A channel that is mainly used to gain inspiration and collect examples is Pinterest. Like Instagram, this channel is however used very little by the companies studied: only 29 percent had a Pinterest page. A missed opportunity, since Pinterest is suitable for sharing inspiration-oriented content and adding a link to the webshop in a non-intrusive way.
Twitter is still a successful channel if we look at the numbers alone. The companies surveyed see it that way too: 88 percent of companies use Twitter. However, the total number of followers of all the companies surveyed is shockingly low compared to Facebook and Instagram, namely 74,473 followers (compared to 1.2 million likes on Facebook). Expert Jayson DeMers writes on Forbes about Twitter fatigue:
Twitter built itself on quick, bit-sized updates, but this led to a barrage of tweets both inbound and outbound. This was new and exciting at first, but now users want something different: something bigger, hospital mailing list more detailed, more interesting pieces of content that are distributed more slowly, like once a day. You can see this trend already taking hold on platforms like Instagram.
Yet the companies studied do not bury their users: an average of only 4.5 messages were tweeted in a month. The question is: is that effective on a fast and time-sensitive social network like Twitter? And would they not be better off focusing on other social media?
Number of followers per channel
5. Using customer data to improve customer engagement
Customer engagement is well utilized via social media when it comes to sending personal messages. One hundred percent of those messages on Facebook are personalized. This is in contrast to, for example, e-mail marketing , where 85 percent of the messages are personalized. Furthermore, other research shows that the use of customer data from social platforms is very limited: seventy percent of companies do not collect data on content and conversations.