Welcome back to Social Media Monday, an article series designed to (hopefully) help authors find their way through the morass that is online marketing.
To get us on track for 2015, I thought we’d take a quick look at some recent social media stats–because who among us doesn’t wonder sometimes (often?) if our efforts to be noticed are paying off? Are we on the right platform(s)? Should we be focusing our attention more on Twitter and less on Facebook, or vice versa? Or should we abandon those two altogether and move on to something else?
First up, a quick overview of Internet usage in general–just in case you need to be reminded about the importance of social networking. According to Digital Insights:
- 23 percent of time online is spent on social networks and blogs
- Companies with a blog have 97 percent more inbound links to their websites than those who don’t blog (while statistic relates to businesses, I suspect there would be a similar trend for authors, which is why I think yes, even fiction writers need to blog).
In addition, Shareaholic notes that “the 8 largest sources of social referrals drove 31.07% of overall traffic sites received [in June 2014]. Compare that to 15.55% during the same time last year”.
Clearly, the influence of social networking continues to rise…a trend wise authors will pay attention to. 😉
But this still leaves us with the question of where you should be focusing your networking efforts. To answer that, let’s look at the numbers for some of the top networks (source: Digital Insights):
- There are 1.28 BILLION active Facebook users each month
- Google+ has 540 million active monthly users (1.6 billion total users)
- Twitter has 1 billion total users, 255 million of whom are active monthly
- Instagram: 200 million active monthly users
- LinkedIn: 187 million active monthly users (300+ million total)
- Pinterest has 40 million active monthly users and 70 million total
- Youtube: 1 billion total users
Now let’s break those numbers down even further:
- 72 percent of online adults visit Facebook at least once a month
- 22 percent of online adults visit Google+ at least once a month
- 46 percent of Twitter’s users send at least one tweet per day (which means they’re on Twitter at least once per day, too)
- If your target market is teens, it’s interesting to note that 23% of that age group considers Instagram their favourite social network.
So there you have it. The numbers really do speak for themselves, and I hope they’ve given you a clearer picture of where to direct your social networking efforts. Do any of these surprise you, or are they about what you expected? Let me know in the comments!
If you’re interested on additional tips/ideas on how to make the most of those efforts, check out my previous articles and watch this blog for new ones. In the weeks to come, I’ll be talking about how to beat that new Facebook algorithm that has everyone in such a tizzy, offering an additional update on my Wattpad experiment, and much more. By special request, I’ll also offer some ideas for having a successful book signing.
Have a wonderful week, everyone!
Linda
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P.P.S. Questions? Comments? A topic you’d like to see addressed? Leave me a note in the comments below, and I’ll be sure to respond. 🙂
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