Secret Marketing Statistics To Arm You for 2024 (Millions of Data Points)

So today we have a lot of data and trends to end up sharing with you. One of the first ones we wanted to share is about social media organic reach. So what we ended up doing is we analyzed 15,000 social media profiles over the last 3 years to see what's changing with organic social media reach. The first one was linking out to external site on average decreases reach by 219%, while 3 years ago, it only used to decrease reach by 74.51%. In other words, they're really trying to keep you on their own platform these days. And the more you—

This is all socials?

All socials, yeah. And then keep in mind, like with Instagram and TikTok, some of them you can't really link out. So it's taking the organic reach from all of them, but not all platforms were used for each and every single point. Content containing short-form videos on average have 32.18% more reach. 3 years ago, it was 54.77%. Back then, they were trying to push short-form videos more than they are now. It's still super popular. Short-form videos on average were 13 seconds long. Keep in mind, back then, a lot of the platforms only allowed you 15-second videos. Now, some of the platforms limit you to a minute, some even more than a minute. Now they're averaging 44 seconds long. 3 years ago, social posts with 10 or more comments had 285.32% more engagement. Now social posts with 10 or more comments have 194.26% more engagement. So it's just showing that comments, yes, they're still important, but they're probably, from what we're seeing, nitpicking the comment quality. I remember when I used to post videos on YouTube back in the day and I used to ask people, just leave a yes or no comment, it would help with my reach. Now they just look at those junk comments. Organic reach has declined by roughly 61.83% over the last 3 years. Profiles that post 1 to 2 times a day on average see the most reach, while 3 years ago profiles that posted 3+ times a day saw the most reach. And that's largely because of the next point. Both 3 years ago and today, posting low-quality content doesn't get engagement and it hurts the overall organic reach of your content. And this is why we think people who are posting only 1 to 2 times a day do better, is because it's hard to create super amazing content 3, 4 times a day. While 1, 2 times, sure, it's not, It's still hard, but it's not that hard compared to consistently cranking out 3 or 4 pieces of amazing quality content each and every single day. Yeah, go ahead.

No, I was just saying, look, I think at the end of the day, and you're kind of getting to this, it's just like, just go out there, focus on creating the best piece of content you can create. Like these numbers are helpful, but at the end of the day, it's like, this is death by a thousand paper cuts. I think too many people focus on like these paper cut things that don't ultimately drive the top line impressions.

Yeah. And dude, I remember when I used to respond to every single comment back in the day, did on my blog, social profiles. When people respond to all their comments on social posts, they see a 12.74% increase in reach. 3 years ago, 39.57%, almost 40%. So they're valuing that less and less compared to what they used to value before. And we're seeing reach decline on all major platforms. And, you know, it's funny because people are like, man, should we still leverage social media and focus on organic reach. And I was like, something's better than nothing. You know, it's just like, why wouldn't you want to? Just like use it for what it is. And we both have that philosophy. Whether SEO's harder or social media's harder, whether something drives you more traffic or less traffic, just be grateful you have that channel and use it for what it is.

Yeah. And by the way, like attention is spreading more and more. There's these, A lot. I mean, there's a lot of channels now. Like back in the day, maybe 10 years ago, there weren't as many channels. So there's more attention that was like allocated to those. Now it's spreading out more and now more people are going omnichannel. And kind of similar to this topic, Neil, did you read about how Cisco was trained? They're training 83,000 LinkedIn influencers. They're basically training their employees.

Wow, that's crazy. I didn't know that.

Yeah, and like what are they doing? They're just trying to make the most. They know organic reach is not going to be there forever, but while they still have it, if they can build like the ultimate company of LinkedIn influencers, they're going to grow their market share, right? Like how big is their— how big are they right now? What's their Cisco stock?

It's $100 to $200 billion.

$203 billion. Yep.

It's a massive company. When— and the last time I was looking at the financials, they do somewhere around $10 billion a year in profit, not revenue, profit.

Dude, check this out here. Look. So let me share my screen real quick.

You see this?

Okay, so here's what it says. Here's the headline. Cisco is training its 84,000 employees to be LinkedIn influencers. Just one of the social 2024 predictions. I also predicted in-house brand ambassadors are going to be huge. What are other companies already doing this well? So you know what? I mean, like, I think we're going to see more of this. Are you thinking—

But wait, wait, check this out. So we used to do this back in the day at NP Digital, right? Because like, we don't have tons of employees, but we have enough. Like I think we're getting close to around 800 or so. My guess is we'll be 1,000+ by the end of next year. So when you think about that, that's enough to get social traction. And we used to have employees that put it on our teams like, hey, go there, click, like, comment, et cetera, as well as post content and engage. When they post stuff out there on their own profiles and being their own brand ambassadors, like great, it has some traction. When you start having too many people within the same company, uh, you know, like, share, comment on a post, uh, the algorithms are picking up. They're seeing a trend of the same people, you know. It's like social media rings, and they're seeing it like back in the days, and it doesn't work as well if you keep doing it with the same people over and over.

Dude, programmatically, it's not hard to figure out who are the same people that keep posting on your shit. And like, I like test out these engagement groups, right? And I see like the same people, the same people over and over. And it's like, dude, I don't see them getting as much crazy reach anymore. Like maybe a year ago I would message my friend, right? And he had like a lot of followers. He had like 600,000. Anytime he just liked my thing, it would just blow up, right? And then now that doesn't happen anymore.

Dude, and all these people have on their profile that they work for the company. So it's like, it's not hard to figure out that everyone in that company Are helping each other to get more traffic.

Yeah. You know, when I talked to Chris Do, he's got like a nice YouTube following, a nice Instagram following. And, you know, whenever he posts to LinkedIn, he might get like a couple hundred, 500, 1,000 likes or so. And he just shoots from the hip. I'm like, you don't do any engagement groups? And he's like, I don't do anything, any of that. He's like, I just, whenever I feel emotional about something, I'm just going to write it on LinkedIn. And that's when it feels emotionally charged. And that's when it does really well because there's a point of view. But it just goes back again to creating like the best piece of content that you can create. And the other thing too that's kind of tied to this, Neil, we talked about this yesterday actually, but my friend Matt Paulson posted something to Twitter and then he was like, yeah, the people with impressive businesses aren't spending time talking about tweeting. They're not talking about buying like ice picking businesses or whatever it is. They spend the most of their time. And I just doubled down. I was like, yeah, they probably spend 90+% of their time on the business. Maybe 10% just creating something really good and going back to the business, which is what, like you talked about it yesterday, like you're spending a lot of time on strategy. I've been like on overdrive right now on the business. So I don't know how much more time I can put on content.

Yeah. Here's another interesting, some data points that we have when it comes to social media and check this out. You see my screen?

Yes.

So we wanted to look at which social networks have the most active users and how much organic traffic Keep in mind, we have a lot of analytics data for over a million sites, but we analyzed 9,488 sites because we're looking for the ones that were consistently getting good traffic to see which social sites drives the most non-paid organic social traffic, right? And if you look from an active social network standpoint, you can see this. Facebook has 3 billion, YouTube 2.49, Instagram 2 billion, TikTok 1.2 billion. X, 666 million. Pinterest, 465 million. LinkedIn, 310 million active users. But if we looked at which ones are driving the most organic traffic, and keep in mind Instagram and TikTok, it's hard to link out to websites. You can tell people to swipe up or your bio, but YouTube, 1,594 monthly visits. LinkedIn, 1,007 monthly visits. Pinterest, 877 monthly visits. X, 659 monthly visitors. Facebook, 385 monthly visitors. Instagram, 104. TikTok, 53. And I did mention, you know, how it's hard to get more traffic from TikTok and Instagram, but the data above just shows just because a website is popular, it doesn't mean that you should just solely only focus on that if you're trying to get visitors to your website. And get conversions. Now, this doesn't take into account that if you get a lot of reach on Instagram, you're growing your brand, and then people just may go directly to your website, which is hard to attribute, right? Unless you're doing things like brand recall studies or asking people where they first learned about you. But people have this misconception, just because Facebook is the largest social network, you can get the most traffic. From paid ads, definitely. It's also one of the most expensive. But from an aspect of, you know, getting visitors to your website organically, some social networks just don't want people to leave their platform.

Similar to this topic, if you were to bet on one social channel for the next decade, one only, what would it be?

X.

Okay, why?

I don't think they have the bureaucracy that most of the companies have and they can do whatever they want and it's not about earnings.

Oh, sorry. So let me rephrase this. As a marketer, which channel would you bet? So you're talking about X as a company, not as like the channel you would focus on. If you were to focus on one channel, what would it be for the next decade?

Meta.

Okay, interesting.

Why Meta? Focus all on Meta. They have the biggest reach, ads are super profitable, and they haven't monetized WhatsApp yet. Once they do with the SMS and texting and all that, I think it'll open up a lot of doors. But, you know, dude, you have agency. When you try to get volume from any channel, Meta just drives the most revenue. I'm not saying it's the most profitable from a ROAS standpoint, but if you just look at total revenue and total EBITDA, it beats all the other social networks when you just combine all their property and you run ads on there.

Yep. Neil's thinking about it from a— I don't disagree necessarily. He's thinking about it from a business standpoint. I'm just saying I would focus on YouTube from like a longevity standpoint for the long term. But yes, Meta's absolutely great. And by the way, we're not saying just because I would focus on one, Neil would focus on another, that they're like way far ahead. It's just like if you had to pick one gun to head, what would it be?

Yeah, we ideally, Eric and I, not even ideally, both of us actually focus on most of the major social networks. We don't really focus on like the Snapchats, on the Pinterest, but we pick the big ones, right? Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, YouTube, LinkedIn, and X. So those are the 6 that I really focus on. And I think for you, Eric, it's the same 6.

And yes, and the separate thing I would say here for those of you that are trying to grow on these platforms, you know, Neil, you don't look at the comments, but like I look, because we restarted this channel on YouTube and I look at the comments and a lot of the comments are just, wow, this is so good. I don't know why this isn't getting more views. Wow, how does this channel not have more subscribers? Blah, blah, blah, right? When you start getting comments like that when you're putting out content, that means your content is good as long as you keep going for, 2, 3, 4 years or whatever, then you know that you're going to compound. And that is the unsolicited response rate you're looking for. So that's more of a side thing that I would call out for whatever channel that is that you're trying to grow on. Yep.

No, totally. And at the end of the day, Eric and I are big believers of omnichannel marketing. We've talked about this. And when you're leveraging omnichannel marketing, especially on social media, Others may disagree, but Eric and I have ran a lot of tests. A lot of times you just have to be patient and keep cranking out good content, and then you see a lot of views. And Eric and I were talking yesterday, check out Patrick Campbell's channel on YouTube. He wasn't getting tons of views, but now he has. The content quality hasn't changed, his format hasn't changed. It's just the algorithms now favor him while they didn't favor him before. You just have to be consistent and patient. And that's the thing that most marketers are not. They're not patient and they don't continually push out the content and push out marketing when they're not getting results. They just give up instead of going for 6 months, 1 year, and then like, oh, now I'm seeing the results. I'm like, yeah, you just got to really put in the time.

Yeah. And the final thing I'll say before we get out of here is I'll share a little more details on the Patrick Campbell story just so everyone's aware. Patrick Campbell, he sold a company called ProfitWell, did well for $200, $250 million or something like that. And he decided he wanted to get into content creation. And basically around September of 2022, you can look at his YouTube channel and he was posting these high-quality shorts on YouTube Shorts. He'd post on TikTok, Instagram Reels as well. But it would be like a whiteboard video where he's like opening up a whiteboard and he's talking about, hey, this happened in World War II and then this company became a billion-dollar company. So it was good storytelling, it was well-produced. He was spending a good chunk of money each month on it, but— and he was posting every single day. The catch is this. He was getting like 100, 200 views. And to put in that amount of time to not get anything, 1 month goes by, 2 months goes by, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8 months go by before he gets anything. But then something starts to happen. YouTube starts to give him more play. And then now, I was looking at his channel yesterday, Last video, 1 million views. His high point video was like 11 million views or so. And he's gone from basically 0 to 150K subscribers because he knew the game. As long as he kept putting out content, he knew that the algorithms would eventually have to give him reach. Yep.

Well, that's it for this episode. Give us a 5-star rating. We really appreciate it. We hope you guys have a wonderful day.