Social media demographics to inform your brand’s strategy in 2023

Looking for the latest social media demographics for 2023?

You’ve hit the jackpot.

The importance of a data-driven social strategy can’t be overstated — up-to-date demographics are crucial to marketers.

Because the social space is constantly evolving. With more networks available than ever before, you need to spend your time and budget wisely. Specifically, you should focus on where your customers are.

And while you may think you know which networks matter most to your target audience, 2023’s numbers might surprise you.

Social media demographics: the numbers you need to know

From choosing your priority platforms to conducting market research, demographic data is key to understanding which networks and campaigns deserve your attention.

Want to know which apps are up-and-coming? Curious about new opportunities to cross-post your content? Worried that a network might be “dying?”

We’ve got you covered.

Below is our list of must-know social media demographics for 2023 (and beyond). These numbers are based on the latest research and social media statistics available at the time of writing.

And as an added bonus, we’ve also highlighted strategic takeaways for each network to guide your social marketing strategy.

• Facebook demographics and usage
• Instagram demographics and usage
• TikTok demographics and usage
• Twitter demographics and usage
• LinkedIn demographics and usage
• Pinterest demographics and usage
• Snapchat demographics and usage
• YouTube demographics and usage

Facebook demographics and usage

• Number of monthly active users: 2.963 billion
• Largest age group: 25-34 (29.9%)
• Gender: 44% female, 56% male (no data on other genders)
• Time spent per day: 30 minutes

Takeaways from Facebook demographics for 2023

• Facebook still remains the largest social platform among consumers and marketers.
• Case in point: Facebook accounts for the bulk of Meta’s ad revenue versus Instagram (58% to 41.5% of $121.9 billion).
• Still, time spent on Facebook continues to fall as overall social media usage grows.
• Following 2022’s social media demographic data, younger users continue to flock to TikTok and Snapchat.

Instagram demographics and usage

• Number of monthly active users: 2 billion (self-reported), other reports cite 1.35 billion
• Largest age group: 18-24 (30.8%)
• Gender: 48.2% female, 51.8% male (no data on other genders)
• Time spent per day: 30.1 minutes

Takeaways from Instagram demographics for 2023

• The platform’s growth remains steady after experiencing a boom period in recent years.
• Instagram saw a small (but notable) flip in its age demographics. The platform boasts a slightly larger percentage of Gen Z users versus Millennials.
• As far as social media age demographics go, Instagram maintains a firm hold on both generations — these groups make up roughly two-thirds of their base.
• Losing its status as the “hip” social network to TikTok, the platform doubled down on Reels. Emphasis on short-form video seems to be paying off. In fact, Reels reportedly drive the most engagement on the platform.
• Recent Instagram stats signal the platform’s shift to becoming an ecommerce hub. However, the app is still figuring things out as it revamps its social shopping features.

TikTok demographic data and usage

• Number of monthly active users: 834.3 million, other reports cite 1+ billion
• Largest age group: 18-24 (21%)
• Gender: 54% female, 46% male (no data on other genders)
• Time spent per day: 45.8 minutes

Takeaways from TikTok demographics for 2023

• TikTok’s popularity and growth remain unprecedented. There are over 150 million active users on TikTok in the United States alone.
• Not only is TikTok’s user base booming but also its daily activity. TikTok boasts the highest average time spent per day of any network.
• The fact that the platform’s gender demographics are leveling out is also notable. Last year, the split was 61% female and 39% male.  This signals TikTok’s status as a staple social app among the population at large.
• As more and more brands get on board, we’re seeing influencers do the same.
• TikTok is ramping up and “maturing” to meet the needs of its business-minded users. New features including more advanced ads and CRM integrations.

Twitter demographics and usage

• Number of daily active users: 237.8 million
• Largest age group: 18-29 (42%)
• Gender: 34.1% female, 61.29% male (no data on other genders)
• Time spent per day: 34.8 minutes

Takeaways from Twitter demographics for 2023

• Twitter’s usage and growth have remained fairly consistent year-to-year.
• It remains to be seen how the recent shake-up in Twitter’s leadership will impact the app long-term. The same goes for features like Twitter Blue and the platform’s ads.
• Some reports note a spike in activity while others note a migration away from the app.
• One-third of Twitter users are college-educated and make more than $75K annually, highlighting the platform’s highly-educated and high-earning base.
• Twitter’s status as a place to discuss events and gather breaking news make it a prime place to share content and drive discussions.

LinkedIn demographics and usage

• Number of monthly active users: 900 million
• Largest age group: 30-39 (31%)
• Gender: 43% female, 57% male (no data on other genders)
• 63% of LinkedIn users access the network weekly, 22% daily (in 2020)

Takeaways from LinkedIn demographics for 2023

• Conventional wisdom might say that LinkedIn exclusively caters to an older audience. That said, Millennials dominate the platform.
• LinkedIn continues to net record revenue and user growth. This growth was driven initially by the pandemic and continued during the shifting job market.
• The platform’s demographic of high-earning B2B professionals makes LinkedIn a potential goldmine for ads.
• According to LinkedIn themselves, it’s the top-rated social network for lead generation. This makes LinkedIn a prime source for B2B marketers looking for motivated audiences and communities.
• Beyond the 200 million LinkedIn users in the US, the platform has a massive international reach.

Pinterest demographics and usage

• Number of monthly active users: 450 million
• Largest age group: 25-34 (28.5%)
• Gender: 76.2% female, 17% male, 6.6% unspecified
• Time spent per day: 14.2 minutes

Takeaways from Pinterest demographics for 2023

• The platform saw a surprising spike in male users during 2021 but Pinterest’s core demographic remains female.
• The platform’s dedicated base of 450+ million monthly active Pinners continues to grow. This number is up from 400 million in 2022.
• Pinterest is perhaps the most produced-focused of any social network, signaling big opportunities for ads (hint: 45% of Pinterest users have a household income of $100,000+).
• Shopping-centric organic content is fair game, too  — almost 70% of users say they trust Pinterest and it’s their favorite place to research products.
• Pinterest is unique when it comes to demographics on social media due to its 1) gender split and 2) wide age range of its users.

Snapchat demographic data and usage

• Number of monthly active users: 750 million
• Largest age group: 18-24 (34%)
• Gender: 51% female, 48% male (no data on other genders)
• Time spent per day: 30.4 minutes

Takeaways from Snapchat demographics for 2023

• Although Snapchat may not be the most talked-about or “trendy” network anecdotally, the platform saw growth in 2022.
• Snapchat is still huge with the younger crowd, although it recently lost its top spot as teenagers’ go-to network. The platform continuously emphasizes its popularity with Gen Z.
• Even if you aren’t active on Snapchat, it’s a prime place for trendspotting and learning what younger consumers want.
• With Snapchat’s steady growth in revenue, the platform isn’t going anywhere.

YouTube demographics and usage

• Number of monthly active users: 2.1 billion worldwide
• Largest age group: 15-35 (highest reach)
• Gender: 51.4% female, 48.6% male (no data on other genders)
• Time spent per day: 45.6 minutes

Takeaways from YouTube demographics for 2023

• YouTube’s popularity among younger users highlights the ongoing, long-term shift toward video content.
• The growth of YouTube Shorts is notable as the platform looks to tap into the power of short-form video.
• Marketers note that YouTube is still a sort of land of opportunity advertising-wise. The platform’s ad revenue held steady from where it was last year as it approaches $30 billion annually.
• This revenue growth signals not only the platform’s influence as a social network but also as a go-to streaming service.
• Still, the majority of users claim to use YouTube for entertainment rather than to find brands and products. Brands still have a lot of work to do on the platform, finding a balance between entertainment and advertising.

Are social media demographics part of your strategy?

Keep in mind that this data is generalized across billions of users and serves as a starting point for brands looking to prioritize their social platforms.

If you’re looking to expand your reach, we recommend looking into the demographic data from your own social presence to see how it compares to the averages above.

These social media platform demographics

Whether these numbers confirm what you already suspected or serve as eye-openers, make sure to bookmark them as you iron out your social strategy for 2023.

And speaking of which, make sure to check out our free social media templates to keep you organized every step of the way.

The post Social media demographics to inform your brand’s strategy in 2023 appeared first on Sprout Social.

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Build emails faster and with less distraction

You know the wonderful feeling when you’re on a roll writing and the words are coming easily? That feeling is called flow. The psychologists Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi described flow as:

Being completely involved in an activity for its own sake. The ego falls away. Time flies. Every action, movement, and thought follows inevitably from the previous one, like playing jazz. Your whole being is involved, and you’re using your skills to the utmost.

One of our main goals is to keep you focused on writing your message when you're in that flow state.

Today we’re releasing an update to the message editor that will help keep you in your writing zone when you want to add content or style text in your message.

This menu is great — I like that I don't actually have to drag things into my email.

Johann

Just type “/”

Now if you want to add an image, video, divider, or button you don’t have to drag and drop (unless you want to). You can just type “/” on any blank line and a menu will appear with a variety of elements to add or text styles to apply.

• Want to add an image to showcase a product you’re promoting? Just press “/”.
• Have a video version of your newsletter for people who are multi-tasking? Press “/”.
• Highlighting social proof through include a stylized quote from someone in your audience singing your praises? You know the drill: press “/”.

Available Elements

Available Text Styles

It’s as simple as that. And it’s available in every AWeber account right now. So go write an email, and when you need to add or change something, try typing “/” for commands.

One last thing, if there’s something you wish was in that menu, but isn’t there now, leave a comment.

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9 ways artificial intelligence can improve your email marketing

It’s hard to talk about modern marketing without mentioning artificial intelligence (AI). According to Influencer Marketing Hub, 61.4% of marketers have used AI in their marketing activities. Moving forward, companies that want to stay ahead of the competition must keep a pulse on the latest AI developments. 

One of the areas where we can witness various AI use cases is email marketing. And this is nothing new. However, technology advancements have slowly made AI an unavoidable part of every marketer’s email marketing strategy. 

From the definition of AI in email marketing to what are the benefits of using AI, and how you can use AI to improve your email marketing results—we’ll answer these questions and more. Here’s everything you need to know to use the power of AI and step up your email marketing campaigns. Let’s dive in.  

How is AI used in email marketing?

Artificial intelligence in email marketing is the use of AI technology to draft, personalize, automate, test, analyze, and optimize email campaigns. 

According to Statista, 32% of marketers are using artificial intelligence (AI) and marketing automation to personalize email messages and offers. AI is combined with marketing automation by 22% of marketers when it comes to product and content recommendations, as well as the personalization of email subject lines.

However, this is just the tip of the iceberg. Before diving into all the different use cases for AI in email marketing, let’s first look at the benefits. 

What are the benefits of AI in email marketing?

The benefits of incorporating AI as part of your email marketing strategy are no longer just a theoretical statement—they are evidence-based. So instead of adopting AI in email marketing just because others are doing it, you have to understand its benefits and measure results against industry benchmarks. 

Here are some of the essential benefits of AI in email marketing (Data from Statista): 

• Boost revenue - The use of AI has a positive impact on companies' bottom line. Marketers using AI for email personalization said their revenue increased by 41%. 
• Save time - Businesses are always struggling to save more time and resources. Here is where AI comes in handy. For 33% of marketing professionals using artificial intelligence and machine learning (ML) tools in their marketing programs, the leading benefit was the time saved.
• Understand customer preferences and behavior - The only way to fuel your business and improve results is to understand customers’ wants and needs. 31% of professionals working with AI and ML stated that the same tools benefited their trend insights, audience preference, or behaviors.
• Optimize content - Marketers are under constant pressure to create more content. The use of AI can help them in this endeavor. Data shows that 26% of American marketing professionals shared that AI and ML helped them improve or optimize content.

9 ways to use AI in your email marketing campaigns 

Email marketing is one of the most important tools in every marketer’s toolbox. As a result, businesses face the challenge of competing for customers’ attention. The good news is that artificial intelligence can help you stand out in a crowded inbox. Here’s how. 

1: Create better subject lines

Your email subject line can determine the success of your email campaign. It’s the first thing customers see when they receive your email, so no matter how good the offer is inside, if the subject line is not attention-grabbing, your email will be stuck with thousands of other unread emails in your customer’s inbox. 

If you are constantly struggling with creating compelling subject lines, AI can help. Tools like Copy.ai offer features where just by filling in a few basic forms such as product/brand name, short description, and tone of voice can generate different proposals for your email subject line.  

How to use it:

Generate different subject lines for your email campaigns and test to see what works best. Based on the email open rates, you can measure results and spot the patterns that will help you create email subject lines that get clicked.   

2: Refine your email lists 

Staying on top of your email database is a full-time job. The process of manual email database cleaning can be cumbersome. And it can be especially challenging for smaller teams or businesses with huge email databases. 

With AI-powered technology, you can remove out-of-date contacts and automatically update personal information such as phone numbers, job titles, and other subscribers’ details. This will ensure your email lists are healthy and improve email deliverability. 

How to use it:

Use an AI email validation tool to help subscribers submit their correct information the moment they subscribe by eliminating typos and notifying them about invalid email addresses. Beyond this, thanks to real-time API scans, you can detect and prevent invalid email addresses before launching your campaign, which leads to a lower bounce rate and better deliverability.

3: Craft highly personalized emails

It’s no surprise unpersonalized emails have low engagement rates—no one wants to feel like a number in a CRM system. According to McKinsey, 71% of consumers expect companies to deliver personalized interactions. However, personalization at scale can be daunting without the right tools. 

Today, thanks to advances in technology, businesses can rely on AI email assistants such as Lavender to create personalized email outreach. Companies can use this type of tool to see social media updates, funding announcements, and company information based on the prospect’s email address. Using these insights, sellers write emails in half the time and get twice as many replies.

How to use it:

Personalize your email outreach messages to improve your response rate. If the person you’re contacting has recently been promoted, congratulate them. If the company received an award, include that in the email. If you want to build a solid relationship and provoke action, you have to personalize your outreach.

4: Discover new segments based on customer behavior 

Studies show that sending personalized content can result in 6x higher conversion rates. Email segmentation enables you to deliver targeted content that resonates with your audience. But what if you can go beyond the basic segments based on demographic information? And no, you don’t need a crystal ball for it. 

With AI, you can use purchase history, customer behavior, and preferences to segment your email lists and deliver personalized emails. This takes the guesswork out of your email marketing efforts. 

How to use it:

Handling hundreds of different newsletters is impossible without artificial intelligence. What seemed like a nightmare just a couple of years ago now becomes easier than ever. You can use AI to create a smart newsletter with personalized content based on your subscriber’s interests and boost engagement. 

5: Send your emails at the right time 

Another hurdle email marketers often face is sending their emails at the right time. While there are some guidelines on the best days and times for sending your emails, to maximize the results and get more opens and clicks, you want to optimize sending time on an individual level. 

Using AI, you can analyze email recipients’ activity history, and based on their behavior, you can determine the best time to send your email marketing campaigns. 

How to use it:

Rely on AI-powered tools to send email campaigns based on the subscriber’s location and time zone. This way, you avoid the risk of ending up in the trash before even a single click.

6: Generate various email ideas

Marketers are faced with the pressure to create many different email promotions, newsletters, and offers on a weekly basis. This can often lead to a creative rut—the state of being blank out of creative ideas. 

But instead of looking at an empty screen, you can turn to AI to generate some ideas and spark your creativity. Alycia McFarlin, Zumba instructor, and AWeber team member, struggled to create a regular newsletter because she was afraid she couldn’t give the readers anything interesting to read. So she decided to ask ChatGPT (an AI-powered writing tool) to give her topic ideas by adding a simple prompt—“What can I write about in a Zumba newsletter?”

As soon as she put those ideas into action, she noticed a huge spike in the average click rate from 1.9% to 11.2%—almost a 500% improvement.

How to use it:

When brainstorming ideas for your next email campaign, turn to AI to generate different topics and copy proposals. Don’t rely fully on AI—analyze the proposals you get, improve, test, and iterate.  

7: Improve customer experience based on the lifecycle stage 

Sending an engaging email marketing campaign requires context. And you can’t get context without understanding the customer lifecycle. Based on the stage in the journey, customers act differently and have different expectations. 

Using AI and predictive analytics, you can generate insights that allow you to comprehend customers’ lifecycle stages and send contextual campaigns to maximize your email marketing efforts. 

How to use it:

Customers that have bought 50 times from your e-commerce store won’t act the same as first-time buyers. While this seems like a no-brainer personalizing your email campaigns based on lifecycle stage manually is a Sisyphean task. With AI and predictive analytics, you can tailor campaigns based on expected behavior to maximize results.

8: Build retargeting campaigns with personalized product recommendations 

Not everyone that visits your website will end up making a purchase. Your job is to build retargeting campaigns and pave the way to the “add to cart” button. But you won’t be able to do that with random, generic product recommendations. Here’s where AI comes into the picture. 

AI technology allows businesses to track on-site activity and include personalized product recommendations in email campaigns. Equipped with these insights, email marketers can create well-performing browse and cart abandonment emails.

How to use it:

In some cases, customers need a slight nudge to make the final decision. Use AI-powered technology to create cart abandonment emails with the exact products customers left in their cart to boost sales.

9: Run automated multivariate tests

If you are A/B testing different subject lines for your email campaigns, you are just scratching the surface. AI allows you to perform multivariate tests and compare a higher number of variables to reveal more information. 

So instead of just testing subject lines, you can add additional variables such as email body, offers, design elements, and even calls to action. Based on the performance, you’ll be able to see which variation is most effective.

How to use it:

AI technology allows you to find the most effective version of the email campaign based on the results from a smaller batch of your email list. This way, you can test different subject lines, call-to-action buttons, visuals, or offers, and based on the initial results, AI will determine the final version of the campaign that will be sent to the rest of your list. 

Ready to create your next email campaign? 

The next chapter of AI-powered email marketing is here. Staying ahead of the wave will require unique insights, testing, analyzing, and optimizing your email marketing campaigns. Email marketing is still one of the most powerful tools for reaching your audience, and thanks to AI, it will stay that way. 
It’s never been a better time to transform your business with the power of email marketing. Get started with AWeber today—it’s free!

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How to measure social media ROI for your business

Is your business really getting something out of its social media efforts? If it’s hard to tell, you’re not alone. According to the latest Sprout Social Index™, proving social media ROI was the second biggest challenge for social media teams.

So if you’re struggling with measuring social media ROI yourself, we get it. Measuring the return on metrics such as engagement rate or customer satisfaction often feels like a guessing game.

Besides, not everything you do on social media translates directly into dollars and cents.

Yet at the same time, businesses need to account for the time and resources that go into their social efforts. That’s why we put together this guide so you can assess social media ROI based on your unique online presence once and for all.

Why social media ROI matters

To skeptics, social media has the reputation of being a total time-sink.

Sure, businesses can pour hours upon hours into their social without seeing much in return beyond a few vanity metrics.

On the flip side, so many brands are killing it with paid and organic campaigns alike. Plus, businesses these days must have a social presence of some sort. It’s one of the best ways to boost brand awareness and reach a new audience.

Many brands are even using social media as a customer service channel.

As such, effectively measuring your social media ROI helps in accounting for your time and resource spending. You can even use the insights to inform your campaigns and make improvements for increased engagement.

If you want to squeeze the most out of your social media efforts, you need to define what you’re trying to get out of your presence.

With that, we dive into the meat of figuring out your social ROI.

How to calculate social media ROI

The process of calculating your social media ROI involves collecting your data and aligning it to your goals. You will need to look at different social media ROI metrics such as impressions, engagements and link clicks. Then compare these metrics against the cost of running your campaign to make sense of your ROI.

This can be a time-consuming and complicated process. But there are tools to simplify your ROI measurement. For instance, you can use Sprout’s Advocacy ROI Calculator Tool to see how your employee advocacy program is paying off. This lets you measure your social media ROI in terms of brand awareness, lead generation and hiring.

1.    Define the purpose of social media for your brand

Let’s be clear. Social media ROI is not some sort of one-size-fits-all affair.

When we think of “ROI,” we often default to thinking about money. Yet not all brands are necessarily using their social presence to “follow the money.” For example, raising brand awareness is a perfectly good reason to invest in social media.

At the same time, other brands may be focusing on social media marketing to generate leads.

Businesses may invest in lead magnet offers or targeted ads which are strategies that yield measurable results. In these cases, it will be much easier to account for their social media return on investment.

For example, here’s Apple promoting the Macbook through a targeted Twitter ad for iPhone users. This strategy will directly translate to measurable results in the form of leads and conversions. The brand will then be able to measure its social media ROI by looking at the number of traffic and sales coming from the ad.

Meanwhile, some brands are primarily concerned with customer service and community building.

Timely back-and-forth with customers is key to retention. Failing to pay attention to customer concerns via social could result in someone bouncing to a competitor. In this sense, customer service can provide a massive ROI with just a little bit of effort.

Heck, you could be doing all of the above. Many brands are, actually.

The takeaway here is that is no single way to use social media effectively. To define your social media ROI, you need to first break down the “why” of your presence. This could ultimately frame how much time or money you’re willing to invest in the first place.

Getting a return on that investment means understanding your performance.

But to do that, you need a data-driven endgame.

2.    Set actionable social goals

Reality check: it’s impossible to measure your social media ROI without knowing what to measure for.

In our guide to building a better social media presence, we discuss the need to set measurable, realistic goals. The same rules apply to uncover your social ROI.

Below are some common yet specific goals for any given brand’s social campaigns:

• Email list sign-ups
• Contact form inquiries
• Trials
• Purchases
• Downloads of a whitepaper or ebook

Note that all of these goals involve someone taking a measurable action. Check out the following video to get an idea of the key social media ROI metrics to track.

Metrics like social shares, followers and general traffic are worth tracking but they shouldn’t be your main goals. Unless you’re focused solely on engagement and awareness, these metrics don’t drill down deep enough for assessing ROI.

To get the most accurate numbers for your social media ROI, it pays to set your goals based on defined actions. Specifically, actions that convert a casual browser to a lead and ultimately to a paying customer.

Someone clicking a link to your site in a Tweet is always nice but tracking such interactions shouldn’t stop there. For example, you need to know whether those clicks are resulting in sales or other meaningful interactions.

Make your goals campaign-specific

Rather than look at the big picture of your social presence, social goals should be campaign-specific. This is a critical aspect of measuring ROI that so many marketers miss.

A campaign is a planned effort with set goals and a measurable outcome. Here are some awesome examples of social media campaigns to help inspire you and clue you in on what we’re talking about.

For example, any brand running a paid Facebook campaign should know whether or not their ads paid off. Through analytics, the answer is fairly straightforward.

One of the most important reasons for setting up a campaign is that it will let you track individual links that you share on social. This allows you to easily attribute visits from specific links you share.

For example, brands on Instagram oftentimes update their bio link to coincide with their latest promotions. Rather than use a generic link, URL trackers help tie clicks to specific campaigns and calls-to-action.

Check out how ColourPop Cosmetics uses a Beacons link in its bio to track conversions from Instagram.

3.    Measure your goals

Once you’ve defined your goals, the next step is to track them. The tracking part is why it’s so important to set up goals based on your visitors taking action.

The easiest way to track your social media goals is by using Google Analytics. This will show you how much traffic came from social and how long those visitors spent per session. From this same report, you can even view the conversions and revenue from organic social.

To view this report using Google Analytics 4, go to your “Reports” and click on “Acquisition.” Then select “Traffic acquisition” to view a full report of traffic acquisition by channel.

Further, you can filter the report based on the type of conversion event. Slide to the right-hand side of the report and click on the drop-down menu below “Conversions.” Then select the conversion event you want to view such as adding to cart or purchases. That way, you can get an accurate idea of how many people from social actually ended up buying.

4.    Track your social media expenses

To figure out whether you’re getting a positive or negative ROI for social media campaigns, you’ll have to measure how much you’re spending. That spend doesn’t just involve money, though. Here’s what to include in your ROI calculations.

• Time: Your time is valuable–whether you’re a solo business or you have a social media team. Add up the hours that go into a specific social media marketing campaign over a specified period of time. Don’t just use an employee’s annual salary, though, as they’re more than likely going to be working on several projects throughout the year. Then measure the investment you make per campaign.
• Content: Did you hire a professional copywriter to write a landing page? Or maybe you outsourced status updates. These costs are easy to overlook but they certainly count. If you’re writing such copy yourself, that’s going to count toward your time investment.
• Social media tools: Using Facebook and Twitter is free. But if you’re using a tool like Sprout Social or other social media management software, you need to add those costs in. Just like with the hours, you should calculate this on a per-campaign basis. So if your campaign lasts for one month, only add in the cost of a month of the software, not an entire year.
• Ad costs: If you’re running a Promoted Tweet or boosting a Facebook post, add in that cost as well. This is fairly easy to track as you set up your ad budget.

After factoring in all your expenses, you can use the social media ROI formula below to make your calculation for each campaign.

Social media ROI = (Earnings – Costs) x 100 / Costs

Earnings will include the revenue you earned from your campaign. Your costs are the expense items you calculated above (hours, content, etc).

You can figure out the specific ROI for each social network by segmenting your earnings and costs per social channel. Then make the per-channel calculations using the same formula above. After looking at the numbers, you’ll be able to decide which social platforms are doing the best for your company and hone in on those.

For any social networks or campaigns that are bringing in a negative ROI, you can either try to adjust by spending less or fine-tune your campaigns.

Tips for improving your social ROI

On that note, let’s quickly cover some additional pointers for stepping up your social media marketing ROI.

1.     Optimize your posting frequency

With social feeds refreshing every second, it’s easy for your content to get lost in a sea of new posts. That means your target audience isn’t going to see your content, let alone engage with it. No engagements equal no returns on your social media investment.

So you need to post new content regularly to ramp up your visibility. Ideally, you should post multiple times a day to get your content in front of the right audience. Not sure how often to post on social media? The industry average stands at a whopping 11 posts per day.

Don’t just stick to these industry norms, though. We recommend testing different posting frequencies to see what works best for you.

Boosting your posting frequency doesn’t just help with social media algorithms. But it even shows your audience that you’re active and you’re worth following. No one wants to follow a brand that only Tweets every other week.

Create a posting schedule to follow consistently. And use social media scheduling tools like Sprout to automatically send out your posts based on that schedule. This lets you plan your content for an entire month and schedule posts to go out at optimal send times.

2.     Improve your engagement metrics

Engagement is the gateway to conversion activities. Someone who engages with your product promotion post is more likely to show interest in the product than someone who just scrolls past it. They might take a closer look at the product, click on the link and eventually buy the item.

So you need to get those engagement metrics up if you want to boost your social media ROI. Leverage strategies to boost your social media engagement. This might include posting at the right time, using eye-catching visuals and creating compelling copy.

Most importantly, make sure you’re creating content that resonates with your audience. Use Sprout’s social media analytics tools to keep a close eye on your post-level engagement metrics. See which posts are getting the most engagement to gauge what’s resonating with your followers. Then use those insights to inform your social media content strategy.

3.     Mine your social data

Measuring your social media ROI essentially boils down to your metrics. Beyond Google Analytics, take a hard look at your social dashboards to understand your performance.

For example, which types of content are your top performers? When are you getting the most engagement? These data points can be make-or-break for paid and organic campaigns alike.

The more data you have on hand, the easier it is to maximize your reach and get a better ROI for your efforts.

Tools such as Sprout are invaluable for mining your data to figure out data points that go beyond the likes of your native analytics. Not only can you get a look at all your channels in one place, but you can use features like message tagging to group together all the messages in a given campaign. This allows you to compare and contrast performance across different campaigns. That way, you can pinpoint what is and isn’t connecting with your audience and adjust your campaign planning accordingly.

4.     When in doubt, run test campaigns

Marketers today have to run a variety of campaigns, paid or otherwise. And not all of those campaigns will pay off. Before going all-in on a particular campaign or ad type, save yourself time and money by running a test first.

This is especially important for paid ads like those on Facebook that can quickly blow out your budget if you aren’t careful. Check out our comprehensive guide on testing on social media to learn more about what it takes to run an effective test.

5.     Tap into the power of social commerce

Social commerce has exploded in popularity over the past few years. It has helped to seamlessly bridge the gap between researching products on social and actually making a purchase. According to the Social Shopping in 2022 survey, 68% of consumers have bought something directly from social media.

Conducting commerce on social media makes your ROI much more evident by tying social engagement to retail success. Use Sprout’s social commerce features to connect your Shopify and Facebook Shops product catalog to the platform. That way, you can focus more on ways to drive sales through social and less on managing different tools for product links or customer history.

6.     Take advantage of the tools of the trade

Thankfully you don’t need to use a ton of tools to assess your social media ROI. We’re all about keeping things lean and taking a DIY approach when appropriate.

Make sure to leverage Google Analytics to track your campaigns and goals. And don’t forget to tap into the robust suite of Sprout Social tools to schedule, manage and track details of your social media posts.

And with that, you have everything you need to break down your social ROI.

How are you measuring your social media ROI?

Knowing exactly what you’re getting out of your social media presence doesn’t have to be a huge question mark.

For the sake of efficiency and accountability, businesses must define and measure their social ROI. This does the double duty of ensuring that your campaigns focus on goals and that your resources are going to the right places.

Get the most out of your metrics with our social media data toolkit.

 

 

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Sprout Tested: The answer to why you put links in the comments on LinkedIn

LinkedIn has become a different kind of social space. What used to be a place to post job openings has become a go-to hub of thought leadership and engaging content for job-seekers, employees, investors and customers alike.

This content explosion isn’t imagined. According to LinkedIn, platform members viewed 22% more Feed updates in 2022, year over year. But ramping up your content and LinkedIn marketing strategy on the platform will inevitably lead to questions in the effort to get it right. And one of the biggest questions we’ve seen about LinkedIn content is whether or not you should put links in your posts, or in the first comment.

We were curious too: why put the link in comments on LinkedIn? So we designed an experiment to find out. Keep reading to see what we did, our results and learnings to bolster your strategy.

Why put the link in comments in LinkedIn posts? (And does it matter?)

Comments vs. post? Does it make a difference for engagement? Impressions?

As marketers rethink their LinkedIn content strategy, these questions are surfacing more and more. With bandwidth already thin for social teams, it pays to be sure the posts you push out on the platform are optimized for maximum social media engagement.

Our social team designed an experiment to answer this question. “I have seen an increasing volume of text-only posts on LinkedIn, which is why we wanted to do this experiment,” Sprout’s Social Media Strategist—and designer of this experiment—Greg Rokisky tells us. “I’ve seen a lot of carousel and document posts, and I’ve seen a lot of creativity being executed there. So it’s exciting to see how LinkedIn continues to adapt for various post types.”

How we tested adding links to content on LinkedIn

Social media is part art, part science. Conducting social media experiments is one of the best ways to evaluate what content your team should be spending more time on.

Here’s how we designed our experiment—and the variables we controlled for—to get the most accurate results possible.

The post content

Over the course of a month, we created 8 posts designed specifically for this experiment on LinkedIn. First, we picked four articles from our blog that:

• We wanted to post about in the upcoming weeks
• Had actionable, social-first lists and takeaways we could include in a post
• Shared similar takeaways

Then, we created two posts for each article: A post that would contain the link in the comments, like this one:

And another that would contain the link within the post itself, like this one:

That left us with four link-in-comments posts, four link-included posts.

The post design

The key here was ensuring that our 8 posts weren’t repetitive, and fit in with our normal flow of content.

To do this, we changed up the text and how information was presented in each post. The link-in-comments posts had a “social-first” design. That is, the post itself had enough value to be sharable and were designed to be:

• Engaging
• Long enough to show the “see more text” prompt
• Value-driven (i.e. included a list of takeaways that provided readers with insights, while also teasing the full article)

The link-included posts had shorter text overall. Where the link-in-comments post copy was designed to be social-first, this copy was geared towards getting readers to click through to the article.

The post frequency

We confined this experiment to a month to spread out and analyze the posts within our regular reporting period. We also published no more than two experiment posts within one week, alternating link-in-comments posts with the link-included ones to avoid redundant content.

Finally, as Greg explains, “We also scheduled using one of the top two of our Optimal Send Time recommendations in Sprout Social to ensure we were scheduling at peak recommended times as an added control.”

Result: Does putting the link in the comments improve performance?

Now comes the fun part. Without further ado, here are the two most impactful results. Drum roll please:

The link-in-comments posts performed better

As Greg explains, “In terms of overall performance and how these posts performed on LinkedIn, the link-in-comments posts performed better and had higher numbers from both an awareness and engagement perspective.”

Not only did these posts perform better than the link-included posts—they also performed well in the context of our larger strategy. In our testing month, two of the link-in-comments posts were among our top 10 performers across all platforms for awareness and engagement.

Here’s a better look at those numbers:

• Awareness results: Link-in-comments posts had a higher average of impressions per post—around 8,136. While the link-included posts had around 3,309 impressions on average—roughly a 3x difference.
• Engagement results: The link-in-comments posts had an average of 261 engagements per post, while the link-included posts fell to 141 average engagements.

To track our results, we tagged our experiment posts in Sprout. Tags helped us pull reports solely featuring our experiment results, which is an effective way to track specific post results, or campaigns. See the tags we used for this experiment below (in Sprout’s dark mode.)

Sprout’s Tag Performance Report gave us an overview of the experiment’s post performance. And we used the Profile and Post Performance reports to analyze how the experiment performed within our overall LinkedIn strategy, including if any were top performers within the month.

If you’re interested in trying these reports for yourself, start a free 30-day Sprout trial.

Posts that were “social-first” performed better

The link-in-comments posts had rich captions that contained takeaways from the link included in the comments. These posts were text-only and “social-first”—that is, designed to fit the platform and acted as a “foot-in-the-door” to lead interested readers in taking the next step to click the link in the comments.

And as mentioned earlier—several of the text-only, social-first posts were in our top 10 posts across all of our channels during our testing month.

These strong test results revealed the right formula for our LinkedIn link posts: a combination of the social-first approach, and putting links in the comments. Testing this post format has the potential to supercharge your post performance as well.

5 Takeaways to use in your LinkedIn strategy

Data is nothing if you don’t put it into action. And there are plenty of ways you can use this experiment to feed how you structure your LinkedIn content, and your LinkedIn best practices.

According to our 2023 Content Benchmarks Report, over half of marketers cite “changing content formats” as a challenge when planning and scheduling content. Use these five takeaways to alleviate some of that stress by knowing where to take your strategy next.

1. Design platform-first posts

Creating posts designed to look native to the platform you’re posting on is like “speaking the language” of the social channel. Not to mention, it works. As Greg puts it, “The posts that felt like they were designed for the channel, or ‘social-first,’ and native to it seemed to perform better overall.”

This also meets your audience with the content type they look for on the platform you’re publishing on. And this goes for any platform—not just LinkedIn. For example, you probably wouldn’t include the same framing or voice effects in a YouTube video that you would in a TikTok or YouTube Short video.

As Greg says, “I think this reinforced our strategy to create content catered to each individual platform.”

Our LinkedIn for Business Template will help you explore ways to make a bigger impact on this channel.

2. Lead with your goals

In this experiment, our goals were social-first—generating more organic engagement and awareness.

But your goal might be focused on other objectives and key results, like driving website visits or purchases. In this case, your social posts may have cross-team implications. Align with other teams on KPIs and the parameters of your experiment to get the data each contributor needs to make informed decisions, and ensure you have access to the necessary tools—Google Analytics data, for example.

For example, if your content team uses Google Analytics to track blog links, work with them to ensure you’re properly tracking your links with UTMs, and can access those results. We go deeper into link tracking in the next section.

3. Plan to track your links separately

One limitation we identified in this experiment was the ability to measure link clicks when the link was in the comments vs. in the post.

Sprout reports measure post link clicks for published posts. However, when the link is in the comments, there’s no way for social platforms to capture that information for the post in LinkedIn analytics.

The solution: To track how many people clicked on your comment link, use UTMs to track your URLs. A UTM is a basic code snippet added to the end of your URL. It tracks the performance of your links and helps you get deeper insights into how people interact with them.

To employ UTMs, use Google’s UTM builder. Or, when you use Sprout, our platform makes it easy for you to implement URL tracking within your publishing workflow, and to shorten your links before you publish.

4. Add the link to your comments to test it for yourself

LinkedIn is already the organic platform that B2B content marketers find the most effective. As you ramp up your posting strategy, try putting links in the comments to potentially kickstart your awareness and engagement.

And if you’re not ready to take the leap, strike a balance. Include your link in the post. But make your text social-first and designed to be engaging for LinkedIn readers. Think: teasing your content with a list of tips, key takeaways and more.

If you use a social media management platform to schedule and publish posts, just remember to comment with the link manually due to API limitations. You’re already engaging with your audience in the comments—which Sprout can also help streamline with our Smart Inbox. Add this step to your current comment and engagement strategy to keep it top of mind, or set reminders.

5. Try crafting platform-specific content experiments

The best way to truly know what makes an impact in you content strategy and what leads to the strongest ROI is to experiment.

Use this article as a guide and design a social media experiment to test different content types, designs and formats in your strategy.

The key is having controls—like how we controlled our posting time, frequency and themes to limit the number of variables we were testing at once. And, to know how you’re going to measure your posts ahead of time.

Having the right tools is crucial to running effective tests. As Greg put it, “When I used to be a social team of one, I ran social media experiments like this and had to lean on spreadsheets that lend to human error. So doing an experiment in a product like Sprout makes it much easier to look back on results, understand trends, dive deeper into posts and keep a controlled experiment.” The easier it is for you to compile your findings and analyze your results, the more motivated you’ll be to test.

Just ensure your test posts feel natural to your strategy. “Doing a social media experiment needs to feel authentic and natural for your audience and platform,” Greg explains.

For example, this is a regular, non-experimental post on our LinkedIn channel. Compare this to the experiment posts we shared above:

Test out what works for your strategy and audience

Social media is constantly in flux. The more content formats and audience preferences change, the more important it is to run experiments that assess what types of content your team should focus on.

The key to running an experiment that leads to actionable insights is organizing your process. Check out our social media testing worksheet to design and run personalized experiments that will fine-tune your strategy and leads to better business results.

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How to use Facebook audience insights for more effective targeting

Just because emerging platforms are coming onto the scene doesn’t mean you should count Facebook out of your social media strategy. With 2.96 billion active users, Facebook is still the third most visited website in the world and boasts a long-time reign as the most used social media platform.

By digging into Facebook audience insights and analytics tools, you are empowered to effectively reach your ideal audience and filter through the billions of active users on the app. With these powerful insights, you can validate assumptions about your audience, start creating more targeted a/b testing, refine your current audience profiles and aggregate audience data across profiles.

Keep reading for an overview of how to use Facebook’s audience insights tool and actionable steps you can take to maximize your paid and organic strategy.

• Why understanding your Facebook audience is important
• Where to find Facebook audience insights
• The different Facebook audience types
• How to use Facebook audience insights
• How Sprout Social helps you define your Facebook audience

Why is understanding your Facebook audience important?

Defining your target audience and learning how they use Facebook will enable you to:

• Spend your ad budget more effectively.
• Determine if the platform should be a high priority for your brand.
• Develop messaging that truly resonates with your audience.
• Optimize your posting strategy.

To understand your audience’s relationship with Facebook, start by researching the latest platform demographic data. Learn who uses Facebook, how often they use it, what they use it for and if users fit within your target audience.

For example, according to Statista, 23.7% of Facebook users are between the ages of 25 and 34, and the majority of them are younger than 44. The app skews male, with 57% of users identifying as such. Statista also discovered that 97.4% of Facebook users access the platform from a mobile device.

Tapping into the Facebook audience insights tool takes it a step further by showing your current audience and zeroing in on your target consumers. With this data on-hand, your decisions will be more informed and customer-centric, translating to more impactful campaigns, advertising efforts and creator partnerships.

To get a head start engaging your audience, complete this free worksheet that will set you up to build authentic connections with your community.

Where to find Facebook audience insights

On Facebook, there are two ways to discover audience insights from your business profile. First, you can see organic audience data including:

• People who like your page broken down by gender and location
• Number of total followers
• Reach and engagement metrics

You can access this data from the Professional dashboard of your Meta Business Suite.

Second, when you run an ad campaign, you can access all the data from your organic view and additional in-depth audience info like:

• Age
• Content preferences (top-performing posts and videos)
• Device usage

Find these metrics in your Meta Ads Manager Ads Reporting and Audience tabs.

You can also explore how your Facebook ad campaign performed with your different audience types, which we will explain in the next section.

What are the different types of Facebook audience types?

When you run a Facebook ad campaign, you have four audience targeting options to ensure you reach your ideal audience.

1. New audiences

New audiences is the default setting option, and refers to new customers who haven’t previously interacted with your brand. You can refine this audience by selecting categories like location, demographics, interests and behaviors.

2. Custom audiences

Custom audiences enable you to connect with people who already show an interest in your business. They might have engaged with your content, visited your site, used your app, completed a recent purchase, or they might be on your customer list.

3. Lookalike audiences

Lookalike audiences are made up of people who share interests with your custom audiences, but haven’t interacted with your business yet. Typically, lookalike audiences are generated using your custom audiences as a source.

These audiences save you time because, rather than starting from scratch to create a new audience, you can rinse and repeat the success of your most successful content and campaigns.

4. Saved audiences

Whenever you create a new custom audience, you can save that audience for future use. Note: you must reselect your ideal location every time you use the audience.

How to use Facebook audience insights

To get started with the Facebook audience insights tool, follow these steps.

1. Upload a custom audience source

Get started by selecting Create a Custom Audience from the Audiences tab of your Ads Manager. From there, choose a custom audience source, including your owned sources like data from your website, app activity, a CRM customer list and more.

You can also use Meta sources, like video engagement, your Instagram account followers, lead forms, event participants and Shopping users.

2. Customize your audience with filters

After selecting your source, indicate additional rule inclusions or exclusions to better refine your audience. The Facebook audience meter will let you know whether your audience is too specific or too broad. Continue iterating until your reach is just right (the ideal audience size is between 2–10 million people). Further customize your audience by age, location, language and gender.

3. Zone-in on interest-based audiences

If you have a relatively large audience (at least larger than 2 million), use additional interest-based targeting to pinpoint a specific audience. Examples of shared audience interests include:

• Business and industry
• Entertainment
• Family and relationships
• Fitness and wellness
• Food and drink
• Hobbies and activities

Then, add the name and description of your audience list and how long you will retain it. Now you’re ready to tap Create New List.

4. Review your audience metrics

After launching your ad campaign, review how your audience list is performing. Are you reaching your campaign goals? If not, make the necessary adjustments to your list. Experiment with narrowing or broadening your audience and redefining your inclusions and exclusions.

5. Save and replicate your best-performing audiences

If your audience performs well, save it for future use. To reach and engage new consumers with similar demographics and behavior patterns, create a lookalike audience.

By tapping the Create a Lookalike Audience button from the Audiences tab, you will be prompted to select an existing audience or data source, select the audience location and size and determine how similar your audience should be to the original (1% lookalike means the audience is as similar to the original as possible). Once you create this audience, you can rerun your ad campaign or continue tailoring the list.

How Sprout Social helps define your Facebook audience

With a platform like Sprout Social, you will master your Facebook strategy by clearly defining your target audience and amplifying the impact of your audience insights.

Our tools will better equip you to leverage Facebook’s native tools, enhance your data-driven decisions and create content that resonates with ideal customers. By doing so, you will increase your audience size and engagements, which are key to increasing demand for your products. Here are a few platform highlights that give you deeper understanding of your target audience.

Social listening

With Sprout’s Social Listening solution, artificial intelligence (AI) and automation technology do the heavy lifting for you at scale—sifting through millions of data points to deliver the trends, insights and key audience learnings you need in seconds.

As the Profile Overview demonstrates, the tools enables you to compare followers, volume, potential impressions, likes and engagements from various Facebook profiles to help you level-set your strategy and prove your impact.

Using the Performance Summary tool, you can investigate topics that are most relevant to your audience. Uncover which keywords are driving conversations and use them to refine your interest-based filters when creating Facebook custom audiences.

Network-specific and aggregate metrics

Sprout’s Analytics tools speed up data collection and distribution so your brand can focus on the KPIs that matter, inform strategy and prove ROI. The tools enable you to maintain complete oversight of all connected social profiles from one location.

Use reports like the Facebook Pages report to dig into audience growth trends, impressions, engagements and post link clicks. Compare these findings with other network results to determine overall audience trends.

Paid reporting

To test the efficacy of your Facebook ad audiences, use Sprout’s Paid Performance reports. The Facebook and Instagram report highlights campaign-level data for ad campaigns across Meta platforms. Trends appear against your key performance indicators (KPIs) to help you identify top-performing channels and campaigns.

Maximize Facebook audience insights to up-level your strategy

Making the most of your Facebook strategy starts with having the intel you need to target your ideal audience. By using the native Facebook audience insights tools and a powerful social media management platform like Sprout Social, you will be enabled to refine and grow your audience, which will grow your bottom line.

Ready to gain deeper insights into your Facebook target audience? Start your free 30-day Sprout Social trial today.

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