Using Social Media to Influence Consumers

By this time, social media marketing has become, if not a central part, a very large part of any marketing department’s focus and budget. While it has been clear for some time now that social media can be an incredible tool when used correctly to influence consumers, some people still have a hard time grasping and quantifying exactly how valuable this practice can be. By looking at statistics, we can get a better idea of just how wide a reach and large an impact social media platforms like Facebook can have.

Through the first quarter of 2017, Facebook has reported a daily active user rate of 1.28 billion people. This is gigantic, and it also represents an 18 percent increase from this time period last year. Growth at this level this long after creation is usually unheard of, but Facebook is experiencing it. There is also an astounding 1.15 billion daily active users on mobile devices alone. This should tell marketers that using Facebook for ad campaigns should not be confined just to desktop platforms, but have a mobile component as well.

Despite the huge volume of traffic that Facebook gets, bit.ly found that the time of day plays a huge role in the amount of people who are on the site. They identified that weekdays in the middle of the day, from one to three in the afternoon, are the most popular times of the day to be on Facebook. Anecdotally, this is not hard to believe, as one could picture coming back from a lunch break and logging on to Facebook to pass some time before continuing on with the workday. This information can be valuable to keep in mind when considering the timing of social media releases for maximum visibility. Target demographic of time zones is also something that should be considered.

While it is widely agreed upon that social media, and Facebook especially, can be very valuable tools for marketers to leverage, it still has been tough to quantify exactly how valuable. Statistics such as these can help illustrate exactly how popular and thus useful Facebook can be for marketers.