Marketers are all too aware of the increase in ad blockers? popularity over the last two years, and many have turned to social media as an alternative channel for getting in front of their target customers.
As marketers begin preparing for the last and often most important quarter of their companies? fiscal years, we set out to answer the question: Which social media marketing tactics are most effective"
Generally, marketers? social media spend falls into one of two areas: ads and influencers. They either pay to have their brands? content appear prominently on the feeds of their target audiences, invest in influencer campaigns that incentivize people with social capital to post about a brand?s product or service, or both.
As the playing field among social networks continues to evolve rapidly, with algorithm updates that favor a more ?personalized? News Feed, determining the right balance of social ad spend and investments in influencer campaigns has become increasingly difficult. With this in mind, we compared the performance of social influencers and social ads against five common marketing metrics: cost per impression, cost per engagement, click through rate, cost per lead and cost per purchase.
For social ads, we focused on sponsored Facebook posts and promoted tweets. When collecting data for influencers, we looked at mega-influencers (celebrities, social media stars with 1 million or more followers), macro-influencers (bloggers, experts and journalists) and micro...