15 Dec A Decade of Community Management | Social You Should Know
How Community Management Has Changed
While all sorts of chat rooms existed in the early 1990s, the role of a professional community manager really began around 2005 with the advent of the Forum Moderator. Over the years, the role has evolved from Friend to Brand Influencer, from Humanizer to Expert, from Newsroom Manager to the Expert Generalist. If you are, or know, a community manager, then this interesting blog post and accompanying SlideShare is worth checking out.
Social (Again) Sends More Traffic; On Less Budget
Briefly, around June of 2014, social media passed search in terms of volume of referral traffic to content on the web. Search recovered, however, until September of this year when, according to Shareaholic research, social took the lead again. While social referral traffic has grown, search referral traffic has declined. Those of you who have seen my recent presentation on Social Media in 2015 know that’s because people now discover content they used to search for. Marketing investment has not kept pace. Search gets 45.1% of the budget but drives only 29.2% of the referral traffic. Social gets 13.5% of the digital ad budget but drives 29.4% of the referrals. Hmmm….
Instagram Passes Twitter in Monthly Users
Instagram has hit 300 million active monthly users, edging past Twitter (at 284M) for the first time. That’s impressive for a product that launched in October of 2010, about 4 years after Twitter. Millennials have driven a lot of that growth, and if you wonder why millennials like/follow brands on social media, the #1 answer is this: “To support the brand.” Brands will soon be able to get verified badges on Instagram as well.
By the way, if you read about an agency getting wrist slapped by the FTC for not disclosing their employees tweets were for a client, don’t worry about us. That has been a rule we’ve followed for years. It’s important that you ensure your employees disclose work related support as well.
Feature Image Source: cnme
