The coronavirus crisis has accelerated the arrival of the digital future into today’s reality. The new normal restrictions and rules make us spend most of our lives online, therefore, more than half of the world uses social media. This is a trend with lasting effects. It concerns all spheres of our brand-new reality. Moreover, the changes in the digital landscape and the way we Internet, became crucial markers for economics and businesses to explore, not only for survival but benefit from.
The latest report on how we go digital in 2020 was produced in October by Hootsuite and We are social in partnership with Datareportal. Those studies show that tech and social media have stronger their positions, reached a level higher than ever before. The tendency to expand digital popularity looks the same as in the first quarters of 2020, but still not equal.
Highlights:
- Global internet users: 4.66 billion
- Number of world mobile phone users: 5.20 billion
- Worldwide social media users: 4.14 billion
- World’s total time spent on social media: over 10 billion hours
per day = more than 1 million years of human existence.
Due to the analytical data, the current big picture of social media looks like this:
- Gaining time — now, the typical users spend about 15 percent of their lives on social platforms, the screen time has increased.
- Gaining people — over 450 million people began to use social media in the past 12 months. That means that more than 14 people have started using social media every second since this time last year.
- Gaining maturity — the social media population has grown older due to a tendency to use platforms for work. The auditory of 35–50 years people has jumped into digital.
- Gaining business advantages — the ordinary search had been replaced by social search on various platforms.
Comparing July’s researches, these numbers describe the continuous growth of global digitalization. So, when the first part of the year was a bit turbulent, the second — attained a balance and offered opportunities.
Social media against social distancing
The social distancing during the lockdown is a cause of a great divide from one side, and our searching for other ways to stay tuned from the other.
Social media, thanks to a high adaptivity, appeared to be the best tool for uniting society. Besides, by this, we don’t mean personal communication only, but business, work, learning-purpose connections, product, and service delivery as well. Speaking about business, COVID-19 has reshaped the work of practically all kinds of entrepreneurship. Mainly, it hits consumer-facing brands, cause reaching out to their customers became a challenging task. Nothing can be compared with the impact of live dialogs or interaction, so entrepreneurs had to overcome a great edge of the lockdown — reinvent the form of communication.
GlobalWebIndex in their Social media trends 2020 report have examined the ways of making a purchase decision. These data show that the business potential of social media has grown in terms of convenience, speed, and influence. More and more people prefer to make a research about products, consumers ask questions, check reviews, seeking recommendations, share feedbacks. As with Aristotelian unities, time, space, and location are essential for business relationships. Social media allows you to choose a platform, and with the power of the big Internet, stay connected with clients 24/7. Confirming this, having an online presence on various social media is crucial for businesses today. The key is to choose a suitable platform? Yes, but not only.
According to October’s report, Facebook keeps a leading position in social media rate, followed by Youtube, Whatsapp, Fb Messenger. A high score of messengers in the rate signifies the importance of keeping contact through online chatting and fast sharing information.
Instagram has added the greatest number of new users between July and September 2020. The platform’s advertising audience has increased to more than 76 million over the past three months, reaching a total of 1.16 billion people by the start of October 2020. However, it’s a secondary result, compared with Facebook numbers of 2.14 billion, which equals almost twice its size. The latest numbers of TikTok’s audience — 689 million people, but it tends to rise, so it may reach the 700 million mark by the end of the year. Speaking about Twitter and Snapchat, they also reported impressive audience growth, especially during the last months to October.
The main advantage of social media is that they are peer-to-peer by nature.
All of them involve chats and communication between friends, colleagues, relatives, as well as with influencers, and opinion-makers, which are important for businesses to collaborate with.
As with the current situation traditional ways of advertising moving backward, influence marketing seems to be the most popular tool to shape the opinion. What is this revolutionary approach, and who are those influencers, we’ll describe further.
The key is to choose a suitable influencer
The secret of all new is that it’s a well forgotten old. Roots of influence marketing go to the oldest way of advertising — word-of-mouth, which meant the passing of information from person to person during verbal communication. Both old and new approaches rely on social proof, as customers tend to trust close people or people they admire more than the companies selling trying to sell products or services. Influencers — are leading content creators, competent in a particular niche, with a loyal audience and regular engagement. There are several types of them: micro-influencers, celebrity influencers, blog influencers, social media influencers, key opinion leaders. Each of them fitting individual purposes, but their common role requires improving brand awareness, increasing traffic, deliver the brand’s message to the target audience directly.
Influencer Marketing Statistic
To use the power of influence marketing fully, you should devote time to find the right person with the right audience. There are several places for searching: Google, social media, blogs, and referrals. All of them include a part of exploring, require attention rather than making a decision fast. Sometimes, it’s hard to talk with an influencer directly, so you have to involve the help of agents, agencies, or even software. Technology solutions are on the top of the edge here, as they are time, cost-saving, and always come with additional features, adapt to the market changes.
A couple of years ago Rolique started work on a marked defining platform. Now, it is a great marketing tool helping brands matching influencers, opinion makers, and top bloggers to set up campaigns. It also provides strong analytics and insights to get benefits from business collaboration, as finding the right person become a data-driven process. Great tech capabilities, like smart filtering system and ML approach, allows users to control campaigns from the very beginning to measuring final productivity. Over 100 major brands across all industries have already discovered the value of creative-center ideas filled with tech and analytical insight.
Takeaway
With the rapid growth of social media, influence marketing shows dynamic rise too. The forecast for this approach in 2021 is extremely positive. With each new tech feature upgrade, the ways of reaching audiences and promote products became more linear and direct.
The future insights for influencer’s trends:
- Maximum value from micro-influencers.
- Instagram is a king of influence.
- From customer into an influencer.
- Long-term collaboration instead of a single campaign.
All things considered — the greatest challenge of today can be transformed into the greatest opportunity of tomorrow. Social media presence is a way of the future, as the chance, that things will go backward is impossible. Whether we like it or not, we are observing the dawn of a contact-free economy and communication without live interaction.
Thanks for reading. We hope you enjoy our article. Stay tuned to know what’s new.
