More social platforms = more reasons to ensure brand consistency

Depending on your sources, social started bringing people and their opinions together in either 1973 or 1995. What began as a way to track down former classmates, former (or estranged) family members rapidly developed into the massive portfolio of connecting, sharing and over-sharing platforms we have in 2024. 

For any business, having access to that potential global audience is a great thing – the downside is there are so many platforms, so many different takes on which users are active on those channels and how much to spend advertising budget where. 

It can and does get confusing for businesses, especially when you consider… 

• There’s massive choice: there are 35 social platforms with at least 100 million active monthly users. Three of those top five (Facebook #1, WhatsApp, #3, Instagram #4) are owned by Meta. (source)
• A lot of people use social: as of January 2024, there are 5.04 billion social users around the world or 62.3% of the total global population. In annual growth, that’s a 5.6% increase or 8.4 new users every second. (source)
• People aren’t always loyal: a typical user visits 6.7 different platforms each month and spends on average of 2 hours 23 minutes a day – or 15% of their waking day – on social. (source)
• The most active demographic on social are millennials (born 1981-96): 69% using social in 2024 (source). Gen Z (born 1997-2012) lead the time spent on social with 35% using it more than two hours each day. (source)
• YouTube is now the most frequented online platform among U.S. Gen Z adults. People spend over 3 minutes on the platform per day. (source)
• And, 78% of US Gen Z were using TikTok in 2023. The platform boasts the highest average time spent per day of any network, it grew by almost 10 minutes compared to 45.8 minutes in 2022. (source)
• By 2027, six billion people will use one or more form of social media - a massive increase from the 4.89 billion in 2022. (source)
• However, engagement across all social platforms is declining - TikTok has an average of 4.25%; Instagram’s 0.6%; Facebook’s 0.15%; Twitter’s 0.05% (source)
• In December 2023, Pinterest.com had 1.16 billion visits. Last year the global monthly active user base on Pinterest reached a 498 million – 76% of them are female but the fastest growing audience are Gen Z and men. (source)
• 75% of marketers report their social advertising campaigns have yielded profitable return on investment or ROI (source)
• Total spend on social media advertising is projected to reach $219.8 billion in 2024 (source) while social media ads account for 28.8% of all digital advertising spend (source)

The number of channels, the time spent on different ones worldwide, the differences in demographics and ages of … the confusion lies in trying to be all things to all social channels. If anything, the strength of your brand, your business’ core values and how you articulate that, are now more important than ever. And that strength has to be matched by consistency – in output, in tone, in branding, no matter which channel you choose to reach your customers, clients and consumers on. 

And if you’re looking for software which can provide your brand the guard rails to ensure brand consistency, then check out MedialakeAI. It’s one of the intrinsic features of our product.

MedialakeAI not only safeguards your brand's integrity across multiple platforms but also integrates with them, enhancing your digital presence and engagement. It offers social media integrations, allowing for automatic synchronization at regular intervals from all your channels. This means that any new content—whether it's the latest campaign visuals on Instagram or a video on Facebook—can be instantly imported into your platform. But we don't stop at just syncing your content. With DAM integrations, Medialake goes a step further by importing additional data such as custom labels, providing a richer, more detailed view of your digital assets.

And we're constantly looking ahead. Future updates coming soon will integrate more dynamic content types, including comments, view counts, and other engagement metrics, especially from platforms like YouTube. This will not only enrich your content repository but also offer valuable insights into your audience's interactions with your brand.