Social Media 2: Channels

Updated: 17 October 2022

2012-2024

YouTube and TikTok are dominant among U.S. teens

The biggest story in social media in 2020-22 (in the United States) was the rapid rise in popularity of TikTok among U.S. teens. Instagram and SnapChat also demonstrate significant growth with this demographic.

As the report Teens, Social Media and Technology 2022 demonstrates in the chart reproduced here, the rapid decline of Facebook among Americans age 13-17 is equally notable.

Click the image to see it full sized.

But don’t ignore Facebook in your professional life

Many Clayton State students rarely use Facebook personally. That doesn't mean that social-media professionals can ignore it. In fact, if you are trying to reach anyone except teens in the United States, Facebook is likely to be your primary channel.

Recent surveys and trend lines compiled by the Pew Research Center confirm that Facebook maintains its dominant role among most social-media users in the United States.

In 2021, 69 percent of online adults used Facebook, second only to YouTube. Furthermore, Facebook's users also visited the site more frequently than users of any other platform.

Facebook for professionals

A few points from Lynch and Horton are worth highlighting.

90 percent of the users who like or follow your page will never visit it
Facebook claims that about 6-16 percent of posts reach the personal News Feeds of people who have liked a page
Some industry experts have found that the percent of "organic reach" has actually fallen to 2-3 percent for commercial pages
Facebook has no incentive to increase organic reach, since it wants companies to pay to boost their reach

Algorithms

Professional communicators must understand how the platforms decide what content to surface for particular users, and what content to ignore. As the authors state, Facebook claims to include 100,000 data points in its decision-making algorithm, but they tend to cluster around three key areas.

Affinity [This is about the viewer.]
Weight [This is about the post.]
Time decay

Factor 3, time decay, makes it imperative that you know when the members of your particular audience are online.

Increasing the “Organic Reach” of Facebook Posts

Include photos, illustrations, or videos in all posts
Produce 1-3 posts per day
Use a detailed calendar to plan social media campaigns
Interact with those who like, follow, and (especially) comment
Keep posts short, ideally no more than 100 characters

Increasing the “Organic Reach” of ANY Social Media Post

Social Media is visual media.

This is one of the most important things that you can learn in this class.

Best image ratios

The textbook recommends a particular landscape ratio for Facebook images, but this is outdated. Since most people use phones instead of laptops to access their social media accounts, square or portrait ratios make better use of the vertical screen space (and not just on Instagram).