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[Data Insight] Referral Sharing + Social Media Challenges for Marketers

The social media landscape has changed a lot in the past year or so. Everything from Elon owning Twitter, Facebook becoming Meta, to Apple stripping away third-party tracking cookies.

Author

Josh at Referral Rock
December 13, 2022

Getting reach on social media used to be easier for marketers. Today, no one seems to read what you slaved over and results are harder to track. I do believe user privacy is a good thing but your work as a marketer in social media is very hard to measure (Sparktoro).

Remember the days when just having a business profile on social media was enough. You could make a post and that post would actually reach your audience without having to put ad dollars behind it.

But now the algorithms have changed (one can argue if it's for the better or worse as it just depends on who you ask) where engaging content is rewarded on the platform vs just having the followers.

I'm interested to see what 2023 lays out for us on the social media landscape and how it affects marketers. I'd love to know your predictions.

Where do you hang out as a marketer and how do you see the social media landscape unfolding for your work?

📊 Referral marketing data insights

Social media has always had close ties to word of mouth & referrals. We've always seen referral programs as a way to help businesses get more word of mouth where social media was a primary method for sharing links. Fortunately, a lot of the sharing still come from SMS, email, and untracked ways people just cut and paste a link (i.e. the Clipboard).

This year we started aggregating our referral data to look for larger insights. Here are some interesting data points on uses of our referral shares (sorry we don't have 2021 to compare to):

Only 57% of the shares were on mobile - This surprised us as we thought mobile devices would make up more than 70% of the shares.

Top sharing methods are Clipboard copy (40.8%) and SMS (14.9%) - Most surprising was that "Meta" (Facebook, FB Messenger, & WhatsApp) still made up a combined 19.5%

All of this is from 2022, anonymized data from both our trial and paying customers. We look forward to providing more of this data in our app and suggesting changes so our customers can make to create more engaging referral programs.

⏮ Product updates in 2022

Since we haven't sent a broad email update in a while here's what's changed with our product.

First, one of the most significant changes (that we feel quite dumb not spreading this news) is a major pricing change to give more members in every plan. We're doing our best to help businesses in this economy and really leaning into our vision for scaling word of mouth for all businesses.