In-depth analysis: User portraits and marketing advantages and disadvantages of the four major overseas social media platforms including YouTube and TikTok

But for game companies, the Twitch game live streaming platform is a very important channel!

If niche brands want to reach the main consumer group of the post-90s and post-00s in the United States, Tumblr may bring unexpected benefits!

Foreign young people of Generation Z (born between 1996 and 2012) are addicted to TikTok, the overseas version of Douyin!

Basic data and user profiles you need to know about YouTube

According to the 2019 YouTube Analytics Report:

1. 1.3 billion people worldwide use YouTube, and more than 300 hours of video are uploaded every minute.

2. YouTube has more than 30 million daily active users, and nearly 5 billion videos are viewed every day.

3. More than 3.25 billion hours of video are viewed on YouTube every month.

4. Female users account for 38% of YouTube users, while male users account for 62%.

5. The age distribution of YouTube users is:

18 to 24 years old accounted for 11%

25 to 34 years old account for 23%

35 to 44 years old account for 26%

45 to 54 years old accounted for 16%

50 to 64 years old account for 8%

3% are over 65 years old

Others 14%

6. YouTube platform supports access in 76 different languages, which cover 95% of the world's Internet population and are supported in 88 countries.

7.9% of small businesses in China use YouTube for influencer marketing.

YouTube influencer marketing advantages

1) Excellent content and strong appeal.

YouTube is the mainstream marketing platform for overseas influencers. Most influencers have professional video production capabilities and support adding product links in the introduction below the video. At the same time, content producers themselves have strong original content creation capabilities and can stimulate the audience's desire to buy by vividly and meticulously displaying products.

2) It is helpful to improve the ranking of brand keywords.

YouTube videos have a high Google weight, and advertisers uploading brand videos on YouTube can help improve search engine optimization (SEO). Google, the world's largest search engine, is paying more and more attention to video search results. When searching for many keywords, there will be a special video section displayed at the front of the search results page. Studies have shown that if advertisers want to guide off-site traffic through keywords, high-quality YouTube content and video links will greatly improve the ranking of Google search results.

3) Good promotion effect.

Using the right influencer + matching the right influencer fan audience + appealing, high-quality original content = explosion! Most influencer marketers can receive feedback that exceeds their expectations.

Disadvantages of YouTube Influencer Marketing

1) The price is relatively high compared to other platforms, and clicks and conversions cannot be fully monitored.

The price of influencer marketing on YouTube is relatively high, because generally high-quality influencers spend a lot of time making videos. Even for a 5-minute video content, many influencers will spend 2 hours preparing, 3 hours shooting products and content, and 5 hours post-editing, adjusting lighting, adding sound, background music, adding materials, and even adding subtitles. Therefore, the effort and time cost of a professional content producer to the content is huge, but users are worth paying for high-quality content.

However, no matter how high-quality the video is, due to the limitations of current technology, most links in the description column only receive 0.1%-5% of the overall conversion rate. The main reason is that many viewers use mobile phones to browse YouTube videos. When they watch in full screen, they are often more willing to search the product name on Google and then place an order directly on the official website or shopping websites such as Amazon.

2) A minimum ROI needs to be set.

When advertisers need to set goals with YouTube influencers, it is best to determine the minimum number of views to ensure that the click-through rate meets the minimum ROI setting for promotion results.

About Instagram: Basic data and user portraits you need to know

1. Nearly 1 billion people use Instagram every month.

2. 71% of Instagram users worldwide are under the age of 35, and 72% of American teenagers use Instagram.

3. 95% of American Instagram influencers also have YouTube channel accounts, so marketers will bundle them together for YouTube marketing while looking for American Instagram influencers.

4. 35% of adults worldwide use Instagram, and 28% of them are from the United States, which has a strong purchasing power. Instagram marketing needs to provide the most suitable products for the appropriate income earners. According to the report on the habits of 2,000 American social users compiled by Flint, a British communications consulting company, the annual income of Instagram users in the United States is as follows:

Less than $30,000: 44%

$30,000–60,000: 45%

$60,000–70,000: 36%

$70,000–80,000: 55%

$80,000–$100,000: 46%

Over 100,000 USD: 60%

5. 60% of Instagram users (nearly 600 million) discover and look for the latest global products through Instagram channels, which has also promoted more and more B2C companies around the world to start influencer marketing through Instagram.

6. Instagram has an interaction rate of 2.2%, far exceeding other platforms. Even Facebook has an interaction rate of only 0.22%. Therefore, Instagram is called the king of conversion rate.

Marketing Status of Instagram Brand Official Accounts

1. 50% of overseas companies will publish Instagram Stories through Instagram.

2. 52% of Instagram influencers follow and follow brand accounts, and their fans will also follow the brand's movements.

3. 71% of American companies use Instagram to start marketing, and the Instagram platform has more than 25 million business promotion content. 80% of Instagram users follow at least one business account.

4. 75% of Instagram users visit a brand’s website after viewing a brand’s post. Instagram is a great way to showcase the physical beauty of a product.

5. 70% of users will choose to buy through their mobile phones after viewing related products on Instagram.

Instagram Influencer Marketing Advantages

1. Relatively high conversion rate and interaction rate, the highest average among several mainstream social media platforms.

2. A large proportion of Instagram users are millennials (a generation born in the 20th century who were minors and reached adulthood after entering the 21st century), also known as the post-80s and post-90s in China. These users have strong purchasing power for most products on the current market. If they become potential customers of a product, their repurchase rate and activity are very strong.

3. Visual platform, serving products with visual appeal. Beautiful and exquisite products will cause extreme comfort and stimulate the desire to buy.

4. Instagram Story, as a new form of content, has a strong interaction rate and can directly lead to web pages outside the platform.

Disadvantages of Instagram Influencer Marketing

1. You must diversify your post content and think of different strategies so that your fans will not get bored. The pictures and video content must be creative and visually beautiful to attract millennial users to click and buy.

2. There will be some robot accounts on Instagram, so when a person has very few fans, most of the comments or likes do not belong to real fans, and the probability of zombie fans will be higher.

3. Since it is easy to make pictures, some fake influencers will appear, and merchants need to pay special attention to it. However, since YouTube videos are difficult to make and take a long time to make, there are very few fake influencers.

If you are a game manufacturer, you need to pay attention to Twitch, the largest overseas game live streaming media platform: PC stand-alone games, online games, various game console games, AR games, etc. all have special sections on Twitch, and they are very popular. Mobile games can also receive good promotion effects and game feedback as long as you find the right game bloggers and matching player audiences.

Needless to say, for gaming peripherals such as keyboards, mice, headphones, gaming chairs, etc., cooperation with Twitch anchors usually achieves good promotional effects.

For non-game companies, if your target audience is young men, Twitch is also a suitable promotion channel to try. Many large overseas brands have begun to cooperate with Twitch anchors and sponsor live broadcast events.

It can be seen intuitively from the figure below that compared with other game live streaming platforms such as YouTube, Facebook Watch, and Mixer, Twitch has a much higher number of online viewers at the same time, and the number is on the rise; while the number of online viewers on YouTube Gaming Live is on a downward trend.

About Twitch: Basic data and user profiles you need to know

1. Twitch was acquired by Amazon in 2014. It started with game live streaming and now also includes many other live content, which belongs to the IRL (In Real Life) category, but it is still mainly based on games.

2. 81.5% of Twitch users are male, and 55% of users are between 18-34 years old.

3. More than 15 million users are active on the Twitch platform every day, 2.2 million to 3.2 million anchors broadcast live every month, users have a cumulative total of 355 billion views per month, and a total of 124 million pieces of content are edited and uploaded.

4. The number of viewers for a single Twitch event exceeds one million, and the number of simultaneous viewers on a single channel can reach 245,000.

5. It has 220,000 Twitch Affiliate members and 30,000 Twitch partners.

6. 21.3% of Twitch views are in the eSports category, 21.32% of Twitch views are from the United States, and 62.87% of Twitch video content is in English.

7. 4 p.m. Eastern Time (7 p.m. Pacific Time) is the peak viewing time for Twitch users. Twitch has a cumulative viewing of 4 billion minutes per month, and the average number of viewers on each Twitch channel is nearly 1 million, with a cumulative viewing of 727 million hours per month.

8. The most popular game in 2018 is Fortnite, and the highest number of concurrent viewers of Fortnite live broadcast is 1.46 million.

9. There are 9 million live streamers on Twitch and the number is growing. Ninja, once the most popular live streamer on Twitch, was watched 150 million hours last year. (Ninja jumped from Twitch to Mixer, another live game streaming platform, this year.)

Twitch Influencer Marketing Advantages

1. Twitch's mainstream user profile (81.5% are male, 55% of users are between 18 and 34 years old) meets the target audience of most games. By analyzing the anchor's previous game types, content and viewing data, game manufacturers can directly and quickly reach their target players.

2. Twitch live broadcasters have good interaction with players and audiences, and live broadcast comments can see real-time game feedback. Positive comments and feedback will influence other players and attract their interest.

3. For products other than games, if the target audience is also men aged 18-34, Twitch can also be used as a promotion channel. Just like domestic e-sports teams have many non-game sponsors, such as mobile phones, functional drinks, e-sports chairs, fast food brands, etc., many foreign big brands such as Coca-Cola, KFC, Uber Eats (takeout APP), etc. also cooperate with Twitch online celebrity game anchors to promote their own products and services.

4. Game manufacturers can establish various forms of cooperation with anchors, and choose to cooperate with different categories of anchors in different states such as game preheating, first release, and update. Use diversified content to attract and mobilize potential and existing players in the most efficient and extensive way.

Disadvantages of Twitch Influencer Marketing

1. Real-time comments in Twitch live broadcast rooms have both advantages and disadvantages. If there are too many negative comments, it will have a negative impact on the overall evaluation of the game. The key to avoiding this situation is to ensure the high quality of the game and choose matching anchors to cooperate with.

2. The particularity of live broadcast content leads to an obvious disadvantage compared to online videos: it cannot be watched repeatedly, that is, it is not as timely as online video platforms. Although Twitch provides anchors with the function of uploading online videos after live broadcast, the number of views of these videos is very low compared to live broadcast. Therefore, it is very important to pay attention to the time period of promotional content during live broadcast. First, the promotional content should be mentioned repeatedly during the entire live broadcast process. Second, it is necessary to understand in advance the time period when the anchor has the highest number of views and focus on mentioning the promotional content during that time period.

TikTok, the overseas version of Douyin, is currently the most successful new overseas social media darling and one of the fastest growing social media platforms. It allows users to create short videos with background music, creativity and special effects. TikTok influencers are active on mobile phones, and the content they create is sometimes novel and interesting, and sometimes spoof, which can quickly attract everyone's attention and become addictive.

TikTok is very similar to the popular short video platform Vine, but Twitter's Vine platform has stopped allowing users to upload new content in 2017, so it can be said that TikTok is now the only one in the short video field and is developing rapidly.

About TikTok: Basic data and user profiles you need to know

1. As of last year, TikTok had more than 500 million active users, covering 75 different languages.

2. As of the end of June 2019, the average monthly download volume of Lasso, a short video software similar to Facebook, was 15,000 times, while TikTok's download volume increased by 6.4 million times in January, a number that simply drove the world crazy.

3. 60% of TikTok’s monthly active users are between 16 and 24 years old. An influencer with 2.5 million followers on the TikTok platform charges an average of $500-800 for each original content, while influencers on Instagram will charge an additional $100 for every additional 10,000 followers.

5. Advertisers can create branded AR lenses, various filters and stickers through TikTok, and support users to add them to original content to gain brand benefits.

Conclusion

There are many popular social media platforms overseas, and their characteristics are quite different. Internet celebrities on different platforms also have different characteristics.

When businesses cooperate with overseas influencers, they need to understand in advance the characteristics of different platforms, the strengths and weaknesses of influencers on different types of platforms, and clearly define the positioning and target audience of their own products. Only by combining professional influencer platform tools can they achieve the best influencer promotion results.

Source: SocialBook Global Influencer Marketing