The fore-runners/ well known social media outlets are Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, You-Tube, Instagram, Snapchat, Reddit, Vine, VKontakte (Vk), WeChat, WhatsApp, QQ, Quora and Goggle+ to mention a few. They afford society with various pleasures such as interacting with family, friends and potential employers; sharing interesting stories; and providing answers to questions. All of these functions are incentives for people to aggregate in relatively large numbers on these social media websites.
These large gathering of folks, like shoals of fishes, are feeding grounds, in this case, for brands seeking new clients. The gathering affords brands inbound traffic, higher conversion rate, reduced cost of advertisement and many more. Therefore, it makes a lot of sense for brands to establish their presence on all of these social media sites especially if these brands can afford it. But what if the advertising resources of your brand is limited, and you can only afford to advertise on one or two social media websites, then which of them do you cost-wise and effectively target your advertisement on?
Method
This post adapts the 2 steps below to identify the best social platforms for advertising your brand
a. The top 18 social networking websites were listed with their corresponding number of unique monthly users and the daily user time spent on these websites (Alexa, Statista, Ebizmba and Expandedramblings)
b. Data were reviewed, using the corresponding number of unique monthly users and the daily user duration, to determine the social platform(s) that is/are best suited for brands, especially the ones on a tight budget.
Note that we are using the parameter, “unique” to account for the number of people with multiple registrations.
Top 18 Social Networking Sites
1. WhatsApp has 1.2 billion monthly unique users with daily user duration of ~3 mins
2. Facebook has 1.1 billion monthly unique users with daily user duration of ~ 15 mins.
3. YouTube has a billion monthly unique users with daily user duration of ~10 mins
4. Twitter has 319 million monthly unique users with daily user duration of ~ 7 mins
5. Snapchat has 301 million monthly unique users with daily user duration of ~ 3 mins
6. LinkedIn has 255 million monthly unique users with daily user duration of ~ 7 mins
7. Pinterest has 250 million monthly unique users with daily user duration of ~ 4 mins
8. Goggle+ has 120 million monthly unique users with daily user duration of ~ 8 mins (questionable)
9. Tumblr has 110 million monthly unique users with daily user duration of ~ 9 mins
10. Instagram has 100 million unique monthly users with daily user duration of ~6 mins
11. Quora has 100 million monthly unique users with daily user duration of ~4 mins
12. Reddit has 85 million monthly unique users with daily user duration of ~12 mins
13. VKontakte (Vk) has 80 million monthly unique users with daily user duration of ~12 mins
14. Flickr has 65 million monthly unique users with daily user duration of ~5 mins
15. Vine has 42 million monthly unique users with daily user duration of ~2 mins
16. Meetup has 40 million monthly unique users with daily user duration of ~5 mins
17. Ask.fm has 37 million monthly unique users with daily user duration of ~4 mins
18. ClassMates has 15 million monthly unique users with daily user duration of ~3 mins
These 18 social networks were further pruned to 13 networks (see the tables below). This was done by selecting the social networks with equal to or greater than 80 million unique monthly users. The 80 million unique monthly users lower benchmark enabled the inclusion of the social media websites with unusually high daily user duration.
Tables 1 and 2 show the 13 social network websites displayed as a function of 1) unique monthly users (Table 1), and 2) daily user duration (Table 2)
| Table 1 | |||
| Social Networks Listed in Order of Unique Monthly Users | |||
| No | Social Networks | Number of Unique Monthly Users (billions) | ~Daily Duration (mins) |
| 1 | 1.2 | 3 | |
| 2 | 1.1 | 15 | |
| 3 | YouTube | 1 | 10 |
| 4 | 0.319 | 7 | |
| 5 | Snapchat | 0.301 | 3 |
| 6 | 0.255 | 7 | |
| 7 | 0.25 | 4 | |
| 8 | Goggle+ | 0.12 | 8 |
| 9 | Tumblr | 0.11 | 9 |
| 10 | 0.1 | 6 | |
| 11 | Quora | 0.1 | 4 |
| 12 | 0.085 | 12 | |
| 13 | VKontakte (Vk) | 0.08 | 12 |
| Table 2 | |||
| Social Networks Listed in Order of Daily User Duration | |||
| No | Social Networks | Number of Unique Monthly Users (billions) | ~Daily Duration (mins) |
| 1 | 1.1 | 15 | |
| 2 | 0.085 | 12 | |
| 3 | VKontakte (Vk) | 0.08 | 12 |
| 4 | YouTube | 1 | 10 |
| 5 | Tumblr | 0.11 | 9 |
| 6 | Goggle+ | 0.12 | 8 |
| 7 | 0.319 | 7 | |
| 8 | 0.255 | 7 | |
| 9 | 0.1 | 6 | |
| 10 | 0.25 | 4 | |
| 11 | Quora | 0.1 | 4 |
| 12 | 1.2 | 3 | |
| 13 | Snapchat | 0.301 | 3 |
Data Analysis/Interpretation
The line plots, of both the daily user duration and the unique monthly users (Figure 1), were used to determine the social network platform(s) with the optimum condition for maximizing the exposure of a brand advertisement.
Figure 1
WhatsApp, Reddit, and VKontakte (Vk) showed excellent peak values in either one of the variables (Figure 1). But Facebook ranked highest in both variables with You-Tube in second place. The combined peaks in the variables indicate that Facebook and You-Tube are the best platforms, of all the social networks, for advertising a brand.
Please, feel free to contact us; we would appreciate any contribution/update to these data.
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