50 minutes, which is 30% of all online time.

Nielsen found that the heaviest users spent over 3 hours a day on social media. According to Nielsen's report, the average time spent on social media by adults 18 and up is is 5.5 hours per week (seen below). This accounts for 22% of all media use surveyed (both on and offline). In a fact that is perhaps surprising, the youngest users surveyed were not the ones that spent the most time on social media. In fact, it was Generation X (ages 35-49) who clocked in with the most time  - almost 7 hours per week. Millennials spend just over 6 hours per week on social media. Females surveyed also spent more time on social media than males, and this was a larger percentage of all of their media consumption (25% vs. 19%).

What does social media use look like worldwide?

Being based in the US, it's easy to stay in the American social media bubble, but from time to time I like to see what is going on in the global social media space. For companies that have the potential to work internationally, or already are international, keeping up with worldwide social media trends is absolutely essential.

Internet use worldwide continues to grow, according to Hootsuite and We are Social's "Digital in 2017" report, half of the world's population now has access to the internet. However, the percentage of internet users is still highest in North America and Europe (though East Asia has the most internet users, numerically). Following on the heels of greater Internet use, social media is also growing across the globe, and is now at 34%, or over 2.5 billion users. An interesting finding is that most people worldwide access social media through their mobile phones - a staggering 91%.

So what are the most popular social media channels? Some are names you might recognize readily, but others are more local. Perhaps unsurprisingly, messaging apps are among the most widely used social networking tools. According to Statisa, Facebook is first in active users worldwide (as of January 2017), followed by the messaging apps WhatsApp and Facebook Messenger. The top 5 is rounded out by 2 Chinese messaging apps: QQ and WeChat. Worldwide, The Global Web Index found that the average internet user in 2016 has 7 social media accounts, up from just 2.5 in 2012.

Though the sheer number of social media users in China sometimes obscures other regional social media networks, there are may robust non-English social media networks that have taken root. Hootsuite has a nice roundup of some of the most popular social messaging apps and networks including VK in Russia, Tuenti in Spain and Line in Japan. Vincos looked at the use of social media networks worldwide, excluding messaging apps, to give a different picture of the most used social networks in each country. Here, Facebook appears more dominant worldwide, with notable exceptions being VK in Russia and QQ's social network Q Zone in China. LinkedIn and Instagram were also more popular than Facebook in parts of Africa.

To drill down even more specifically, I recently came across a great report for those interested in the non-profit sector. Non-Profit Tech for Good surveyed nonprofits across the globe about the internet and social media use. Do you make use of any non-US based social media networks? Does your organization?

5 Easy Ways To Repurpose Your Content

If you are a content producer, you already know that it takes a lot of hard work to develop blog posts, white papers and reports. So after you've done all that work and posted it, what comes next? Repurpose it into other social media posts of course! Why bother to repurpose? The shortest answer is: audience. Posting content in new venues will reach a bigger audience than through blogging alone. Plus, since you already created the content, it is just a question of tweaking it a bit.

Here are 5 easy ways to repurpose your content: 

1. Make a Visual. Visuals are so important on social media. Facebook posts with images get over twice as much engagement than those without images. Even if your post does not include any images, you can create graphics by pulling out a particularly memorable, quote, fact, or even just your post title, and create a graphic with text overlaid. You can check out my previous post on the best stock photo resources for some great backgrounds. Canva is another great (and free) resource for making simple, clean web graphics (seen below).

2. Create an infographic. Infographics are a great user-friendly way to share your info (if your data lends itself to an infographic, of course). Don't be intimidated by the design factor, though, there are many great tools to throw together a professional-looking. Canva also has the capability to create infographics, as does Venngage (an example of which is seen below) and Piktochart.

3. Make a Tip Sheet. If you have a few related posts, or ways to expand a little on what you have already written, you can turn your post into a downloadable PDF tip sheet or guide for download. This is an especially good way to make a "lead magnet"  to entice people to sign up for your email (example below from Omnimonster). If you are new to the idea of lead magnets, Amy Porterfield has a great short video introduction.

4. Break it up. With a little tweaking, a long blog post can be broken up into a condensed Facebook post (or two) or a series of tweets. If your post has have bullet points (like this one!), you can tweet them out over the course of a few days - with a link to your blog post - to build interest, and drive traffic to your blog.

5. Add some audio (or video). This is the most ambitious repurposing - turning content on your blog into podcasts, or even Facebook Live videos. In these channels, you can go over what you covered in the blog (you could even consider doing a live Q&A after you discuss the post content). If you have a lot of related content you may even consider doing a webinar. Creating audiovisual content may require the most work, but it can also have the largest payoff. Facebook prioritizes videos in news feeds, and it has been shown that content with videos gets higher engagement.

While each of these steps requires a little extra work, you will reap the rewards of an expanded audience. Do you have favorite way to repurpose content?

My 4 Favorite Royalty-Free Stock Photo Resources

The old maxim that a picture is worth 1,000 words may be trite, but research shows that content on social media that contains image is much more engaging. According to BuzzSumo, Facebook posts with images see 2.3 times more engagement, and Buffer found that Tweets with images receive 150% more retweets than tweets without images. However, finding the right image makes all of the difference. When the internet was in its infancy, the only options for images seemed to be expensive stock photo sites with awkward, corporate images or the legal gray-area of simply skimming images from the web. There is temptation, even today, to just search the web for related images and post those, without thinking about the copyright status. Fortunately, there are now more options for royalty-free, fair use stock photos today.

One of the reasons I like these selected sites, is that their images are more contemporary, and they avoid some of the cheesiness of some of the older stock photo sites. Striking the right tone, and finding images that fit the feel and message of your blog is just as important as the messaging. Each of my favorite sites below has a good selection of royalty-free photos that are clean and modern. As you night expect, there are tons of tech-related images, but other categories, like food, travel and pictures of people are covered as well.

MacBook photo from SplitShire

• Stocksnap - This is probably my favorite stock photo site currently. Though not exhaustive, it covers a wide variety of topics, is searchable by keyword, and the photos seem to be uniformly of high quality.
• SplitShire - There are a limited amount of photos on this site, but they all have a more artistic bent, and are organized by category.
• Pixabay - This site has a huge selection of images on a variety of topics. The quality level can be a little more variable, so make sure to vet your selections. On unique feature is that this site also has clip art, especially related to tech and business topics.
• Creative Commons Search- Creative Commons licences enable content creators to share their work with alternative copyright licenses that allow others to remix and share their content. From the Creative Commons search page, you can search popular sites with CC content including Flickr and Wikimedia.

Image from StockSnap

Though these are the sites I am using most right now, the list is by no means exhaustive. The Content Market Institute, Buffer and Freestack also have more extensive lists of resources. Do you have any favorite stock photo sites or resources?

What are the demographics of social media users?

It is harder than you may think to find good, reliable statistics on the demographics and habits of social media users. Fortunately, the always-thorough Pew Research Center has released some new figures on US social media user demographics. Pew surveyed 1,520 American adults - 18 years of age or older - about their typical social media network use. So what did they find out about we know about the typical social media user?

86% of adults surveyed were online, and of those, 79% were on Facebook, 32% on Instagram, 31% on Pinterest, 29% on LinkedIn and 21% on Twitter (as seen below). Though all of these number have grown year over year, Facebook has shown the most growth. The largest jump in growth was among older users: 62% of 65+ online adults are now on Facebook, a 14-point increase from 2015. However, Facebook has the highest saturation among younger users: 88% of internet users 18-29 use Facebook. Pew also found differences in Facebook use among different income levels, gender and rural vs. urban areas.

Of all the platforms, Instagram showed the greatest disparity between different age groups. In the 18-29 age group, 59% are on Instagram; for 30-49 - 33%; for 50-64 - 18%; and for 65+ only 8%. For Twitter, Pinterest and LinkedIn, the greatest use was still by the youngest demographic, but the disparities between age groups were less. 

Pew also surveyed the use habits for each social media platform. In terms of frequency, Facebook is visited daily by 76% of users, followed by 51% for Instagram, 42% for Twitter, 25% for Pinterest and 18% for LinkedIn. Respondents were also likely to utilize more than one network, though not as many as you may think. Only 56% of those surveyed used more than one of the five measured social media platforms. For those that only use one platform, 88% use Facebook as their single social media outlet. You can find even more information about these behaviors in the original report, on Pew's website.