Buffer The State of Social Media put Stories as Format of Choice

By
TCMO Bureau
-
Social Media

Buffer’s annual report The State of Social Media, focused on the world of social media marketing, that took inputs from more than 1,800 marketers from businesses of all sizes, across a range of industries, shared some interesting facts.

73% of the respondents believe that social media marketing has been either very or somewhat effective for their businesses.

57.6% of the marketers revealed that social media Stories have been effective as part of their social media strategy. Social media Stories, the format first developed by Snapchat, has been now dubbed as the ‘next frontier.’ Media marketers are aware that social media users in the US prefer to see brand content in Stories as opposed to their feed. Stats from Buffer corroborate this idea.

62.9% of businesses had not invested in Stories ads, but this is likely to change soon. This year, 61% of respondents plan on investing more in this format. In the third quarter of 2018, 25% of Instagram budgets were spent on Instagram Stories.

Influencers are still effective in social media marketing. More than two-thirds of the respondents felt that influencer marketing is effective.

  • 3% of survey respondents believe that social media is either somewhat or very important to their overall marketing strategy
  • Most common social media platforms used by businesses:
    • 7% Facebook
    • 4% Twitter
    • 9% Instagram
    • 70% LinkedIn
    • 8% YouTube
  • The majority (88.4%) of brands currently using influencer marketing plan to continue to invest in it in 2019.
  • 6% marketers also felt that the regulations and guidelines for influencer marketing were, at least to some extent, unclear.
  • While 65% of the 8,000 respondents would be happy to communicate with companies via messenger services, these were not actually being used.
  • 4% respondents are currently not using messaging apps for marketing, and 50.6% of the them are not planning to do so this year.
  • Of the 50% that plan to use them-
  • 1% will use Messenger,
  • 8% will use WhatsApp.
  • 2% , plan to use Slack
  • 7% Telegram
  • 5 % WeChat  and
  • 1% Viber
  • Video content frequency:
  • 7% of businesses publish video content monthly,
  • 3% publish it on a weekly basis.
  • 9% so do daily
  • Businesses post video content on:
  • 2% Facebook
  • 9% YouTube
  • 8% Instagram
  • 6% Twitter

Note: Buffer’s data is based on a survey of 1,842 marketing professionals. Respondents worked for companies representing various industries with fewer than 10 employees up to 1,000 employees.