It is important for content marketing professionals to know which social network sites are best used for different types of content; while one platform might be ideal for promoting images, another site could be better at sharing online articles.
New research has uncovered four major findings that content marketers should take note of to help them decide where to make the most of their social media efforts. The first finding is that people tend to spend far more time on social media profiles with powerful visuals than they do on other platforms that lack images. Most professionals realize that getting an immediate emotional response from an image is far easier than from an article.
The power of pictures can be seen in new data collected that outlines how many hours the average user spends on networks every month. While Twitter and LinkedIn were found to have 36 minutes and 17 minutes respectively, Facebook, Tumblr and Pinterest averaged 6 hours 33 minutes, 1 hour 38 minutes and 1 hour 17 minutes. Incorporating images into blog posts and then sharing them on these highly visual websites can be more effective than, for example, investing heavily on Twitter.
The second finding was that for SEO purposes Google+ is the best network to utilize. Just 14% of marketers are spending time making Google+ a high priority; however, after the recent findings, this should change. Posts on Google+ are often found higher in search rankings, especially when first sentences are optimized.
Third, it will come as no surprise that with Facebook’s latest change to its news feed, page posts have once again been affected. In a bid to provide users with more relevant content, Facebook changed its algorithms in January. Page updates no longer rank as highly as friend updates. With not as many fans seeing page posts, it is important for content marketing to be interesting and diverse, with posters using links, photos, questions and videos in their content.
Finally, an important point for B2B marketers to note is that the opportunities for the most successful content marketing efforts is through LinkedIn, with Twitter and SlideShare coming in second and third place. With its public publishing platform now open, LinkedIn has become a great place to share professional blog posts and personalized insights.
It won't be long before professionals take note of these new trends and audit their content marketing efforts. After taking the time to review your existing social media accounts, let us know what changes you plan on making by leaving us a comment below.
