How You Can Harness The True Potential of Social for Digital Advertising

November 02, 2018

We’ve been following along with eMarketer’s Social Series, where each day they focused on the audiences of today’s most relevant social platforms including: Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Pinterest and SnapChat. As we look toward the closing of this year and ahead at 2019, this was a great series to help us understand what is really going on with all the various networks. So today we’ll provide you with a high level overview from this series and also talk about how you can harness the true potential of social using our audience creation technology, which relies on social media, Social Data.   

Key TakeAways from eMarketer’s Social Series

• Instagram is the only platform that is attracting new users of all ages.
• While younger generations (Teens) are shifting away from Facebook, older generations (Millennials, Gen Xers and Baby Boomers) still consider it the number one social network platform.  
• Twitter will add the fewest number of new users this year out of any social network.
• Pinterest will see more of an increase in user growth than Facebook and Twitter combined.
• This year both Snapchat and Instagram will gain the same amount of new users (1.8 million) under the age of 25.

Growth Attribution  

Each platform is expected to see user growth but what or who is being attributed to this growth for each platform?

• Instagram stories and the platforms ability to attract users under and over 35, at a nearly 50-50 split.   
• Facebook can thank older generations, specifically baby boomers.
• Twitter is also most popular among adults.  
• Both Facebook and Twitter were in the negative spotlight this year as investigations into election meddling, the dissemination of fake news, censorship and more have stirred up tensions.
• Pinterest differentiates itself from other platforms as a place for discovering ideas, allowing for healthy growth among all ages and demographics. The platforms broader appeal to millennial males will also be a contributing factor.
• SnapChat is the No. 1 social network among teens.

Anticipated Challenges

• Pinterest will continue setting itself apart from other platforms as a place to discover ideas and is investing in things like visual search options.
• One major challenge to Snapchat’s future growth will be Instagram, in particular its Stories feature. According to eMarketer principal analyst Debra Aho Williamson, “Instagram says 400 million people per day now use Stories. That’s more than double Snapchat’s worldwide daily active user base.”  
• Video will continue to be a major driving force in Twitter’s user growth. According to Ryan Moore, director of global video solutions at Twitter, “the core function of [Twitter] is to help people find out what’s happening with the things they’re most passionate about.  It makes sense to have content on the platform that can be watched collaboratively.”

The Importance of Social Data… and by the way, What is Social Data?

Despite the challenges facing social networks, continued growth is a reality. Furthermore, there does not exist today, a more widely accepted and utilized tool to identify true interests of any audience. Social networks have developed into content consumption vehicles for everyone, users self-select into editorial, influencer and topic related information that create a true picture of who each user really is.

This was the driving factor behind Social Data, our audience technology that enables the creation of custom ‘personas’ using publicly available social media data. Here’s how it works:

• • We have developed a proprietary system known as the Blended Interest Graph that collects public information on followers from social networks at scale.
  • We start from a known set of supernodes, what is a supernode you ask?

A supernode is a highly followed user or brand that is easy to categorize.

• We find connections or commonalities among users through these supernodes in order to create the Blended Interest Graph for a particular Consumer Interest Persona. Here’s an example of a Persona:
• We then use Artificial Intelligence to obtain correlations against campaign performance and create highly nuanced and accurate segments of users with high propensity to convert with a specific client campaign.
• We match user handles to device ID’s using data we receive from our media partners (over 500 apps we buy media from and which provide this mapping).
• We match desktop to users using our cross-device technology.

So this entire explanation might have gone way over your head, but the point is, you can harness the true power of social and we can help you do this. We’re working everyday to find your perfect audience using technology. This allows us to serve advertisements directly to users who are truly interested in whatever you have to offer. Want to learn more about how Social Data can work for your next digital program? Get in touch.