New Report Looks at Social Media Usage Trends Over the Past Decade, and Where Things are Now Headed
App Annie’s ‘Evolution of Social Apps’ report looks at how social media usage trends have evolved over the last decade, highlighting the rise of live-streaming, the increasing focus on social commerce, the growth of TikTok and Snapchat with the biggest highlight being the rise in consumer spending within social apps, with cumulative spend already at $3.2 billion in the first half of 2021 – up 50% year-over-year.
Social Media Today

In B2B Marketing, The 95:5 Rule is the New 60:40 rule
According to Professor John Dawes of the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute, only 5% of B2B buyers are in-market to buy right now. That means 95% of the buyers that you reach are out-of-market and won’t buy for months or even years. And, contrary to popular belief, you cannot persuade the buyer to go in-market because they already have what you’re selling and won’t need a newer version any time soon. Marketing Week

Forrester: B2B CMOs Keep the Focus on CX
marketing decision-makers from across the globe put it in the hands of marketing as opposed to any other. As such, improving customer experience is set to be a key area of focus for marketers over the next couple of years, per Forrester’s 2021 Global Marketing Survey. MarketingCharts

Gartner: CMOs Need to Step up Their Company Connection Efforts
“Marketing budgets are facing steeper cuts than any in the past decade. We’re going to have to do more with less,” said Gartner VP research, Mike McGuire. Gartner’s graph showed marketing budgets as percentage of total revenue dropping from 12.1 per cent in 2016 to 6.4 per cent today and trending down. The way out of these troubles relies on existing marketing expertise, not a bigger budget.
CMO

TikTok reportedly overtakes YouTube in US average watch time
TikTok’s Android phone users now spend more time each month watching content than YouTube users, according to a report from app analytics firm App Annie. The Verge

New Social Network Glass wants to make an Instagram just for enthusiasts, but at a cost
“We have two [features], and I don’t think they’re what most people would suspect. Yes, we have higher quality photos with minimal compression. Color profile support? Yup. But right now, the things that make Glass great aren’t product-based,” co-founders Watson and Borsje explain. techradar

Twitter Wants You to Tweet to Interest-Based Communities, Not Just Followers
Twitter is on a tear with new features lately and its latest experiment, called Communities, is designed to make it easier to connect around shared interests. Users will be able to join these new social hubs and tweet directly to other people with shared interests rather than their regular group of followers. Those tweets will still be public, but replies will be limited to other community members. TechCrunch

Google: Website Quality Can’t Be Fixed With Technical Changes
Inspired by comments by Google’s John Mueller, Barry Schwartz says, making changes to your site speed, core web vitals, changing your structured data, title tags, etc – is simply not enough. You need to look at your website as a whole and see what you can vastly improve on, including site content, navigation, user experience and much more. Search Engine Roundtable

SEO By The Numbers, What B2B Tech And SaaS Marketers Think
New research from FINITE and 93X show that the three biggest search engine optimization (SEO) challenges for business-to-business (B2B) tech marketers are technical SEO (38%), link building (21%) and content creation (21%). MediaPost

ON THE LIGHTER SIDE:

Are “Selfie Museums” a growing trend? Columbus Dispatch

“Viral” isn’t always a good thing for business: Denver Japanese restaurant overwhelmed by viral TikTok response. The Denver Channel

TOPRANK MARKETING & FRIENDS IN THE NEWS:

LinkedIn Marketing Solutions Blog featured a post from TopRank Marketing Blog, Three Use Cases that Connect the Dots Between Influence and B2B Marketing Results.

A Future So Bright, the new book from “Tech Humanist”, “Optimistic Futurist” and professional keynote speaker Kate O’Neill, is now available on Kindle and paperback.

Have you found your own B2B marketing news item from the past week of industry news? Please drop us a line in the comments below.

Thanks for taking the time to join us for this week’s TopRank Marketing B2B marketing news, and we hope that you will return next Friday for more of the week’s most relevant B2B and digital marketing industry news. In the meantime, you can follow us at @toprank on Twitter or on LinkedIn or even more timely updates about what’s happening in the B2B marketing world.

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