Study On Search Trends: Social Media Analytics More Important Than Ever

2013 was an eventful year not only for quintly but for the entire social media marketing industry, particularly for social media analytics. The level of professionalization in social media marketing departments continues to rise and the appropriate social media tools and vendors cover more and more social networks. Of course, not only because of the increasing adoption of large networks by users around the world, but also because of the rising popularity of more specialized networks like Instagram, LinkedIn and others. As part of this these networks are naturally getting more and more interesting for brands.

Depending on the focus of a social network, the respective brand products can be marketed very well. Think about fashion on Instagram, there are endless possibilities. But if you are a screw manufacturer, it is perhaps not that easy to find your target audience on Pinterest. In the end you need to measure your social media success and performance and for this you need of course one thing: Numbers.

At the beginning of the last year we analyzed the growing demand for social media analytics solutions for selected networks and created an infographic about it. The then analyzed search trends have been Facebook, Twitter, Google+, YouTube and Pinterest analytics.

This time I want to take a different approach. Since there is, of course, a kind of correlation between user adoption of networks and analytics demand by brands and agencies, it makes sense to check the social network sizes, the worldwide market penetration and the corresponding analytics demand.

Top 10 Social Networks: Unique Monthly Visitors

To get a first impression, I took the fresh December 2013 numbers from eBizMBA and built an easy chart.

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“The [...] eBizMBA Rank [...] is a constantly updated average of each website's Alexa Global Traffic Rank, and U.S. Traffic Rank from both Compete and Quantcast.”

It’s interesting to see that YouTube has about 100 million more unique monthly visitors than Facebook and is therefore on the first rank. Rank three to seven is hardly surprising. The eighth place is taken by the good old Flickr, launched back in February 2004, so shortly before its 10th anniversary. After all, on the ninth place is VK, also known as VKontakte. The russian network was launched in October 2006. For many years it was only relevant for Cyrillic speaking users, but with the addition of the English language it has opened itself for the world. Instagram, kind of freshman with its initial release in October 2010 takes the tenth rank.

Of course, Google+ is the youngest member in the round and with 150 million unique monthly visitors on the 5th place. However, the inclusion of nearly all Google services using a unified login, the fact that almost every Gmail address automatically creates a Google+ account and the recent embedding into the YouTube comment system should be a reason for such a high number.

Most Popular Networks By Country Penetration

Based on Alexa.com traffic data the italian blog vincos.it recently released its new version of the world map of social networks.

As you can easily see, Facebook is dominating in nearly every country. Spoken in figures these are 127 countries, while VK is still leading in Russia.

Social Media Analytics Search Trends: January 2006 to December 2013

As we are updated now about the social network usage and the current country penetrations, it’s time to check the social media analytics search trends. Therefore we took again the global search data from Google Trends and checked the time period from January 2006 to December 2013.

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If you ask yourself how the trends data is created:

“Google Trends analyzes a percentage of Google web searches to determine how many searches have been done for the terms you've entered compared to the total number of Google searches done during that time. For example, if you search for tea in Scotland in March of 2007, Trends analyzes a percentage of all searches for tea within the same time and location parameters.”

Furthermore all search data gets normalized and 100 represents the highest value. To get to the point, the demand has grown steadily over the years. Of course, a demand for social media analytics can only occur if the network adoption is great and brands can discover marketing possibilities.

Facebook analytics searches reached their highest point at the beginning of this year. Since 2008 the demand for analysis of Facebook activities is the most meaningful of all. Remembering Facebook's market penetration in the world shown above, the best developed advertising possibilities and related ecosystem and that for many people Facebook is synonymous with social networking, the analytics demand isn’t a big surprise.

Although YouTube launched around one year later than Facebook, the first notable analytics searches have been made for YouTube Analytics. Now YouTube and Twitter are competing for the second highest analytics demand since the beginning of 2009, where most of the time Twitter is in the lead. Between 2011 and 2012 we can discover an interesting demand peak from the recently launched Google+, which after that came back to a lower search volume.

To get a faster view on the numbers lets check the averaged social media analytics search trends per year.

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Now it's getting clear that the demand for Twitter analytics is the second highest after Facebook analytics. In 2013 YouTube takes the third rank followed by LinkedIn and Tumblr. Google+ lies on the sixth place followed by Pinterest and Instagram. Both services with a kind of specialization for visual content were launched in 2010. Next-to-last Flickr takes it place. It is worth mentioning that although there was a Flickr analytics demand since 2008, Flickr couldn't manage to create a higher demand in the following years, which, of course, is due to its service limitations and a slow-growing user base in comparison with the other Top 10 members. Furthermore Flickr is the only social platform in the list whose search demand is declining. The last rank is taken by VK with first analytics searches in 2013.

The overall conclusion is that the demand for social media analytics solutions is still in a massive growth phase. Not only the world's leading social network Facebook, but also younger networks like Pinterest and Instagram attract more and more analysis needs by brands and agencies. This is based on a significant broadening of the social media marketing activities by all stakeholders over the years and a tipping point is still not in sight.