Report highlights important trends to watch in 2019 and provides guidance to brands on how to invest advertising budgets to maximise reach, engagement and business impact
London – Socialbakers, the leading AI-powered social media marketing platform, releases its 2019 social media trends report exploring the state of social media engagement and advertising, and emerging themes for the year ahead. It dives into demographics and brand trends, advertising effectiveness, engagement best practices, and growing trends from influencer marketing and which platforms offer the most engagement to privacy and security.
Key findings from the trends report include:
- Instagram ad spend increased in 2018, while ad spend on Facebook decreased. Brands are shifting their investments between the two platforms – and from News Feed to Stories
- Photos are the most heavily promoted type of content, but video promotion soared in 2018 overtook photos in September, indicating that the popularity of this type of medium is on the rise.
- In 2018, Instagram ad campaigns rose, reaching their highest adoption rate in June – and as Instagram audiences continue to grow, so will marketers’ ad investments
- Facebook ad impressions happen overwhelmingly on mobile, as mobile users consume more ads – only 5% of ad impressions on Facebook now happen on desktop
- With 2.6 billion monthly active users, the Facebook family is still where most consumer-to-brand engagement happens online
- In terms of engagement per user, Instagram reigns supreme – Instagram users are far more engaged than Facebook users
- Avoiding influencer fraud will be a key consideration in 2019, when brands can minimise the risk of working with fraudulent influencers by looking at an influencer’s performance over an extended period, and their engagement level per 1000 fans
“Instagram is becoming the number one social media platform when it comes to engagement for brands,” said Yuval Ben-Itzhak, CEO of Socialbakers. “When we look at engagement on an absolute level, Instagram has a lot more engagement for brands than Facebook does, despite having a significantly smaller audience size. As a result, we see businesses leveraging Instagram for advertising more than ever before.”
On mobile, Yuval adds: “The key with mobile content is to focus on understanding each of the personas in your audience and tailor mobile-first content at scale. Brands should leverage digital platforms to identify the personas and learn what content sparks a conversation with each of them. That content will then drive engagement and achieve their marketing performance goals.”
On the need to avoid influencer fraud, Yuval notes: “It’s estimated that influencer marketing ad spending will reach $10 billion by 2020. But in this golden age of influencer marketing, there is also a good deal of fraud. In 2019, social media marketers will learn they need to do their due diligence before investing in an influencer – and watch out for fake fans, fake engagement, and fake interests.”
Yuval also warns that brands need to focus on their data in 2019: “If you want to successfully leverage digital platforms like Facebook and Instagram for your marketing efforts, you need solid data to drive your decision making. In 2019, good data will still be imperative to help you know precisely where to invest your advertising budget in order to maximise reach, engagement and business impact,” said Ben-Itzhak.
About Socialbakers
Socialbakers is the trusted social media management partner to thousands of enterprise brands and SMBs. Leveraging the largest social media data-set in the industry, Socialbakers’ social media marketing platform helps brands large and small ensure that their investment in social media is delivering measurable business outcomes. With over 2,500 clients across 100 countries, Socialbakers is the leading social media management platform. Socialbakers has been a Facebook Marketing Partner since 2011, a Pinterest Marketing Partner since 2017 and a LinkedIn Marketing Partner since 2017. Socialbakers was named in the 2018 Inc. 5000 list of the fastest-growing private companies in Europe. For more information, visit www.socialbakers.com.
