INBOUND ACCELERATOR

Hashtags got their start on Twitter, as a way of sorting and organizing the fast-moving social media channel into areas of interest, but Instagram took the tool and hyper-sized it with up to 30 hashtags per caption.

This may come as a surprise to anyone born after 1990, but this symbol (#) has not always been known as a hashtag. It gained that identifier in 2007 when it was introduced by Twitter as a way of identifying and organizing tweets by subject matter.

In a fast-moving environment like Twitter, timing your schedule can be important to reach followers before the 20-minute half-life of a tweet means decreasing engagement. (Source) You want your content to hit the feed when your audience is most likely to be using it.

While Facebook far outnumbers LinkedIn in the total number of users and its use by businesses, in the B2B marketing realm, LinkedIn leads the way. According to HootSuite, 96 percent of B2B content marketers use LinkedIn for organic social marketing (only 82 percent used Facebook or Twitter).

As millennials, who are completely at home with social media, become the primary purchase decision makers in many businesses, it is imperative that B2B brands become equally comfortable with using social media to distribute content.

Even as new social media channels make the news and take over the attention spans of younger generations, Facebook remains the most-used channel, with 2.45 billion active monthly users. And it is one of the few channels—along with YouTube—that consistently delivers followers for nearly all types of business, both B2C and B2B. 

YouTube is not only the largest repository of video content on the web, but also the de facto second most-used search engine out there, with more than 3 billion searches performed every month.

Market research encompasses many different activities marketers use to identify the needs of their customers, assess how they compare to the competition, find opportunities within the industry, and gather original data that can be used as the basis for content marketing campaigns.

While Facebook has many more users, and LinkedIn is seen as the flagship for B2B and professional networking, Twitter can still play an important role in your social media marketing strategy, but it requires attention to detail and a knack for brevity.

Did you realize YouTube is the second largest search engine on the internet? With more searches daily than all other search engines (other than Google) combined, it is one of the key places the world goes to learn.