This year, advertisers are estimated to collectively spend more than $23.6 billion (yes, that’s with a “b”) worldwide with various social media outlets — a 33.5% increase in spend over 2014, according to eMarketer. The U.S. and Canada combined are likely to make up nearly 43% of that spend. Those numbers don’t include other investments that companies make into social media, particularly around their own social media presence and on analytic and affiliated tools.
Of course, many more social sites outside of Facebook have secured solid user bases. According to our own data (ours is very similar to data from Pew Research Center published in April 2015) over the past year, we find that:
- 29% of US respondents use Pinterest
- 27% of US respondents use Instagram
- 27% of US respondents use Twitter
- 15% of US respondents use Tumblr
- 14% of US respondents use Snapchat
Because of this, our InsightStore™ product is a treasure-trove for researching these user bases, so that’s exactly what we did. Looking at our syndicated questions related to each of those five social networking platforms, we studied only the active users (using the app on a daily to weekly frequency) and then compared hundreds of other consumer attributes we store about them to the general U.S. population.
What resulted is a new report that we are making publicly available, to show how these 400,000+ active users of “next tier” social sites benchmark against the general population on things that go far beyond mere demographics. We found out whose users rank higher (or lower) as:
- Market mavens, early adopters, and evangelizers
- Price sensitive shoppers or more discriminating in their shopping habits
- Bigger TV fans and genre-specific fans
- Bigger sports fans, even by league
- Effective managers of their own finances
- and more
This report should be a “must-read” for anyone investing in social media, whether it’s enhancing your own presence or making advertising buy and ad creative decisions. The insights contained are valuable in helping to optimize your strategy and to gain a deeper understanding of each audience. We also explain in the report’s introduction why we chose not to include Facebook in this study.
