Social Media Update 2020
by Sheri Candler
Every year, I compile a presentation for the TFC all-staff meeting to inform the group on what the latest social media trends are, what changes have recently taken place and what may be to come on the major social media platforms. This post will share the insights I gathered with that might benefit filmmakers in the coming year.
General Social Media Trends
- People’s attention spans are short and the way they like to consume content has also changed. Content formats like Stories have become popular. They are short, engaging, and addictive in a way that people can spend hours scrolling through one Story after another. Facebook forecasts that sharing to Stories will surpass sharing to Feeds at some point in the coming year. Consider creating a 15 seconds vertical video as one of your trailers.
- 1 out of every 4 Facebook Pages now use paid advertising as part of their social media strategy and Facebook accounts for 23% of total U.S. digital ad spending. If you’re trying to grow an audience via Facebook and Instagram, budget will be needed for paid social media placement.
- 4 in 10 consumers say they are unlikely to become emotionally attached to a brand unless they are interacting via social media, but those interactions need to be authentic and personalized. This means refrain from only posting about your projects and really try to relate, on a personal level, to your audience.
- Most popular mobile social networking apps in the United States as of September 2019, by monthly users (in millions). Facebook is still tops when it comes to users.
- Approximately 223 million Americans use social media in 2019. This is a slight increase over 2018, and a slight decrease compared to 2017. Overall, however, social media usage is essentially unchanged over the past four years. The ONLY social network growing among young Americans is Instagram, up from 64% to 66% in the past two years. Social networks in 2019 are now nearly as likely to be utilized by people 35-54 years old, than those younger, which is good news for theatrical campaigns and documentary makers.
Social Media Usage: Total U.S. Population, from 2008 to 2019
- Facebook is actually less popular now than it was four years ago. But it is still at the top of the list for daily users.
The only demographic group that is using Facebook more than in prior years are Americans 55+. - The average monthly change in page likes is just 0.13% Building your Facebook audience is definitely a slow and steady game.
The average organic reach for a Facebook post is 5.5%. Take the number of fans on your page and multiply it by 5.5% to see if you are reaching the average per post. If you are not, then re-evaluate what you are posting. - 60% of Americans who watch digital video do so on Facebook and the average engagement rate for Facebook video posts is 6.13%
Among U.S. adults who use Facebook, around three-quarters (74%) visit the site at least once a day. - Facebook has eliminated Post Scheduling for pages on DESKTOP. To access this function, you need to use Creators Studio or third-party scheduling tools like Hootsuite.
- Groups are booming on Facebook. They’re pretty much the platform’s most popular feature, and engagement in groups is skyrocketing.
- A change in Reach calculations. More on that here.
- New Creators Studio insights called Traffic Source. More on that here .
- Twitter’s U.S. user base is predicted to grow 0.3% in 2020.
- Only 20% of Twitter’s daily users are American.
- Compared to other age groups, Gen Z is most likely to be using Twitter. (By comparison, only 26% of 30- to 49-year-olds use Twitter.) That said, Gen Z is still much more likely to be using YouTube, Instagram, Snapchat and Facebook. 65% of Twitter’s top 10% of users (by tweet volume) identify as women. And 69% of this group say they tweet about politics, and identify as Democrats.
- Tweets with hashtags get 100% more engagement, but only 1 or 2 hashtags.
- 93% of video views on Twitter happen on mobile so be sure to use mobile-optimized video that has subtitles or captions for sound-off viewing.
- No political advertising. Political ads are defined as content that references a candidate, political party, elected or appointed government official, election, referendum, ballot measure, legislation, regulation, directive, or judicial outcome. Ads that contain references to political content, including appeals for votes, solicitations of financial support, and advocacy for or against any of the above-listed types of political content, are prohibited under this policy.
- Redesign of the Twitter layout on desktop happened in summer 2019.
- Twitter lets you add a photo, video or gif to a Retweet. Read more about this here.
- 2 rumored changes that could be coming in 2020. The ability to prevent other users from mentioning you without your permission and ability to disable a retweet on your tweet.
- 1 billion people use Instagram every month, though only 110 million are located in the United States.
- Instagram is the most popular traditional social network among U.S. teens 13-17yrs. Only YouTube is more popular with teens. 72% of U.S. teens say they use Instagram, compared to 69% for Snapchat and 51% for Facebook.
- The gender mix on Instagram is pretty even: 52% female and 48% male.
- In case you were thinking of hiring an influencer to help with an Instagram campaign, brands pay Instagram influencers between $100 and $2,085 per post. For videos, they pay between $114 and $3,138, and for Stories they pay between $43 and $721.
- Brands post an average of 2.5 Stories per week.
- Instagram is now hiding Likes on mobile devices for US accounts after testing in several other countries. Facebook may soon start hiding likes, too. Likes can still be seen on desktop.
- Donation stickers available on IG. Instagram launched donation stickers for Stories back in May, giving accounts the capacity to raise money for non-profit groups via the option. A non profit must be registered on Facebook first in order to have this capability.
- IGTV now supports Landscape Videos, though it is up to the user to actually turn the phone to watch them. Most people watch their IG feed in vertical position so uploading a landscape video is asking to go against consumer habits.
- It is recommended to use Facebook Creators Studio on desktop to manage a brand Instagram account because it gives access to scheduling posts and expanded metrics.
Sources: https://www.convinceandconvert.com/social-media-research/social-media-usage-statistics
https://blog.hootsuite.com/facebook-statistics/#business https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2019/05/16/facts-about-americans-and-facebook
Recent changes that affect Facebook Pages
Source: https://blog.hootsuite.com/twitter-statistics
Recent changes that affect Twitter
Instagram.
Source: https://blog.hootsuite.com/instagram-statistics
Recent changes that affect Instagram
A word about TikTok
For those who do not have teenagers in your life, TikTok is a video sharing platform where short updates, typically accompanied by music, are shared publicly. This is one of the fastest-growing social platforms and forecasted to continue to grow by leaps and bounds in 2020, but be cautious with any platform championed by teens. The very young are quite fickle and meteoric rise is frequently countered with equally quick crashes as the party moves to the next shiny thing. For a look at brands killing it on TikTok, read more here.
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Sheri Candler February 21st, 2020
Posted In: Facebook, Instagram, Marketing, Social Network Marketing, technology, Twitter
Tags: Facebook, social media, social media for filmmakers, social media tools, Twitter
Social Media Update for Indie Filmmakers, Part 3: Twitter
In the previous two posts, I wrote about changes I think most independent filmmakers should be aware of when it comes to using Facebook and Instagram for their marketing efforts. This post will talk about Twitter. Is having an account here still necessary?
With 69 million monthly active users in the United States, 267 million worldwide, Twitter is one of the top social media sites that brands still actively use. We can’t go a day without hearing news of a certain someone ranting on the platform, and without a doubt, Twitter is the number one social media platform for breaking news. But is that helpful for the average indie filmmaker?
While it isn’t likely that filmmakers will post breaking news that is of interest to a broader public, one great reason to use Twitter is for video sharing. Over the last 12 months, tweets containing videos perform the best in terms of reach compared to posts with links, images, and GIFs. Filmmakers need to be able to produce a regular supply of short videos, ideally less than 1 minute long (Twitter mainly allows for videos of 2 minutes 20 seconds in total), with the first 3 seconds serving to capture thumb-stopping attention (thumb-stopping-causing someone on a mobile device to pause scrolling through their newsfeed). Give some thought to the kind of clips and trailers you will post to social versus what you would make for a theatrical experience (where the audience won’t be scrolling on their phones). Also, don’t forget to make these videos square (600 by 600 pixels) or vertical (600 by 750 pixels), instead of horizontal, to optimize for mobile viewing.
In 2018, Twitter has been grappling with slow user growth and has deleted thousands of fake and bott accounts, lowering follower numbers on most accounts. If you have seen a slight drop in followers, likely you had a few of these accounts following you.
A recent update to the Facebook Platform Policies ended the ability to automatically post Tweets to your Facebook profile or page. This was never a good idea as audiences on the two platforms are different and it was a lazy way of marketing. But for those who did connect their Twitter accounts and Facebook pages, a more manual process is now needed for posting to the different platforms.
As of September, Twitter has re-enabled the ability to see tweets in purely chronological order, if you change your settings. Two years after phasing out this ability in favor of top-ranked or “curated” tweets, Twitter gave back the functionality that most people loved about the platform. But you have to make a change in your settings, by unchecking the box that says Show the Best Tweets First. In a world where it seems your newsfeed is programmed by an algorithmic guess, finally having the ability to see news according to the time it was posted is refreshing.
Like Facebook and Instagram, Twitter has instituted its own political content policy on advertising. The platform considers ads that advocate for legislative issues of national importance to be governed by their new policy and in order to advertise, advertisers must go through Twitter’s certification process (https://business.twitter.com/en/help/ads-policies/restricted-content-policies/political-campaigning/US-political-content/how-to-get-certified-issue-ads.html). Most likely, if you are making a documentary with an issue of national significance at its core, such as abortion, civil rights, climate change, guns, healthcare, immigration, national security, social security, taxes, and trade, you will need to register your account in order to use Twitter advertising in the future.
Getting back to the question of whether indie filmmakers still should be using Twitter, it all depends on your ability to handle multiple social media accounts and what you want each account to do as far as your goals. If connecting with Twitter influencers, or perpetuating a campaign hashtag, or reaching a global audience outside of the U.S. are some of your main objectives, Twitter is still a great place to do that.
Sheri Candler December 31st, 2018
Posted In: Marketing, Social Network Marketing, Twitter
Tags: digital marketing, film marketing, independent film, Marketing, Sheri Candler, social media, The Film Collaborative, Twitter