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There are 4.5 billion social media users worldwide, but publishers could be making more of the opportunity
Social media usage is higher than ever, but publishers might not be making as much of the opportunity to reach their audiences as their competitors. A new report from publishing automation firm Echobox spotlights benchmarking data from some of the biggest platforms to assist publishers in understanding how their social media reach rates against the competition and how to get the best ROI.
Social media benchmarking
- There are more than 4.5 billion people worldwide using social media. In theory, that gives publishers access to almost 60% of the global population and with growth in social media usage averaging 3% a year, the opportunity to increase audience reach has never been bigger.
- The Ultimate Collection of 2023 Social Media Benchmarks report from Echobox gives benchmarks for the biggest social media platforms – Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and LinkedIn. Echobox serves more than 1,500 brands and businesses around the world and the report is based on analysis of thousands of their social shares.
- The report’s authors encourage readers to use the international benchmarking data to understand how different platforms perform in driving traffic back to a website. Comparisons can be used to optimize social media strategies and target activity to improve engagement and drive click-through rates, attracting new readers and strengthen relationships. They state:
Healthy click-through patterns enable companies to capitalize on the enormous number of social media users and funnel them toward their website’s carefully curated environment.
Despite drawing back from publishers, Echobox rates Facebook as ‘still perhaps the single greatest social resource for businesses looking to drive click-through traffic’. With almost 2 billion daily active users and close to 3 billion monthly active users it delivers a social media reach that takes in over 30% of the world’s population.
Analysis of over 3,000 Facebook Pages from hundreds of businesses over a 6-month period shows the platform drives 3% of all social media referral traffic, on average.
Meta’s Instagram boasts over over 2 billion active monthly users and is growing. Nearly 40% of users visit the platform weekly, according to Reuters Institute’s Digital News Report 2022. The report spotlighted research that shows the audience on Instagram skews younger than the other platforms benchmarked.
Analysis of referral traffic from more than 200 Instagram pages over 6 months found the platform drives 3.8% of all social media referral traffic, on average.
Management problems aside, Twitter was said to remain ‘an effective tool for businesses hoping to increase brand visibility, boost audience engagement, generate click-throughs or grow subscriber numbers.’ The number of monetizable daily active Twitter users stands at almost 240 million, up 16.65% compared to the previous year, in the company’s 2022 Q2 earnings report.
Analysis of pageview data from more than 600 Twitter pages over 6 months showed Twitter generates 6.7% of all social referral traffic, on average.
Publishers are increasing their presence on LinkedIn which has just under 1 billion users worldwide. LinkedIn users are older – 60% are between the ages of 25 and 34. According to a 2020 World Economic Forum report, this makes them more likely to pay for content than the global average.
Analysis of more than 100 different LinkedIn pages over 6 months found that publishers get around 1.5% of all social traffic from LinkedIn, on average.
The true value of content
The detailed analysis in the full report provides publishers with insight into how the value of their content on a range of social media platforms and within specific content verticals, including, sports, news and lifestyle.
Understanding the value of your content, whether that lies in driving social media reach, website traffic or generating advertising revenue, is crucial to planning, creating, and publishing content that will truly support your business objectives.
Find out more about How to measure the true value of your content by downloading this free whitepaper from Spiny.ai.
This piece was originally published in Spiny Trends and is re-published with permission. Spiny Trends is a division of Spiny.ai, a content analytics and revenue generation platform for digital publishers. For weekly updates and analysis on the industry news you need as a media and publishing business, subscribe to Spiny’s Trends weekly email roundup here.
