Adobe’s first annual Social Media Intelligence report has examined paid, earned and owned social media trends.
Key findings of the Adobe Digital Index report show Twitter and Pinterest with the biggest, year-over-year jump in revenue per visitor with Twitter experiencing 300% growth.
Facebook’s Cost-per-Click decreased by 40%, while Click-Through-Rate and advertising ROI increased by 275% and 58%, respectively. The data also shows that Facebook still dominates the share of social referral traffic to retail sites, but Twitter’s share grew the strongest with 258% YoY.
The analysis of the latest social trends is based on aggregated and anonymous data across retail, media, entertainment, and travel websites over the last twelve months. The data represents 131 billion Facebook ad impressions, 400 million unique visitors to social networking sites, more than 1 billion Facebook posts, and 4.3 billion social engagements on Facebook including comments, shares and likes. Paid social data is based on data from customers using Adobe Marketing Cloud.
"Social media is rapidly maturing as a marketing channel, bolstered by the steps Facebook and Twitter have taken to make their audiences more accessible to marketers," said Tamara Gaffney, principal analyst, Digital Index, Adobe.
"Recognising the opportunity, marketers are optimising their campaigns for social channels, and as a result consumers are now using social media much more in their purchasing process. We expect this trend to accelerate during the holiday season."
The report also found that Facebook is becoming increasingly attractive to brand marketers with ad click volume up by 29% YoY.
Social engagement on Facebook grew by 115% while the number of brand postings increased by 9% YoY. Brand posts containing an image produced an engagement rate 600% higher than text-based posts. In addition, Tumblr earned the most positive sentiment of all social platforms.
