LeadTail Social Insights: How Mid-Size Marketers Engage on Twitter
Despite that social media has been around and used widely for a few years now, many digital marketers are still trying to figure out how to best engage with customers and prospects using it. If you are trying to reach marketers, then you need to understand how they spend their time on social media, because they do spend a fair amount of time there.
LeadTail has produced a new report (with DNN Software) that is worth the time to read, “How To Marketers at Mid-Size Companies Engage on Twitter.” It takes you through the patterns and behaviours of mid-sized marketers on social media, and Twitter in particular.
The report covers research and analysis LeadTail did with its LeadTail Social Insights Technology. The company developed a target audience to track by looking at marketers active on social media and grouping them by job function, seniority, geography and company size. Once it had a target audience (which is North American focused), LeadTail captured tweet data from this group (504 marketers) for 90 days (Oct 1 – Dec 31, 2013). In all, it captured and analyzed over 91k tweets and 45k shared links.
Obviously since this report focuses on Twitter, all the target audience uses Twitter. But here’s a look at the rest of the social media sites most used:
Popular social media for marketers.
What do these marketers like to share? Of the 100 top content sources, 43% are mainstream media, where things related to business and strategy are shared. Among these sites are Forbes, HuffPo, NYT, Wall Street Journal and BuzzFeed.
The next popular is industry media links from sites like Mashable, TechCrunch, BusinessInsider, GigaOm, NextWeb and more.
During the 90-day period YouTube was the most popular social media site shared (I’d contribute this to the time of year), with Instagram and Foursquare right behind. Let’s point out now that Google+ is placing at the bottom of the pile in all this research so far.
Some other interesting points from the report:
- Twitter.com website and the Tweet Button are the most popular ways to tweet, but it’s also interesting to note 9 of 15 top sharing tools are mobile-based.
- If you want to know who the best people to follow in the marketing world on Twitter are, there’s a great word cloud that points them out. I think I have almost all of these on my Twitter Follow list.
Who Do Marketers Retweet the Most?
Is there a Difference Between B2B and B2C?
The answer is yes, in some ways. If you look at the hashtags used by each group during this period you’ll see very different things. B2C marketers tended to be much more consumer-oriented with their hashtags using popular holidays, world events and pop culture. B2B marketers were business-focused for the most part. Also, the report notes that B2B marketers used LinkedIn more than B2C, where as B2C used Facebook much more than B2B marketers. I’m sure there are more differences, but it’s also true that there are many similarities between the two.
There is some good information in this report, but how do you take advantage of it? Well, you could get some ideas of where to advertise, either display ads or native advertising. You also see a strong list of influencers you might be able to reach out you that could help promote your brand. There are two good ideas to get you started.
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