ROI on Different Social Media Platforms
Social media marketing can be very profitable – it is more affordable than other forms of traditional and digital marketing, and can increase brand awareness, engagement, and even traffic to your website. Approximately 3.2 billion users use social media – that’s 45% of the population. It’s safe to say that social media has a broad reach. The increase of use in smartphones has resulted in more time spent on social media since users can access their favorite platforms on the go.
Return on Investment for Social Media Marketing
Social media marketing has taken over the internet in recent years, but not all social media platforms are created equal. 73% of marketers say that social media marketing has been effective for them but investing in different platforms can be a difficult decision if you don’t know which platform will give you the highest ROI. While this differs among different platforms, it also depends on your product and target audience. In this article, I’m going to break down the most popular social media platforms and their potential for ROI.
YouTube
With video marketing <insert link to video article> taking over other digital marketing methods, it is no wonder that YouTube results in a high ROI. Not only is YouTube the preferred platform for social media marketing globally, it is also the social media platform that has the biggest reach among both, Millennials and Gen Z consumers.
83% of video marketers have said they have been successful using YouTube marketing, and with video marketing increasing every year, this number is sure to blow up. YouTube is also a major platform for influencer marketing (with the other being Instagram), which has been shown to have a large ROI.
Research has also shown YouTube to have higher ROI than television. Marketing on YouTube has an added advantage – if in video form (influencer marketing or content marketing), the ad remains on the website and can convert users far into the future, making return on investment even higher.
There’s a reason 89% of marketers use Facebook marketing – it’s effective. It has the largest audience of any social media platform with 1.62 billion visits every day, and 66% of users admitting following or liking brands on the platform.
Only 6% of ad revenue from Facebook comes from desktop users – 94% are mobile users. As I’ve emphasized in the past <link to UX design article>, optimization is extremely important, both for content, as well as your website. Any traffic you get from Facebook will be useless if mobile users cannot view your website properly, and ROI will be minimized. Square videos outperform landscape videos in both, likes and engagement, and get 35% more views than their landscape counterparts. To maximize ROI, marketers should ensure a square video design.
Making buyer personas and defining your target audience will also help to increase ROI when it comes to Facebook marketing since Facebook ads let you target users according to age, location, and interests, and even create lookalike audiences for you. Retargeting is also possible, and brands can use the mere exposure effect to capitalize on this. According to Statista, Facebook’s total revenue in the second quarter of 2019 was $18.7 billion.
One of the best parts of Facebook marketing is the affordability with which marketers can test out campaigns since the minimum budget is only $5. Testing can give you a concrete idea of the ROI you can expect.
According to HubSpot, Instagram is the social media platform that generates the second-highest ROI for marketers. 120 million users on Instagram are from the U.S., making it the country with the most Instagram users.
Instagram provides marketers with plenty of advertising options, including Instagram stories, which are becoming increasingly popular – daily active stories on Instagram grew from 150 million in 2017 to 500 million in 2019. Additionally, stories have an automatic CTA at the bottom of the screen saying, “swipe up”, urging users to engage with the post.
Instagram is one of the main platforms for influencer marketing, which can provide a huge ROI since 49% of people depend on influencer recommendations. Influencer marketing has shown extremely high ROI, with every dollar spent resulting in earning $6.50.
According to Instagram, 90% of its user base follows at least one business, and 50% say that their interest in a brand increases when they see Instagram ads for it. 130 million people alone click on shopping posts every month, showing that the platform helps direct sales as well as traffic.
In addition to sales, Instagram ads can also help brand awareness, since engagement with brand posts is one of the aspects the platform excels at. In fact, Instagram has 58 times more engagement than Facebook, and 120 times more engagement than Twitter.
Instagram isn’t limited to B2C marketing – 36.2% of B2B businesses utilize the platform for research as well. According to Statista, Instagram is expected to make $18.6 billion from ad revenue in 2021.
Invest in Social Media Marketing
Social media platforms give marketers access to billions of people. With people using social media constantly, and it being interwoven in our daily lives, it is the digital marketing option that everybody is capitalizing on.
Ideally, you should have a presence on all social media platforms but should focus the most on the platform that will give you the most ROI. Not only can I help you choose the perfect platform for your product or service, but I can also show you the ins and outs of every platform, and how to best use it to maximize revenue. If you’re interested in discussing this further, contact me here.
