Choosing One Social Media Platform: A Marketing Exercise

Overview

For some organizations, one social media platform could be the perfect fit. This, of course, is contingent upon the type of organization, its target consumers, and the demographics and identity of the selected social media platform. This could especially be the case for smaller organizations that do not have the payroll budget to manage a social media team that works across 6+ social media platforms.

Takashi Murakami & Kaikai Kiki

Figure 1. Takashi Murakami.

In order to explain my argument, I would like to use an art organization as an example. Kaikai Kiki is the small artist studio company founded by the acclaimed Japanese visual artist, Takashi Murakami. Murakami primarily uses Instagram to showcase his new visual art projects to his fans and followers online. Because Murakami and his brand, Kaikai KiKi produce very visual consumer materials, a visual social media platform like Instagram is a logical choice. Instagram is a popular platform for visual artists, in general, as it allows users to quickly and easily photograph or video record their work and post it for viewers to see. Past posts are easy to find due to Instagram’s chronological listing of previous posts as thumbnails on the user’s profile page.

Another consideration that supports the argument for using one social media platform as a primary follower outreach approach is the multinational nature of many organizations. Not all social media platforms have the same level of popularity and penetration across the globe. Though I was unable to find transnational statistics for Instagram, a 2016 Global Web Index report found that Facebook, Youtube, Twitter, and Google + are all relatively unpopular platforms in Japan, the home nation and primary consumer of Murakami and Kaikai Kiki’s work. Figure 2 below provides an in depth look into the percentage of internet users who have used the four social media platforms at least one during the last month.

Figure 2. GWI Chart - Social media platform popularity by country.

Because Murakami is an artist who has achieved international success, select social media platforms which have healthy levels of popularity among Japanese and English-speaking users (as an unofficial world language) provides the best opportunity to reach diverse audiences without managing multi social media platforms. Additionally, if an organization is restricted to centralizing its social media presence on one platform (due to logistics or resource limitations), selecting a platform with high user interaction (including liking, commenting, and sharing) is a good idea to maximum exposure. Figure 3 below, which uses data from 2016 Trackmaven study, shows that Instagram is strong option for garnering interactions from users.

Figure 3. Trackmaven interactions data.

Leveraging Mobile’s Popularity and Convenience

Another important question an organization should ask itself when selecting a social media platform to invest in is “is my audience using the device type most associated with this platform?” In the case of Instagram, mobile is the device type that dominates. If an organization’s data suggests that young and middle aged consumers are its key target demographics, mobile is a perhaps a stronger device type to target than desktop. A 2016 study from comScore found that in December of 2015, 67% percent of participant social media use was done on a mobile app or site, and an additional 12% took place on a tablet app or site (see figure 4 below). This trend has occurred year over and strongly suggests that mobile is the new dominant device type for social media. In the case of Murakami, focusing on a mobile-centric platform like Instagram is likely a wise investment, as statistical trends support mobile social media as the new norm. Snapchat is another option in this vein, though Instagram outperforms it in overall popularity (so Snapchat alone would likely not be the most efficient selection for a single social media platform).

Figure 4. Share of time on social media (from a 2016 comScore study).

Contemporary art is a subject matter and product type that is likely more popular among urbanites (due to the higher presence of art industry jobs, art events, galleries, and art museums in cities). Due to long commutes on public transportation and busy schedules, mobile is likely to be a highly relevant and highly used device type among urban consumers of art. Due to the nature of Instagram, I contend that it is a strong choice of platform to reach such a demographic. Images and short video clips are easy to view and digest when in busy public settings (as opposed to reading an article on your phone on the metro). Additionally, consumers of art are likely to be in touch with Instagram, due to its emphasis on visual content. In short, the daily schedules of urban consumers and the proclivities of art consumers fit well with Instagram.

Other Considerations

It should be obvious that for organizations with a broader customer base, a great need to spread general awareness, or those with large marketing budgets in competitive markets, that limiting one’s self to one social media platform is likely a wasted opportunity. The audience sizes and demographics of platforms evolve and change from one year to the next. MySpace was once a popular social media platform and has since faded from the foreground. Facebook has seen its user base shift from primarily college students to a much more even mix of ages and users. Not to mention that there is no guarantee of their constancy; Vine recently announced that the mobile social media platform is set for termination (Rogers, 2016). These examples illustrate the pitfalls and dangers of investing in only one social media platform.

However, given the constraints of Murakami and Kaikai Kiki (including variation in social media usage and platform selection across different countries and the sometimes precarious budgets of a small art company), I feel that selecting the single strongest social media platform for sharing visual content is a respectable decision. Instagram has proven to be a popular and successful mobile platform and is now owned by Facebook, a brand that has proven its ability to create lasting success with social media. For an individual who is also the owner of their brand and who has a direct role in their marketing, a single platform provides manageability and can even create an air of exclusivity around their brand and social media presence.

What's Driving Traffic? Looking at the Entry Page Metric

The entry page metric is a simple one - it denotes the first page viewed when a session began at the domain. However, as simple of a metric as it is, some confusion can arise regarding the relationship between the entry page, a landing page, and a home page. Whereas the entry page can be any page a visitor first viewed at a domain, the home page and a landing page are designated pages created with the intention of welcoming visitors to the site or introducing them to a promotion (respectively). The home page of a domain is routinely the basic domain URL for that site (i.e. amazon.com or netflix.com). A landing page is often the linked address attached to clickable advertisements that appear on external websites and on other pages on the organization's own domain.

Entry page metrics can tell the domain operator which content or products are drawing visitors to the domain, and this often relates closely to the most common desires of visitors, but also to referrer. For example, if Nike were to find that a disproportionately large rate of sessions at their domain began at the entry pages for the Nike Flex running sneaker, that could cue to the brand that that item was a popular and interesting item for consumers that was drawing them to the domain. 

The entry page metric only tells half of the story, though. Knowing the most popular referrers can also provide information about which ad buys are performing strongly (with good click-through-rates). If the web traffic to the entry page is primarily coming from organic search engine inquiries, then it stands to reason that the product has gained traction through word-of-mouth, social media buzz, or non-digital advertising (i.e. print, television, radio, billboards, etc.). 

Other considerations include disparities in entry page metrics across platforms (desktop vs. tablet vs. mobile) and how to mediate an undesired entry page. For example, if a brand were to find visitors were commonly landing on an undesired entry page and this was resulting in too many bounces or preventing a promotion from gaining traction, the domain operator could then alter their SEO to funnel searches to the desired entry or landing page. Additionally, ad buys could be invested in drawing traffic to more desired pages via linked external advertisements.

Entry pages are only the start of the visitor path (or, potentially, the path to purchase). They can also be analyzed in reference to what visitors do after entering a domain from a specific page. Ivan Bager of siteimprove.com suggests the use of scroll map and click map to trace the visitor behavior following the beginning of a session at an entry page. Even if an entry page is not seen as problematic to a domain operator, some entry pages might outperform others in terms of leading visitors towards other content, longer sessions, and a high conversion or purchase rate. Tracking visitors from the point of entry to their final action on the domain can help organizations learn how to optimize their site map and linking to create better outcomes and produce more deliverables.

The Benefits of Longer Visit Durations

In terms of web metrics, visit duration refers to the amount of time a visitor spends at a domain. As an aggregated metric, it can refer to the average visit duration of all visitors. This type of metric belong to the "visit characterization" family of metrics, which help site operators better understand the trends and behaviors of visitors while at the domain.

While page visits, impressions, total visits, and unique visitors are metrics that often receive a great deal of attention, visit duration has the capability to tell the domain operator things other metrics cannot. The aforementioned metrics can be more direct in telling the story of how much notice a web campaign received, but not necessarily in measuring the impact and success of a message and its ability to capture the visitor's attention and interest. Additionally, impressions and visits do not necessarily correlate to conversions, which might be defined as email or SMS subscriptions, social media shares, or number of purchases. Long visit duration alone does not guarantee conversions, but tends to positively correspond with more engagement, more link interaction, and more repeat visits and frequency.

Yaro Starak analyzed the value of visit duration in an entry to his marketing website, Entrepreneur's Journey. According to Starak, creating engagement content and facilitating community building are key ways to increase visit duration. This can be done by simply adding more content (which can include articles, supplementary information, how-tos, customer testimonials, etc). Additionally, creating visitor forums can be a good way to build site loyalty and boost favorable metrics. Some great examples of tactics to increase visit duration include news websites creating live streamed events, Youtube's investment in algorithmic "selected for you" videos and suggesting similar content, or even Amazon's "other visitors also viewed" product recommendations. In the eyes of the visitor, these advents save them time and effort - but they can also increase their visit duration on your domain and discourage "bounces."

Despite the helpfulness of the visit duration metric, it needs to be understood as a supplement to other metrics. As noted by the marketing source group, Wholewhale, a long visit duration might mean that visitors are having technical difficulties with your website. If this isolated to mobile visitors, it could mean that your site is not well adapted to mobile browsers and is frustrating visitors. Long visit duration, but low conversions, recency, or frequency (of visits) should signal to a domain operator that they are not reaping metric rewards from long visit duration, and there may be other problems standing in the way.

Some supplementary metrics to look at include page visit time (so that the pages visitors linger on can be enhanced, replicated, or if needed, repaired) and page views per visit. These metrics could help the domain operator identify their successful content and modify their site to showcase their most popular, longest viewed, and most revisited content. Recency and frequency can also be considered as metrics related to the helpfulness, popularity, and success of web content.

So, summarily, visit duration is a small piece of the picture, but it has the potential to highlight a domain's strengths or weaknesses. If an organization's goal with their web presence is to build an online community and foster engagement and loyalty, visit duration can be a great supplementary metric for gauging the desirability of their content and how well it fulfills the needs and wants of visitors.