Social Media Engagement Trends You Shouldn’t Miss [Infographic]

Many companies have clued-up the fact that being present and active on social media platforms is imperative if they are to succeed in their marketing efforts. Organizations have found it critical to use social tools to engage their customers, employees and other external stakeholders. Through social tools, they are able to listen, gather actionable intelligence and measure outcomes and progress.

So social media engagement is as important to organization as their products and services. As a matter of fact, it can be said that social media is the best thing that ever happened to online businesses. According to statistics, 88.2% of U.S companies use social media and the figure is expected to grow to 89% by 2017.

70% of internet users are active social media users

The rise of social technologies and mobile phones has given customers more power than ever. Now, customers are more informed, dynamic and alert to what is happening around them. 7 in 10 internet users are active social media users; hence, they can access information regarding various company offers, news and trends. Their ability to find information in a matter of seconds puts them in firm control of their own destiny. Consequently, this trend is forcing marketers to rethink the way they connect and engage with their customers. About 40% of internet users use social media apps. This means that marketers face the daunting task of providing real-time, tailor-made experiences that make customer experience a blissful event. Whether it be a mobile app that provides online customer care services or a push notification that promotes a sale, marketers must now appreciate the full impact of social mobile apps. This is a grand opportunity for organizations to engage with their customers like never before.

Facebook remains the most active social media platform, while the rest aren’t left behind

Facebook continues to be the most active social media site. According to pew Research findings, more than 71% of internet users are on Facebook. You can’t ignore Facebook as a major tool for social engagement because it is the ultimate beta business. Nearly 50% of Facebook users use it on a daily basis while 25% use it on weekly basis. YouTube (28%), Google + (25%), Twitter (27%) and Instagram (24%) are all social networks that record significant interactions by its users on a daily basis.

Because post engagement on Facebook is about 75% in the first 5 hours, it means that regular updates is important in order to maintain customer engagement. It is also important to note that Thursdays and Fridays record 18% more post engagements. 64% of marketers say increasing customer engagement is an essential thing in their social media marketing strategy. Therefore, regular updates with particular emphasis on Thursdays and Fridays is a sure way to increase your social media engagement.

Instagram has better brand engagement than any other social media platform

According to a recently released study by Forrester, for every one million brand followers on Facebook, there were only 700 interactions (sharing, liking and commenting) and 300 interactionsfor every 1 million followers in the case of twitter.

By all means, these are very dismal rates. However, Instagram presents an exception. For every1 million followers on Instagram, there were 42,000 brand engagement. This is about 58 and 120 times more brand engagement in Instagram than on Facebook and twitter respectively.

This tells us that Instagram is a more effective social tool for brand engagement than Facebook and twitter combined. If you have been overlooking Instagram thinking it isn’t valuable tool for branding, then you might have to think again. Ignore Instagram at your own peril.

Type of social content that result in more engagement

Perhaps another interesting fact about social media engagement is that some rules are quite different from what happens with website and blog content. In social media, engagement is at its peak where the amount of text is kept at its absolute minimum.

Facebook posts with less than 250 characters receive 60% more engagement. 87% of Facebook post engagement happens on posts with images while twits with images receive 150% more retweets. It is even better to post more than one images in Facebook to achieve 12.9 time more engagement. Another interesting take away is that tweeting more than 3 times a day will decrease your brand engagement by more than 300%. Tweeting with 3 or more hashtags will also hurt your engagement by 17%.

Final thoughts

Having said that, it is important to ensure that your social media profiles are complete and optimized to attract and engage your audience the way you want. Adding relevant keywords in your social media updates and profiles is often the first step towards social media engagement success.

Irrespective of the social media platform you are using, integrating visual media is important because it increases engagement. Text-laden and formulaic posts are boring and devoid of human touch. Once you understand the potential of visual social media, you will begin to see dramatic improvement in the way people engage with your brand.

Another critical point of consideration for marketers is not to view social media as simply a platform to amplify their products and services; instead, social media should be used to provide more value to their customers. It should be used to discover new customer trends, new technologies and better ways of relating with customers before the competitors do.

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How to Increase Your Content’s Shareability

Have you ever been stuck in a rut? When you’re just blogging away but see no increase in your traffic?

It’s an extremely demoralizing experience, even if you have hundreds of thousands of visits. We should know—in the first 60 days of launching Design School (Canva’s blog where you can learn how to design well), we were already getting more than 250,000 visitors.

Those are great results, but we were having trouble increasing them. And like most people, what makes us tick is progress.

Today, I’m going to share how we eventually broke out of that rut—first by covering the shift in our content strategy, and then the specific tactics we’ve since learned. Now, you might want to jump right to the second section, but that will be a mistake. While you can apply the specific tactics we’ve learned and get immediate gratification, it’s the lessons in the first section that will teach you how to break out of future roadblocks.

And trust me, if there’s anything we learned from increasing our visitors to more than 800,000 in the last 60 days, it’s that there are plenty of those down the road.

Part One: The Mindset Shift

What do you do before you write an article? How do you determine what to write? There are many things you can do to grow a blog’s traffic, but if you have limited time, what should you prioritize? These are just some of the questions we grappled with.

But instead of just giving you our answers to those questions, I’m going to walk you through our logic first. The answers will come in part two.

Resist the urge to update your blog.

Before we started a new content strategy that would eventually increase our traffic by 220%, there was a lull that lasted for 3 weeks. We did not post a single new article during that period.

You might think it was easy to do, but it wasn’t. Like most bloggers, we have the urge to update. We couldn’t sit still.

So why did we pause? Because it was important for us to sit down and think through our content strategy. We needed to research and gather data. We needed to make informed decisions based on our circumstances instead of following “best practices.”

Article success is not always common sense.

If you try to be the judge of your own content, you’ll realize one thing: You know surprisingly little about why a particular piece of content did well.

The good news? There are plenty of awesome tools out there to figure it out. When we realized this, it was no longer all about posting new content. Content should always be there to achieve a particular goal.

In particular, we started to pay more attention to analytics. We have always had Google Analytics, but we decided to add Heap Analytics a couple of months ago to dive deeper into how each factor affects each other.

Set measurable micro goals.

When Canva created the Design School, we had a pretty ambitious goal in mind: To enable the entire world to learn design. But did we have a goal for every single post we published? Not straight away.

Now we do. This is not to say all of our posts have to achieve the same goal. We came up with a variety of goals we’d like to achieve, and every single post we publish since then needs to achieve at least one of them.

Part Two: What We’ve Since Learned

That was how our thought process changed. We went from “just do it” and to being more deliberate about our blog. We added goals, so that we had something to optimize toward, and we broke down those goals, applying them to every single post we publish.

Then we tested. Relentlessly. Here’s what we’ve since learned, broken down into actionable tips you can apply to your own blog.

Write more in-depth posts.

Like many other blogs, we believed keeping our posts short would benefit our readers. You’ve heard it before: “People don’t read online.” Everyone’s busy, right? So we went straight to the point and just gave our reader short, summarized tips.

But in our research, we found two interesting studies. The first one, published on Moz by John Doherty, showed a correlation between big content and the number of links an article receives. The second one was by Buzzsumo which showed long form content gets more social shares that short posts.

We tried it, and it paid off. The first long form content post we published broke our previous record in traffic and shares. All content we’ve published since then has been at least 2000 words.

Become a storyteller.

Stories speak to the emotional psyche, build anticipation, tell you why what you’re about to read is important, and get your point across in an interesting way—much more memorable than just another list post with short, actionable tips.

How do we know this? Because some of our most shared blog posts start with a story. This post, for example, received over 70 thousand shares. Read it through, and you’ll see we didn’t just start with a story—we included plenty of other stories in between.

Optimize your title, no matter what your gut says.

We all know the importance of a great headline in getting attention, but when it comes to blog posts, this focus seems to fade, for some reason.

By default, most people have a preference for short titles: “Social Media Made Easy” or “How to Convert More Users”. You might even think longer titles look spammy, or that it doesn’t look good on your blog’s current design, and changing it would mess up the design of hundreds of blog posts in which you used short titles.

But our experience is that longer titles are just as effective, if not more so, than shorter ones. To see this in action, check out the length of our titles for blog posts published before January 7, 2015 and the ones published after January 28, 2015.

The point is not for you to start writing long headlines. The point is not to be afraid to test longer headlines—or more generally, not to be afraid to test headlines that you’re biased against. After all, if titles are really that important, wouldn’t you do just about anything to accommodate a good one?

Reverse engineer your competitors.

Rather than just trying to push out more articles to get more traffic (a common mistake), start thinking of your blog as a product. As any successful business owner will tell you, understanding the competitive space is crucial. If you don’t know what content is already out there, how can you become the best in your industry?

Here are two tools we used to reverse engineered our competitors.

BuzzSumo

BuzzSumo shows you which pieces of content worked well on your competitor’s website. Here, for example, is a screenshot of Convince & Convert’s top three posts in the last year, according to the number of shares each post received.

From looking at this result, we can learn a number of things.

First, lists work. If you look at Buzzsumo’s results for the rest of Convince & Convert, you’ll see this pattern plays out nicely. People like knowing exactly what they’re going to learn before diving into the post.

Secondly, Convince & Convert readers want to read about process. They want instructional content they can implement themselves. This is the sort of quality that sets the benchmark for your blog.

Complete this exercise for your competitors’ websites, and you’ll have an awesome insight into your industry.

Quora

Another awesome place to do research is Quora. Do a simple search of your topic, and you’ll get some great topic ideas. Here’s an example from when I searched “fonts”:

It’s quite easy to see which questions are popular in this topic.

How is this different from BuzzSumo? Quora gives you the other side of the puzzle. You get a lot of topic ideas you’ll never find in either Buzzsumo or traditional keywords.

Social media strategy is not social profiles.

Your post just got 200 likes. Awesome! But is this really social media success?

Consider this example. Last year, Copyblogger deleted their Facebook page. Here’s a screenshot taken from Buzzsumo showing their their top three posts.

Notice how their post announcing the deletion is their most popular post in the last year, with Facebook being the main driver at 4,500. How could this be? Because readers shared it straight from the blog.

Even if you have thousands of followers on Facebook, the reach from your own social profile is limited. However, if you improve the quality of the content you produce (like we did), you’ll be inviting every reader on your blog to share it on their own page.

This is true when we looked at our stats, too. Most of our Facebook traffic didn’t come from our page, which has 70,000+ fans. It came from our readers sharing our content with their friends. In this sense, optimizing your blog (the title, the button placement, the copy, the image, etc.) is more important than optimizing your page or what time you post an update. This realization drove us to prioritize optimizing our blog over our social media outlets.

Curate unique content.

When you write a world-class post, you need to produce content that’s 100% original, right?

Well, yes and no. Yes, it needs to be 100% original as a whole, but no, you don’t always need to create—you can curate. This is something we learned by observing our competitors.

Take a look at Design School’s posts. In many of them, we curate the awesome work of various designers (and give them due credit, of course) instead of creating original designs.

Curation works for two reasons. First, your readers love it because you’re showing them something they are interested in but would never have otherwise found. Second, you can let the people you feature know they’ve been published, and many of them will share your post to their followers. Win-win.

Use more visuals.

The curation strategy we took had a curious side effect. As we curated more designs, the number of Pins our posts got increased. By the end of the 60-day period, we increased the amount of traffic we got from Pinterest by 62.5%. Here’s a screenshot of our Pinterest traffic:

Instead of pinning once, many of our readers are pinning multiple images from a single post. So instead of seeing one pin, their followers would see multiple pins linking to the same article, thus increasing the likelihood they’ll click through.

This motivated us to dedicate even more resources into creating original graphics. We still curate a lot—and we recommend beginners to start with curation—but have since stepped up original designs. In fact, our most pinned image (with more than 700 pins) was created by our team, and many more are rising to the top.

Test Everything

That’s how we grew our blog by 226% in 60 days.

So what’s the most important lesson here? Stop doing, and start testing. Do you research, find the right tools, and set micro-goals to reach your massive one. If you continue to test with your eye on the goal, you’ll be able to see an improvement, just like we did.

Canva is launching Canva For Work, which will help you and your team create original, stunning visuals faster than ever. Register your interest to win cool prizes.

Continue the conversation on our Facebook or Google+ pages.

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How to Leverage the Power of Infographics on Social Media

​Infographics have become an increasingly popular and powerful method for delivering vast amounts of data while generating incredible visibility. Considering that the human brain is able to consume visual content 60,000 times faster than text, it is little wonder that infographics are so powerful. Even more compelling is the fact that consumers seem to like visual content better than text. In fact, Jeff Bullas points out that images receive nearly two times more views than content without images.

Clearly, infographics offer an incredible amount of power. But, that power is only worthwhile if it is properly harnessed. The tips below will ensure that you are able to put infographics to work properly to drive increased visibility for your brand.

The process of designing an infographics is often overwhelming, particularly if this is your first time to do so. While there are numerous tools available to help you to create custom infographics, including Piktochart, it is still important to ensure that you understand a few cardinal rules.

Go Beyond Statistics and Data

One of the reasons that infographics have become so popular is that they present a concise method for delivering a vast amount of data. Even so, it is important that you do not fall into the trap of simply providing statistics in your infographic. Weave a story around these statistics to ensure that the visual content you provide is both attractive and informative.

In this example, there is so much data that it becomes difficult to decide where to focus one's attention first. Packed with data, this infographic attempts to communicate too much at once and makes it difficult to quickly get to the point, a quick turn off for viewers. 

Avoid Text Overload

Besides making certain that you do not base your infographic solely on text, it is also important to avoid text overload. The primary goal of an infographic is to visually engage your viewer, which is difficult if the presentation is muddled with too much text. The experience associated with an infographic must be visual in nature. If the viewer is forced to read too much, you might lose him or her.

Here, we see an infographic that is not only too long, but contains far too much text for any viewer to easily and quickly read. 

Keep It Fresh

When creating infographics, keep in mind that you only have a few seconds to snag and retain your viewer's attention. Furthermore, you face a tremendous amount of competition from other online content. If the information you present in your infographic is not fresh, valuable, and relevant, it will be a letdown to your viewers. Avoid simply dressing up content that has already been rehashed, or is simply too bland. Do not take your viewers for granted and assume that because you are giving them an infographic, they will appreciate it. 

Keep It Simple

Aside from avoiding vague information in an infographic, make sure that you do not have a design that is too complicated. Viewers should be able to understand the information presented within a single reading, or even a single glance. Under no circumstances should a viewer be forced to read your infographic more than once, or study it too hard in order to determine what it is that you wish to convey, as can be seen in this example. Rest assured that if you compel viewers to exert too much time or energy trying to understand your infographic content, you can kiss that lead goodbye. If the content you wish to convey is complex in nature, break it down into smaller, more digestible chunks. 

Choose Colors and Typography Wisely

When dealing with visual content marketing of any kind, but particularly with infographics, you must consider the use of typography and colors very carefully. Both play an extremely important role in how easy or how difficult it is for your reader to digest the information presented. Ideally, avoid using more than three colors. In choosing colors, opt for lighter hues for backgrounds rather than dark ones, as were used in this example. Remember that fonts are extremely powerful and can also convey messages regarding your brand even subtly. 

Avoid Blatant Self Promotion

Naturally, the ultimate goal of your infographic is to drive brand visibility and awareness. Even so, avoid leaving your viewers feeling as though they have been duped by luring them into an infographic that is clearly designed to promote your brand, product, or service with nothing of real value to them. Consumers expect some branding, but never make the mistake of putting promotion before value. 

Develop a Strategy for Sharing your Infographics

Unless you are a highly successful brand that has already cultivated and attracted millions of visitors daily, there is a good chance that you need to find other webmasters who would be interested in hosting your infographic. Ultimately, it is all about visibility. This strategy can help you to attain the visibility that you need. It is not enough to simply build an infographic and hope they will come. You also need to develop a content strategy that includes a relevant article. Keep in mind that the associated article should not be redundant in terms of repeating the information presented in the infographic, but should instead serve as a supplement. You might be surprised to discover how many bloggers and webmasters would be interested in publishing your content and infographic.

Infographics may seem complicated, but the power they are capable of generating in terms of visibility and exposure is tremendous, making them well worth the effort involved. 

infographic via Dashburst

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