Today in Digital Marketing - 139: How Has COVID-19 Changed Social Media Engagement?

Episode Date: April 27, 2020

Today, a special episode: Sprout Social's research on how COVID-19 has changed how consumers engage with brands on social media. Advertise on the Podcast Classified Ads (only $20) — http://engageQ.com/classifieds 30-second Mid-Rolls — http://www.engageq.com/podcastads Help spread the word! Review this podcast at https://ratethispodcast.com/today Or click https://ctt.ac/o713H to preview a tweet you can publish Today in Digital Marketing is produced by engageQ digital. Can we help you with YOUR brand’s digital marketing and social media? Let’s chat. http://www.engageQ.com TOD’S SOCIAL MEDIA: Tod’s web site: http://TodMaffin.com Tod’s agency: http://engageQ.com LinkedIn: http://linkedin.com/in/todmaffin Twitter: http://twitter.com/todmaffin Instagram: http://instagram.com/todmaffin Facebook: http://facebook.com/tmaffin TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@todmaffin Mixer: https://mixer.com/HappyRadioGuy SOURCE: https://sproutsocial.com/insights/covid19-social-media-changes/ --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/todayindigital/messageOur Sponsors:* Check out Kinsta: https://kinsta.comPrivacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy

It is Monday, April 27th, 2020. Happy Freedom Day, South Africa. I'm Todd Maffin from EngageQ Digital. A special episode today, Sprout Social's in-depth research around how the coronavirus has changed the way consumers interact with brands on social media. Every so often, a study will come out

that I think has important enough findings in it to devote almost an entire episode to it. And that's the case today. Sprout Social, which is the tool that we use for engagement and moderation, has come out with a study called How COVID-19 Has Changed Social Media Engagement. Now, I'm aware that not all of you handle the social media for your brand. So before we dive into that study, three smaller items for you. First, if your brand has a big following on Twitter and you've noticed a drop in the number of followers, it's not your fault. Twitter confirmed that they have removed millions of inactive Twitter accounts earlier this month. Any inactive account that had signed up using SMS, they no longer offer that sign-up option and say that those accounts had a high risk of being compromised.

So poof, they are just gone now. Some brands with large Twitter followings may have noticed that their followers have dropped by up to 10% as a result. Second, Google engineer John Mueller confirmed over the weekend that if you move pages on your brand's website and your web developer adds a redirect, that redirect needs to be kept live for at least a year now. He said in most cases, redirects are left in place for multiple years. And third, Google has discontinued the AdSense apps for iOS and Android. They actually announced that they'd be doing this about a year ago or so. If you have the app on your device, it still should work.

But if you delete it from your phone, you will not be able to redownload it. Okay, so on to Sprout Social's study, which you can read on their website at sproutsocial.com slash insights, and I will be quoting liberally from that piece. First, some background though. Earlier in the year, they presented their regular update with the latest data on the best times to post on social media. Around nearly the same time that they published that, many individuals and organizations started working remotely, so some of that data, of course, shifted. Sprout Social has now reviewed data from their 20,000 customers to see how usage of social media has changed during this pandemic time. Now, a short caveat.

If you've been listening for a while, you will know I'm generally not a fan of the best time to post studies since they all use very wide averages. And in many cases, actually, you know, actually, in most cases, the best time to post for your social media account may be different, maybe wildly different. But the general shifts are interesting for sure. And they have data that is not just best time to post. By the way, why is it best time to post? Why do we use that as the metric? What we're really talking about here is clusters of times when people are most likely to be online and engaging with content on the various social platforms. Also very important to note before we get started here, all the times that you will hear are in the central time zone. So be sure that you calculate in your head the right time zone for your brand. Okay, quoting from the Sprout Social piece, first on the best times to post front,

on Facebook, while we previously found that Wednesday from 11 a.m. and 1 to 2 p.m. were the best times to post on Facebook, and Wednesday was a peak day overall, our updated review showed that activity was more consistently high throughout every weekday. Currently, the best times to post on Facebook are Monday, Wednesday, and Friday from 10 a.m. to 11 a.m. In fact, every day at 11 a.m. was a slight peak compared to the rest of the day. Weekends and weekdays after 5 p.m. still showed a significant drop-off, as remote workers juggling a variety of home and family needs face, in many cases,

even more demands on their attention after the typical workday ends. Similar to Facebook, the number of peak times during the week expanded since our previous review for Instagram. Previously, Wednesday at 11am and Friday from 10am.m. were identified as the best times to post. Now, we are seeing that out of an overall very busy span of weekday and working hours time, Monday, Tuesday, and Friday at 11 a.m. and Tuesday at 2 p.m. are the best times to post on Instagram. Additionally, while our previous analysis showed that Instagram activity carried on with some consistently through the early morning and late evening, activity now is much more concentrated in the workday, with a distinct drop-off seen after 6 p.m.

On the other hand, weekends, including the previous worst-dated post, Sunday, are now highly active from about 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. Twitter patterns of usage have remained slightly more consistent pre- and post-COVID response. This may be due to the ongoing use of the platform as a way to quickly check news, spread useful public information for different regions' lockdown and quarantine measures. Despite this, the top time to engage still shifted somewhat as we reviewed the data in April 2020. While it was previously Wednesday and Friday at 9 a.m., the current best time to post on Twitter is Friday from 7 to 9 a.m., with 9 a.m. showing the peak of activity. And LinkedIn, since LinkedIn is a professionally oriented network, it's not surprising that behavior has remained largely similar. Like

Twitter, the best time to post did shift a little. Current best times for LinkedIn are Wednesday at 3 p.m., Thursday from 9 to 10 a.m., and Friday from 11 a.m. to noon. So that is the best times to post. Next, volume. How has COVID-19 changed the amount of content that brands are publishing and the volume of incoming messages or engagement? Again, we're quoting Sprout Social's research here, which you can read in full at sproutsocial.com slash insights. Across all industries and networks,

the number of posts sent per day remained about the same on average, only dropping by one fifth of one post per day when you compare Q1 with April of 2020. A few industries increased their sent message volume during this time. Sent message is what social refers to as a published post, especially health care and media and entertainment. On the other hand, some industries had a sharper decline in published posts during this time, particularly sports and travel, both of which of course have been highly impacted due to suspensions of activity and restrictions on business as normal. Retail, consumer goods,

and education sent messages also dropped, though less dramatically. When looking at all messages broken out by network, outgoing posts published by brands declined slightly on average across industries. On Facebook, outgoing posts decreased by an average of 1.8 posts a day. Instagram, it was down by 1.9 posts a day. And Twitter, outgoing tweets were decreased by 2.3 tweets per day. Next, Sprout Social found a bunch of changes in how audiences are interacting with brands during April last month compared to the whole of Q1. How?

Incoming engagements increased, especially in the consumer goods, healthcare, and media and entertainment sectors. For other industries, as published post-volume dropped off out of necessity due to changing circumstances, engagements also declined. We found this was the case with decreases in sports, retail, legal, and non-profit fields. While engagement went up, incoming messages to brands actually decreased by 19 messages per day, averaged across all networks. No industries saw an increase in Facebook engagement

comparing the first two weeks of April to Q1 of 2020. Instagram showed the only increase in engagement with an average increase of 6.4 comments per day. All right, so that was Sprout Social's take on how COVID-19 has changed social media. They've also got a crisis management post up on their blog site, all of which you can find at sproutsocial.com slash insights. And finally, an interesting tidbit from Sarah Fryer's new book about Instagram, Behind the Scenes. Apparently, when Instagram decided to switch from the chronological feed to an algorithmic feed,

they did a focus group. And when they showed people the algorithmic feed, but told them it was the chronological feed, people loved it. Then again, when they showed people the algorithmic feed and told them it was the algorithmic feed, people hated it. So there you go. Well, if you would like to reach decision makers in the digital marketing space, consider a classified ad here.

It's only 20 bucks. I will read it at the end of the show. See the link in this episode's notes. Also, there are links to all of my social media channels. I'm Todd Maffin. Talk to you tomorrow.