I love data. And in today's episode, we're gonna dive into some
recent social media studies done by Metricool to talk
about what's working and what's not here in 2024. Let's get
into it.
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notes and get started today. Hello. This is my
first episode that I'm recording back after having a
baby. There will be episodes after this that I prerecorded just
the way the schedule worked out. But this is my first official
episode that I've recorded, like, in present time, which
just feels good. Right now, the time of recording this,
currently, 6 weeks postpartum, loving every
second. If you wanna get all of the BTS details,
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a lot about what this is like. And I've been loving threads. The conversation
around motherhood and parenting and running a
business has been a lot of fun over there, so come hang out with me.
But in this episode today, we're talking about social media trends for
2024. At every time I start a conversation on
trends, I do have to say there are
strategies and there are trends. And they're very two different
things. K? Strategies are the underlining,
approaches that you take to marketing. So whether you're marketing for
yourself or your clients, when we're looking at strategies, these are
foundational components to how we approach marketing. You know,
what message are we sharing with our communities? How are we gonna
attract the right people? Who do we wanna attract? How do we wanna
nurture relationships with them and help them make purchasing decisions? How
do we want to make sure that they're informed and updated? How do we wanna
communicate with them? And then how do we wanna give them the tools they need
to be able to become advocates for our brands and share it with the
people that they love and trust? That's
strategies. Trends are simply tactics. These are things
that, help you deploy the strategies. So are we
gonna use TikTok or Instagram Reels? Are we going to focus
on long form videos on YouTube, or are we gonna do a live stream on
LinkedIn? Those are tactical decisions that you
make based on your overall strategy. And I think it's helpful to have
both. Okay. It's very helpful to have both. I know,
sometimes a conversation can skew one way or the other. And even as a marketer,
I'm very aware of how sometimes I come across
as anti hustle or anti trend, and I'm not anti
trend or anti hustle. But I'm not hustle all the time, trends all the time
either. There's this beautiful middle ground that's a marrying of
the 2 ideas. And so they have to work together. And in this
episode, we're talking about trends and tactics and things that are working right now.
I'm gonna go by platform. But before we dive in, this
study, particularly biometrical, looks at a few different
things. The first thing is that they're looking at analysis of 9
different social media networks. Instagram,
Facebook, x, formerly known as Twitter, TikTok, LinkedIn,
Pinterest, Google business profiles, YouTube, and
Twitch. For this podcast episode, I'm going to
ignore Twitch. And I may not talk a lot about
Google Business Profile, but we'll touch on all of those. And then in
this particular study, they looked at almost a 1000000 accounts, specifically
978,000 accounts, and they looked at over
29,000,000 posts. So a lot of data was gathered for
this study. Now they do this annually. So the this
particular study ended in December 2023, and a lot
of the comparisons made in it are made to 2022
in their previous iteration of that study.
Also in this particular study, I love and I that I can
geek out about how they grouped these accounts together. So specifically,
they grouped tiny, small, medium, big, and huge accounts
together so that they can get accurate data based on the size of the account.
So they consider a tiny account, one that has less than 500
followers. Small accounts are 500 to 2 k. Medium
accounts are 2,000 to 10000. Big accounts are
10,000 to 50,000, and huge accounts are 50,000
plus, up to 55,000,000, which I think is the most followed
account anyways. So that's how they group them together. And what I love about
this grouping as well is that it gives you a better understanding of what's
working for your brand. So one of the tactics that
I've been talking a lot about lately is posting less, posting less
frequently. But in this particular study, that posting
less frequently only works up to a certain size account. Once you start
looking at big and huge brands, specifically huge brands with over
50,000 followers, increasing your posting frequency
actually helps you more than it hurts you. But up until 50,000
followers, posting more frequently actually hurts your reach, impressions,
and engagement. K. So that's one of the examples of the data points in
the study that I find so fascinating that I love
to, talk about. But let's start with Facebook.
So with this particular study analyzing
over 280,000 Facebook accounts, what they
noticed is that there is there is a decline in Facebook usage for
brands. So across the board, more and more brands are using
Facebook less in 2023 versus
in 2022. I think this is a pretty accurate representation of
how businesses are viewing Facebook. It's it's like a battlefield out
there to try to get seen on the platform. It looks like
big and huge accounts still get the most interactions
on average, so they're still seeing some traction on Facebook.
But tiny and small and medium accounts really aren't seeing that much
engagement. So if you have less than 10,000 followers on
Facebook, you're not gonna see a lot of engagement. That's pretty that's pretty standard
across the board. On average, we're
seeing about 50 engagements per
1,000 posts. K? Fifty engagements per 1,000
posts. That's for a small brand on Facebook. So
significantly lower than in 2022, and that was about 548
interactions per post. So significant.
90% decrease this year, k, for small
accounts. The huge accounts
saw the least impact on this. So they saw a
43% decrease. And, actually, big accounts actually sell the least
at 24%. So big and huge accounts saw the least,
decrease in interaction. So again, if you have an account that's over 50,000,
followers, then you're probably still seeing some traction, but you are seeing
a decrease. So if you feel like engagement is down, it's down across the
board. That being said, this was the
year for Reels. Facebook Reels have
really taken off this year. And actually
engagement has increased across the board by an average of 33%
with Facebook Reels. So if you're gonna post to Facebook, post to Reel.
And anecdotally, I've been seeing this with my clients. We actually had 3
clients go viral with over a 1000000 views on Facebook
Reels this year in 2024, and we're only, what, 5
months into the year. So if you're gonna post on Facebook,
post a reel. Okay? And this is because Facebook's prioritizing that content
placement for discovery. So I talked about this
in, previous episode on micro video content. But when we think
about the types of content pieces that are working really well across social right
now, They're micro video content pieces because of
their design to be discovered. Okay.
So looking at the data on the engagement,
the medium, small, and tiny accounts. So if you have less than
50,000 followers, saw the largest increase in engagement
this year. So, again, lots of,
engagement there. And when we compare posts versus
Reels, the engagement is saying that users are
more drawn to Reels. Okay? So they want to see the
Reels. They want to engage with the Reels. You
don't need to post as much though on Facebook. A lot of brands are
reducing their frequency of publishing posts
while increasing their frequency of publishing reels. So they're also seeing that
data and making that change with, just
the frequency publishing frequency skyrocketing, for
small brands up to 500%. So 5 times more, I
believe, is the stat there of of posting reels.
Alright. So that is Facebook in a nutshell. Let's move on to x,
formerly known as Twitter. Twitter saw the most significant drop
in impressions across all accounts. I think this
is also reflected in their, advertising
dollars. When we look at where advertisers are
choosing to spend, they're also not spending there. Elon
Musk has, in my opinion, single handedly destroyed the
platform. There is a opportunity for it to rebound, of course, but
I just don't see that happening when users aren't there and advertisers aren't
there. Now that being said, we there's
still some positive growth in some areas, which I'll cover, but
it's mostly downward trends. Alright. So across the
board, brands are posting less on
x, formerly known as Twitter, with the largest difference coming in from
tiny accounts. So tiny accounts less than 500 followers, about
35% less, though that number is across the board.
It looks like the medium brands are at 25%, so
between 20, 35% less across the board.
But some engagement has increased for
some folks here on x formerly known as Twitter.
It seems like the people who are left, they're engaging,
especially if, if you have a tiny or a small brand,
so less than 2 k followers. You may see some increase in
engagement, and you may see people who, interact more. But
that, in my opinion, is just the people who are left are those power
users. Everyone else is is thought. We've moved on.
Alright. Decrease in impressions across the board for all brands,
all size brands as well. As much as a
1000% a 1000% decrease in
impressions for tiny brands. But even, huge brands are
seeing over a 100%, big brands over 200%,
medium brands, over 300% decrease in impression.
So fewer and fewer people are seeing the post on Twitter,
x formerly known as Twitter. Alright. Let's move on
to, LinkedIn. So in LinkedIn,
we did see a decrease in impressions, in some accounts,
but, larger engagements there, more
posts there. And this particular report focuses on
pages because LinkedIn doesn't give us a lot of data for
profiles. But my theory, and based on my manual reporting
that I do for my clients, is that personal profiles have seen increases
in engagement impressions across the board this year. A
lot of people moving away from Facebook and especially Twitter over
to LinkedIn. And so we're gonna see LinkedIn particularly
is doing some interesting things that, we'll see in the coming
years. Now, the opportunity to
go viral has increased on LinkedIn because of this.
They're working on their algorithm. It's a little bit different than, you know,
your like, Meta, Facebook, Instagram, or even
x, what they do with their algorithm. LinkedIn
is a little bit different in that their posts actually live in
the feed a lot longer. And so the chance of being viral
has increased significantly. For huge brands, it's up to
over a 1000% increase. And this
particular study looks at shares for this number. So how many
people are sharing the posts have increased over a
1000% in 2023. But
even if you have a tiny, small, medium page, we're looking
at increases of a 1000, 2,000,
and 800% here. So lots of interesting
opportunities for brands on LinkedIn. People are
actually posting, a little bit more on LinkedIn if
you're a medium to huge sized brands. But tiny and small brands, so less than
2,000 followers, aren't posting as much on their
page. And again, I do believe that is because of the profiles
on LinkedIn being the key here. That being said, engagement has
increased across the board. So whether you're posting less frequently or more frequently,
we're seeing engagement, from anywhere from 11% increases
to 22% increases across the board when we
compare engagement in 2022 versus 2023
on LinkedIn. So, yeah, if you haven't
considered LinkedIn, I highly, highly recommend it. We're gonna take a quick break when we
get back. We're gonna talk more about the data that is exciting
for 2024 trends.
Social media is constantly changing. I know that, you
know that, but not all of these changes are pertinent to
your business. That's why I created The Feed. The
Feed is a private audio experience of curated
social media news and updates that relate to your business. So
ditch the overwhelm and download the feed today.
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Com/feed to start feeling like a social media expert today.
And we're back. Let's dive into the Pinterest data. So we're
looking at Metricool's latest report on social media networks
and what's working right here, now, and today. And Pinterest is an interesting
one because I consider Pinterest and YouTube searched
based social platforms. I'm kind of making that
term up, but essentially, it means that these platforms
heavily rely on search engines even though there's a lot of social
components to the platform. So there's comment sections. There's
ability to like and share. But a lot of the
ways that the platform works is based on search. So you
wanna make sure that what you're posting to these platforms have keywords
and that they're optimized for search. Now
this year in 2023,
engagement increased in Pinterest by 32%. So we're
seeing a lot of increases there. Pinterest did some interesting things
with, amalgamating idea pins into their regular pins.
So prior to this year, they had their regular
standard pin and then they also had idea pins, which
were essentially like your TikTok videos, your reels, you
know, videos. But they kind of renamed everything. Everything's a pin.
So whether you're posting a video, whether you're posting an image, whether you're
posting a GIF, they're all pins. Okay? And
I think that really actually help with the user experience. Because when I was scrolling
through Pinterest and I look at an idea pin, my natural instinct is
to tap on the pin to visit the website on the other side. And as
business owners, that's kind of what we want people to do. However, when you're looking
at a video, tapping on it is a pause and play option. So they're
kind of making it easier for the user experience. In my opinion, I think Pinterest
is doing well there. But, yeah,
32% increase in engagement on Pinterest.
Also in, average link clicks went from half a percent
to over 1%. So 1.2%. So more people are clicking links
because of the changes that Pinterest is making as well. As a business owner, that's
kinda what we want. We want people to, like, click links and visit our
website. Then when we look at clicking on
the pins themselves so typically, they click on the pins, like, read the
description or the comment section, that has gone down a little
bit. So, in 2022, we saw about
26% clicks. And in 2023, we're
looking at 19 ish percent. So that has gone down a little bit as
well. But in my opinion, if we're clicking over to the website, we're getting it
done. Engagement rate has increased as well. Used
to be about 3% engagement rate. Now it's a bit over 4%
engagement rate on those pins, which is just lovely to
see. And lots more interactions.
Just 17.4% growth in
content interaction. That's everything from clicking on
links to saving content, which is how most people use it. And so
it feels like there's more action happening on that
platform. Pinterest itself is really all,
kind of like rebranding themselves as a social network for direct
purchase. And I personally see a lot of people use it in
the research phase of their customer journey. So they're thinking about
buying something. They go to Pinterest. They start saving ideas. So
if your business falls in line with that, you should absolutely be on
Pinterest. They have some interesting things here on
Twitch. Now Twitch isn't a large platform when compared to the
other platforms specifically because it is really
focused on live streaming and kind of made a name for itself in
the gaming arena. But we're seeing kind of that
explode in this year. We saw almost a a
100% increase in the number of accounts on Twitch
and the number of streams on Twitch from 2022 to
2023. So the the amount of weekly
streams, like the frequency of them have gone up.
And there are a lot of, changes,
especially when we look at the tiny to medium sized brands.
Now the big to huge brands actually are seeing a decrease in
creating content over time. But
overall, there's lot there's just more streams happening in general on the
platform. And we'll spend a lot of time here because not a lot of, people
who list to this podcast are to are on Twitch, but I think it's important
to note because it could be a little bit of a rising star, especially if
you're a live streamer. And with the pending TikTok
ban, there may be opportunities for live streamers on TikTok to
move over to Twitch. So I see more people moving to YouTube
as a natural choice there. Alright.
Let's talk about Instagram. Instagram is by far, for
my community, one of the most popular platforms. So if you've
purchased a product from me, if you're in my membership,
you're probably interested in Instagram. If you're listening to this podcast, probably waiting for
the Instagram part. Because Instagram is where a lot of my business owners
really spend the most time. And one of the things I wish this report had
was threads as well. But, you know, it's it's not even a year old
at the time of recording this, so hopefully, we'll get that data coming out
soon. But Instagram is where it's at. So we saw some interesting
things in Instagram this year. If you're feeling the pain, if you're feeling like
engagement isn't there or followers aren't there, this report will
give you some insights into that. Now generally speaking,
people are posting less on Instagram. So when you look at Instagram
posts specifically, we're looking at between
30 to 70% decrease in,
percentage of posts per account. So with the highest
being huge accounts, went down by 76%.
And then we also see big accounts going down by 31%
as far as frequency of posting goes. Now when it comes to
Reels so we're talking about posts and Reels totally separately inside of
Instagram, by the way. They're also they have separate,
delegations. I don't know where I'm trying to look for there. But they're in like,
their insights are in totally separate places. It's actually annoying.
But when we look at Instagram Reels, it's a mixed bag with
mostly increases. Unless you're a tiny account less than 500 followers,
most accounts increase by, 35 to
40% when it comes to posting reels. So whether you're small, medium, big,
huge, we're seeing an increase in Reels on
Instagram, Reels posts. Now when we look at
engagement though, engagement per post
and per reel has gone down across the board.
Okay? So engagement per post, engagement per reel has gone
down in across the board. When we look at
interactions, whether that's likes, comments, saves, or shares,
it's gone down. K? So while everyone's posting less, it's because
engagement has gone down even though it's kind of like we shifted focus
away from posts towards reels. Now
the interesting thing though is stories. That has gone
up almost across the board for everyone, but particularly with
tiny and huge accounts. So we're looking at
impressions and reach for stories. So if you're looking to
increase impressions or increase reach for Instagram stories,
that's the way to go. Post to your stories. Share your post to your stories.
Share your reels to your stories because that has increased across the board.
Lastly, let's take a look at TikTok. Now TikTok does have this,
like, looming ban over its head. This isn't the first time there's
been a threat of a ban. However, this has been the most serious and the
farthest the ban has gotten. Basically, TikTok has to get it together
by the end of this year. That being said, it from 2022 to
2023, there is a drastic increase in not
only accounts, but posts. Okay? So more
and more people creating accounts, way more people posting.
In 2022, the number of people that had posted in this study
Now when
we look
at engagement, Now when we look at engagement,
that has gone down across the board for almost every category
except for huge accounts. Okay? So very similar to Facebook,
TikTok has seen engagement go up for huge accounts by 27%.
But if you have a tiny, small, medium or big account, we're seeing
decreases range from 4.5% all the way up
to almost 20% decrease in engagement.
So engagement has gone down a bit on TikTok
when we look at engagement rate. Now, when we look at
average interactions as well, we're seeing those numbers
reflect as well. Average interactions
for tiny accounts having the biggest impact,
down by 88%. K. Down by 88%.
If you have a small or huge brand, those are the
least impacted. But medium and big brands, still pretty
impacted by drastic, number of interactions
drop. Average video length is 55
seconds on TikTok right now with this study.
But the weekly posting frequency,
most small, medium, tiny brands are about 2 to 3
times a week with huge brands going up to 6 times a week. So when
people say post every day, 3 times a day on TikTok, that's
not really what people are doing. Most people
are doing about 2 to 3 times a week with larger,
big, and huge companies. I'm assuming they just have more budget, for
posting, so they are seeing an increased publication rate on
the platform. There you go. There you have it.
So one of my toxic traits is
saying, oh, and the last thing and then, like, saying 15 more things.
My husband can attest to that. I actually posted that on TikTok recently.
But that was not the last thing. I wanna talk about YouTube as well for
the purpose of this podcast episode. So YouTube
is seeing some interesting things right now and
27% increase in publication across the board.
And I think it's the platform that stills to beat.
Someone asked you the other day if I did if my business got erased and
I had to start all over again, what would I do? And I feel like
I'd have, like, a focus on YouTube. It's just, like, knowing what I know
now, it's been the steadiest social platform. Least amount
of changes, least amount of algorithm changes,
very long term content play. I don't know what the
future is gonna bring, but with the, again, pending doom of
TikTok ending and the rise of video content
creation, I think YouTube's yeah, is here to
stay. Alright. So posting frequency
on YouTube has increased across the board for every single
brand. K? So every single brand in this study, it has increased,
with huge brands increasing by 21%. And I like
to look at huge huge brands, not to say that, you know, if you
don't have at least 50 k followers, you're nothing. But I like to look
at huge brands because, typically, huge brands have huge
teams. And that means they have more data points. They have more access
to analyze what's working and what's not. And so if
they make a change, like, posting 21% more on YouTube, I'm paying
attention. I'm going, that's interesting. Right? So but every single brand
across the board in this study has seen increases
in, posting. And most people posting
about 3.5 times a week, which
is very interesting. I'm not
sure if this study includes shorts. Oh, yeah. It does include shorts as well. So
about 3.5 times a week. And most
people, most brands increasing posting
by 5% all the way up to 30 percent or, yeah, 30%
of ads. I'm rounding up for that one.
That being said, there has been a decrease in
engagement across the board for most accounts, except tiny accounts.
Tiny accounts, so less than 500 subscribers, are still
seeing an increase in engagement at 14% if you have a tiny
account. But the rest of us in decreases in engagement
across the board with medium accounts being the least impacted at 3.9%
and huge accounts being the most impacted at 41%. So even
though they're posting more, they're seeing 41%
decrease in interactions. Now as far as
subscriber growth goes, that is going up
for most brands. Tiny brands, not as much. So they actually
saw a decrease of 12%, but everyone else saw increases. Medium
brands at the lowest at 4%, huge brands the highest at
70% increase across the board.
So here are some takeaways from all of this data and all of these
studies. Number 1, the algorithms
are getting better. So even though we're seeing a decrease across the
board, I think that the attention,
that people are placing on the content, is
getting better. And even though people, like business as business owners, we
complain about the algorithm, the studies still show that
people are spending more time on social media than ever in history. Like,
we're spending more time on our phones than ever in history.
There's more content to consume than ever in history, and so there's more for the
algorithms to sift through, and that means the algorithms are getting more
accurate and they're doing a more efficient job of matching people to the content that
they wanna consume. So your job
as a content creator, business owner, marketer is
to figure out what people wanna consume and how you can get your content in
front of them. So that means the second takeaway from this is focusing
on quality content versus quantity. Almost every single
platform people are decreasing besides YouTube where people are
posting frequency. So, generally, that means
that we wanna focus in on quality content. So how can we
make content that actually resonates? This does not mean it has to be
super polished and perfect. In fact, what I'm seeing in
studies with my client list and with my, marketers that I work
with is that, content that
feels low effort, so low production
quality, is doing really well even though
the effort behind the scenes still can be significant. People don't
wanna feel like you're trying too hard, but they also don't wanna feel like you
didn't try at all. K? So that's finding that middle ground. Video is on the
rise. So 3rd conclusion from this report is that
video formats, reels, stories,
lives, YouTube videos, this it's a
content placement to beat. People love that video placement. So
even if you're not a video person, I try to find ways that you can
create video content so that you can adapt to the algorithm and the platform
change changes and get that reward of
increased engagement. So we're seeing the platforms that have the increased
engagement. Rates tend to be towards
video, and tend to have a posting frequency that
matches the size of their account. For this full study, go
to metricool.com/socialnetworkstudy. You can also
Google it, Metricool Social Network Study. Find it there. This is not
sponsored by them. I just loved the study and wanted to bring it to you
here on the podcast. But that's all for today. I'll be back soon with another
episode. Bye for now.