Nearly half of marketers don’t find Twitter useful for brands anymore – Hopper HQ survey finds.
As you’ll know, the social media landscape is something which is forever changing and adapting – so we decided to see how marketers are evolving with it. To do this, we surveyed more than 2,000 marketers from the UK to see what they thought about social media and the different platforms at their disposal.
Here is what we found…
We discovered that nearly half (46%) of the people asked don’t see the use of Twitter anymore – with more than three quarters of this group (79%) stating they no longer use Twitter for employer or client social media marketing. The survey also found that nearly two thirds (60%) of marketing professionals are ‘forced’ to spend at least 2 unpaid hours during the weekend managing social media.
The main reason for Twitter being considered useless by this group was “a lack of useful engagement”, on the platform – with other respondents citing ‘trolling’ and ‘negative users’ as reasons that they didn’t see the platform as a useful marketing platform.
When asked “how much, on average, would you estimate each client/your employer spend on Twitter ads on a monthly basis?”, the majority (72%) selected £0. In comparison, the average monthly ad spend on Instagram was £7,000, with Facebook averaging at £12,000 – varying between brand size and industry.
Another interesting fact we found through the survey is that more than a third (39%) of respondents over the age of 35 prefer younger colleagues to handle social media – which may or may not come as a surprise to you!
When asked what they would like to change about social media platforms, four-fifths (80%) said they would like live links to be added to Instagram, and nearly all (94%) said they’d like an ‘edit tweet’ feature to be added on Twitter – something we can all get behind! Only 2% of people asked said they used Snapchat anymore for clients.
The survey also revealed that nearly two thirds (60%) of marketing professionals spend at least 2 unpaid hours during the weekend managing employer or client social media – something we pride ourselves on stopping. As a result of the unpaid weekend work, we’ve estimated that the average marketer could be owed up to £2,436 every year if they worked in an industry that paid overtime.
We also discovered that nearly three quarters (72%) of B2B marketers still struggle to obtain social budget from their clients, despite four fifths (80%) of marketing professionals saying that social media was the most accessible and easiest marketing tool to use.
Visually plan your social content. Instagram, TikTok, Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn + Pinterest
The survey also found that the majority (57%) worked across more than 10 clients – with less than a fifth (16%) stating they work with less than five brands. More than a quarter (29%) said they work with international clients and nearly all (97%) said they use social media advertising.
The above statistics were taken from 2,000 UK based respondents, however, we also surveyed 1,000 international marketing professionals, with two thirds (65%) stating they do not find Twitter useful anymore, the most popular cited reason for this like Brits, was a lack of useful engagement.
However compared to British marketing pros, international marketers rarely work outside of normal hours, with only a fifth (22%) stating they spend at least 2 unpaid hours during the weekend managing employer or client social media.
Hopper HQ co-founder, Mike Bandar, said,
“It’s astonishing to see just how much time marketers are taking out of their weekday evenings and weekends to work. This appears to have become a necessary evil within our industry. One respondent even said that they worked up to 20 unpaid hours out of work. It’s a testament to how far marketing agencies and their teams go to meet client needs, but also shines the light on
the need for better tools and methods to increase agency efficiency.“We know that Snapchat and Twitter have been decreasing in popularity, however to see such a small amount of people within marketing using them for client or employer marketing purposes is surprising. We know that there are fundamental issues with how certain social media channels work and how marketers can use them effectively, and I think our survey has uncovered some of the moving trends in the space.”
