LeadTail has released its latest quarterly study [download page] of Twitter activity by marketers, this time looking at the behavior of 515 North American digital marketers (primarily from the US) active on Twitter during the second quarter. The report indicates that these brand, corporate and agency marketers cross-posted content to Twitter from various other social networks, with 52% doing so from Instagram, 34% from foursquare, 27% from Vine, and 25% from LinkedIn.
Those are significantly higher figures than found in Lead Tail’s Q1 study. That difference could be a result of wider interest by marketers in sharing content between networks, but could also be due to the different sample base, with this study focused on digital marketers while the last looked at the broader marketing community.
Beyond the top tier of networks used for sharing to Twitter, some digital marketers are also turning to Spotify (9%), GetGlue (6%), and Pinterest (6%), emphasizing the use of Twitter to share multimedia content. Facebook sits further back, with only 4% sharing content from that platform to Twitter.
While digital marketers differed from the earlier sample in their cross-posting behavior, the media source types they shared on Twitter were quite similar. Of the 100 most popular shared content sources, 45% were mainstream media (44% in the previous study), 35% were industry media (32% in the earlier study) and 17% were social/user-generated media (22% in the previous study).
Other Findings:
- Digital marketers used a number of mobile platforms to publish tweets, with Twitter for iPhone (66%) and Twitter for iPad (30%) both more commonly used than Twitter for Android (14%).
- Looking at tweets that originated on the web, Twitter.com (used by 81% of the sample at least once) and a Tweet button (77%) were most popular, followed by HootSuite (29%), LinkedIn (25%), and TweetDeck (20%).
About the Data: The study looked at a total of 143,856 tweets and 69,657 shared links. The total follower reach was 2,418,293, and the media number of followers per marketer was 891. The tweets were all published between April 1, 2013 and June 30, 2013. Digital marketers tracked were all responsible for digital and/or social marketing programs.
