Public Relations & Social Marketing Insight

It's been a white-hot week so far for digital marketing statistics. We've seen numbers roll in about Reddit viewers, digital-media growth, bad ads, web bots, Amazon Echo, ecommerce and the hit film La La Land.

Check out these dozen data points that grabbed our attention:

1. Big Game versus going big on Snapchat
On Thursday, we looked at how many types of digital ads equaled the cost of a 30-second Super Bowl TV spot, which comes in at $5.6 million this year. For Snapchat sponsored lenses, 17 of them add up to one Big Game commercial. A branded lens on the mobile app, according to digital agency Essence, costs roughly $329,400.

2. Redditors love mobile reading
Reddit didn't have a mobile app one year ago today, but on Wednesday it revealed that more than 40 percent of its content views occur via its app....

Twitter, which has struggled to grow its user base to the size of some of its social networking rivals, is reporting earnings this week not long after news that companies including Disney would not be moving to acquire the service.

This year, eMarketer estimates, more than 52 million people in the US will use Twitter on a monthly basis, and just shy of half will use the service on both PCs and mobile devices. Mobile-only Twitter use is becoming more common in the US as desktop- based usage shrinks, and will account for a majority of US users in 2018 for the first time.

Currently, just 19.5% of internet users and 16.1% of the population of the US uses Twitter, compared with 51.5% of the population using Facebook. On a worldwide basis, Twitter penetration is even lower: Only 3.9% of people around the world use Twitter this year, and by 2020 the figure is only expected to rise to 4.8%....

Here’s an interesting stat – according to a Pinterest survey of 2,500 Pinners (conducted in May this year), 45% of users are active on the app while watching TV.

That’s surprising – normally it’s Twitter that’s identified as the ultimate TV viewing companion in social, given its position as the home of real-time conversation, particularly around live events.

As it turns out, Pinnners, too, love to multi-screen:

“64% of our users tell us they pay more attention to what they’re doing on Pinterest than what they’re watching on TV—and 44% of them will engage with Pinterest for the show’s entirety, regardless of whether it’s on a commercial break or not.”...

Social networks occupy more of the digital space than ever before. We decided to conduct a research to shed light on some of the interesting points of social media usage. You can download the high resolution infographic at the end of this article.

As always, at ResearcEgg facts come first. We asked 1,000 social media users in the US and we ended up with a rather interesting data set. We have put together an infographic to visualize the key finds. Now, let’s get into the data!...

For well over a decade, consumers have increasingly turned to online review sites to vet purchase decisions before they buy. Take a look at the top trafficked sites on the web, and it’s no shock to see consumer review sites by the likes of Amazon and Yelp both squarely in the top ten.

In fact, reading reviews prior to purchasing has become so ingrained in American consumption habits, 55 percent of all shoppers say online reviews influence where and how they spend their hard-earned cash.

Why then, when every person on the street checks a review site before buying a coffee, is it such a surprise to the software industry that consumer reviews actually matter in their space? In an industry generally considered “innovative,” product reviews are a shockingly late-adoption....

Although content has proven itself to be a critically important component of successful marketing in today’s online world, all too often companies are sacrificing the quality of their content for quantity. As we’ve seen, most of the 340 companies we reviewed as part of our initial look at global content quality are producing content that doesn’t measure up.

We believe those companies, and the countless others just like them, will be handicapped if they don’t start paying more attention to their content quality....

Data has never been more important to marketers, which is why it is always all the more alarming when it's suggested that a platform is delivering false analytics.

Approximately 15% of Twitter accounts — some 48 million — are bots rather than people, according to new research from the University of Southern California and Indiana University.
While the research is troubling news for Twitter, which has struggled to elevate its user base in the face of growing competition; it is perhaps more frustrating for marketers who trusted the engagement data.

The report elaborates on the percentage of bots, by stating that complex bots could have shown up as humans in their model, "making even the 15% figure a conservative estimate."

Social media studies have given us great ideas to improve our social media marketing, helped us understand the psychology behind social media behaviors, and made us better marketers.

To help you better understand the ever-changing social media landscape, we jumped into the latest social media research papers, hoping to discover someunder-the-radar insights to help supercharge your social media marketing strategy as we head into 2017.

In this post, I’d love share what we discovered and bring you some insightful and surprising social media studies of 2016, sharing the key findings and actionable takeaways you can try today....