Chief Marketing Officers are a highly connected and competitive crowd, and a new study by Leadtail and cloud-based analytics company Neustar has delved into how they use Twitter.
The study sampled 1,034 execs but wasn’t limited to only chief marketing officers. People with the job titles head of marketing, and VP of either marketing or digital were also included. The study looked at their Twitter usage statistics during a four-month time span of September 2014 to December 2014. 31 per cent of those in the sample group were involved in the B2B industry, with 52 per cent coming from B2C, and 17 per cent coming from agency industries.
We took some time to analyze the report and extract some of the key takeaways. Here’s what we learned.
LinkedIn is Blowing Up
LinkedIn is becoming increasingly popular with CMOs as a method of posting content to Twitter. Over the past two years, the number of LinkedIn updates cross-posted on Twitter by CMOs increased 200 percent. The LinkedIn app is also popular for Twitter sharing with 22 per cent of the CMOs in the study posting to Twitter with it at least once during the study, and that’s up from 11 per cent in 2012.
CMOs Prefer Visual Content
While LinkedIn usage is on the rise, it still isn’t the biggest app for cross-posting content on Twitter. Forty-eight percent of CMOs use YouTube and 35 percent use Instagram while only 30 percent used LinkedIn. The lean toward You Tube and Instagram shows that CMOs have a strong preference for visual content which transitions well between mobile and web-based apps.
Mainstream Business News Sources are Highly Followed
CMOs specialise in marketing, business, technology, and social media, so it comes as no surprise that those are some of the most popular subjects they tweet about regularly. CMOs get their news, business features, and business strategy content from a small list of mainstream media sources such as Forbes, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and Fast Company. Mainstream sources almost half of all shared content. Those same sources are also the most retweeted.
CMOs Are Looking For Audience Quality Over Quantity
CMOs are looking for more valuable audiences, rather than just trying to reach the most people possible. They want to find strategic insights that help them better understand their audience and master the constant influx of new technology and data-driven marketing.
B2B and B2C Becoming More Similar
Whether you’re coming from a B2B or B2C angle, the underlying principles are generally the same and the line between those two is becoming harder to distinguish. The main difference between the two is that B2B focuses more on tech while B2C focuses more on branding.
As this study told us, CMOs are highly mobile, and connected to the social web. If you want to reach out to them, you need to provide a seamless experience across both mobile and Web-based platforms.
If you want to read the report yourself, download the PDF here.
