Marketers are constantly striving to capture consumer engagement.
However, with attention spans dwindling and digital content increasing, it appears consumers are stuck on one extreme or the other – according to Kantar Futures, many are displaying what it calls ‘torrential engagement’, meaning they are either intensely engaged or entirely disconnected.
Since the ‘Like’ button in all its various guises was invented, ‘engagement’ has become the most commonly used measure of success by marketers on social.
But what if – regardless of all this so-called interaction occurring – the message is getting lost?
For years, there has existed an underground market in which individuals and companies buy and sell fake social media followers, along with fake likes and comments.
These markets are an open secret and while fake accounts obviously violate the rules of popular social platforms like Facebook and Twitter, they have persisted.
It’s often said that it costs a lot more to acquire a new customer than to retain an old one.
Because of this, many marketers have been tasked with developing engagement and loyalty programmes.
Ratings and reviews are invaluable for online and in-store sales, web engagement, SEO, customer service, reducing returns, merchandising, marketing, and product development, as we discovered in this previous article.
It’s not quite over yet, but 2016 has been busy. As I predicted last year, mobile has been a definite focus for almost every marketer and we’re slowly starting to see VR and wearable technology take off.
I’ve found it interesting to see how businesses have started to scope out new and creative ways to incorporate all of these technologies and opportunities into their marketing strategies.
It can be tricky enough for brands to engage people over social media, but what about service providers?
What about the shopping malls, theatres and transport hubs that we use every day?
It wasn’t long ago that pharma brands tended to avoid social media.
The strict regulation of the industry’s advertising communication still acts as a motivator for the industry to be cautious with social content, yet increasing numbers of brands are taking to social media anyway.
What’s changed?
Much has been made of the fact that Snapchat reportedly now has more daily active users than Twitter, but is overall usage of all social apps peaking?
According to data from website traffic and mobile app analytics service SimilarWeb, the answer just might be yes.
Building a successful mobile app is difficult.
Companies spend significant amounts driving consumers to install their apps, and by some estimates, apps that aren’t opened for a second time within the first 12 hours after download can see churn exceeding 50% in some categories.
The start of the year is a good time to dig into social trends.
As usual, our latest Internet Statistics Compendium update sees a swathe of new data from across the world of freely accessible stats and our own in-house research.
This month it is the social arm of the compendium that boasts some of the stand-out insights.
It still surprises me that audience engagement remains overlooked as a key metric for campaign success, because focusing on engagement helps align all players in the market and satisfies both marketer goals and consumer needs.
Why is that? Well, for advertisers, having pricing options that are tied to consumer engagement rather than impressions ensures that we’re only paying for ads that are seen and engaged with.