In case you missed it, Buffer released an excellent "State of Society" report in January. I say great because Buffer has been a premier publisher of insights and opinions on their blog for years. I dare say Buffer is probably the best tool, platform or social media company blog today (I also love Hootsuite's blog). So when they released their annual report, I quickly bookmarked it for scrutiny later. After sifting through the data and graphs, I started to notice some points that the Buffer folks didn't mention. Here are 7 things I learned from the report: 1:
Marketers need to be smarter about measuring the success of IG stories While 57% of marketers say Stories are very or somewhat effective, a whopping 35% say they are "uncertain" about overall performance. Now, some of the uncertainty can be industry mailing list down to the fact that stories are still relatively new, but I'm still disturbed by the fact that one-third of marketers can't be sure that stories are working. After all, Instagram does provide you with a wide range of metrics within the platform. Everything from impressions to clicks back to forward clicks.
But, more worryingly, most marketers haven’t even invested in Instagram Story ads — a full 63%. So, we have nearly one-third of marketers who aren't quite sure how organic Stories are going, and we're sitting on the precipice of almost two-thirds of marketers who haven't invested in Stories yet, but will likely try, in the coming year. oops. 2: Marketers don’t know anything about how influencer marketing works, which continues to confuse me Guys, we're having real problems with influencer marketing. Just check out the recently released Fyre Festival documentation on Netflix and Hulu for proof. First, less than a quarter of our marketers say influencer marketing is very effective — the same number say they're not sure it's working. You then add that almost 60% of marketers are either unclear, or very unclear, what current regulations and guidelines mean for influencer marketing. Are you fucking kidding me?