Get Social: February Edition
Social media trends, updates and content ideas to fuel your inspiration
Hey friends š
For anyone new here, this is your monthly newsletter designed to simplify the world of social media marketing. Giving you;
The most important new social media trends, data and updates you need to know
Content ideas and inspiration to help fuel your creativity
Tips to help you create content faster
Ready? Letās do it.
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š£ The social media stats, trends and data you need to know
Hereās the slide deck, giving you a network-by-network run through all of the most important updates you need to know for February. Caution, this monthās update contains A LOT of data!
TL;DR
1ļøā£ Social media continues to grow (passing 5 billion users worldwide). And continues to fragment. The growth of more recent networks like Threads, Bluesky and Mastodon, demonstrates a remarkable rise in smaller communities.
2ļøā£ Brand discovery is driven by social media. More buyers are turning to social media first to make purchase decisions. (If you ever need to justify social media to your boss or client, thereās some great data below to support your argument!)
3ļøā£ TikTok is having a massive impact on the search and e-commerce market. If you are a D2C brand, TikTok feels like the most important platform right now
šØ Stat of the month
Latest data demonstrates the impact that social media is having on buyer behaviour. 73.9% of internet users say that they use social media to research products they are thinking of buying.
In terms of which platforms dominate for product research, I donāt think thereās any surprise seeing Instagram at the top, but itās interesting to note that X still continues to be an important channel for buyer research - as is Reddit - an often forgotten platform when it comes to a social media strategy.
Given that Google has just signed an exclusive data sharing agreement with Reddit, it feels like Reddit is about to become an even more important part of our search and social media strategies. Purchase decisions are increasingly being made as a result of word-of-mouth and community-based recommendations, so this move from Google makes a lot of sense.
Whenever weāre researching products to buy, weāre faced with two costs: Search Costs and Opportunity Costs. āSearch costā relates to the time it takes to research. Weāre all limited by our available time, so weāre typically at the mercy of what appears at the top of Google search results. āOpportunity Costā relates to the cost of making the incorrect decision, which we all feel the weight of.
This is why so many of us turn to recommendations from others first, it reduces both search and opportunity costs. As a result, Reddit+Google might just be the perfect combination to quickly - and truly - understand the ābestā product to buy.
š£ New feature of the month
I spend most of my waking hours talking about how collaborating with others is the key to success on social media. To create an impact, we need to think ābeyond our feedā, focussing a little less on the content we create and a little more on who we can work with.
Working with others is compounding. It gives your content more depth and also gets you in-front of new audiences. The types of collabs I personally enjoy doing are webinars and podcasts - they have equal benefit for both parties and result in long-form content that can be easily cut down to a monthās worth of social content and are typically shared across both yours - and your collaborators social channels.
Instagram has recognised the power of collabs and have released a heap of new features over the last year to support this use case. Now, to help us see this impact of our ācollabsā, we can now see how many new followers have been gained as a result.
š Tip of the month
This month, Richard van der Blom released his very valuable LinkedIn algorithm report - this is definitely worth a read, but I wanted to call out a metric that I found very interesting and personally feel is a missing piece whenever we are talking about how to grow on social.
LinkedIn is a perfect example of how meaningful interaction on content from your niche can result in significant growth. Success is not just come through the posts that we create, but also the conversations we become part of.
šļø In other newsā¦
The Marketing Meetup is my favourite resource for marketing education. I was invited to give a webinar to demonstrate how to build a high-impact social media strategy from scratch in 60 minutes.
It was my most popular talk Iāve ever done, so here it is for you. I hope you find it helpful!
š¬ See you next month!
Thatās it for this week, we so hope you found this useful š
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We always love chatting about and helping on all things social media. Feel free to connect and message us at @jordandeneellis and @andyrlambert
Made with ā¤ļø by Jordan and Andy
Great round up - good to find you over here.