According to a new study by Localytics, web users tend to make quick and frequent visits to social media on mobile devices, so the content brands share must be concentrated into quick-to-digest formats or it will probably be ignored.
The social media marketing research reported that users access social accounts through an app more than 50 percent of the time. Social media usage grew 49 percent during that span, but the breakdown of that time is the most interesting:
• The average time spent with social media apps was 2.5 minutes
• The average number of app launches each month was 25.1
Taken together, these figures indicate over half the time people see social media content, it’s taking place during a short but frequent visit.
Grab user’s social attention quickly
The clear takeaway is that punchy, attention-getting media is going to work best for driving social media users to a company’s website. Consider the following tactics:
• Publish videos. As the format becomes more popular on Facebook (785 percent more popular since 2012), people are more likely to stop and watch. Just make sure they’re under a minute, which is about as long as most viewers stick around.
• Include visuals like infographics, info stats or even just photos. Posts with pictures get 53 percent more Likes, which further increases reach and the odds of referral traffic.
• Be engaging. Engaged traffic is qualified traffic, as Shareholic data indicates. For instance, people who arrive at a website from YouTube have the highest time on site and lowest bounce rate of any social network.
This information shouldn’t be taken to mean in-depth posts and long resources are useless for social media marketing. However, that applies to one group of readers, and the data indicates at least half of all social users respond to content that’s quick and to the point. Use analytics and social data to determine which one is more successful among your target audience and then create more of what’s driving results.
