This is Bloomberg Business Week with Carol Messer and Bloomberg Quick Takes Tim Stinovic on Bloomberg Radio. Well, social media, it's incredibly important, not just to you Katie Greifeld, who right now is probably looking at her Twitter. She is she here's something that just happened. Preparing she had to go and charge her phone. And it was tough for you to be away from it for like twenty minutes. Right I was try heaving. I hope you couldn't hear
that on air, but it was pretty nervous. Okay, well it's okay, Um, it's your birthday, so we're gonna cut you a little slack. Social media not just important to Katie but also to brands. The social media management and analytics company Sprout Social has released it to annual Sprout Social Index. They do this each year and it's a survey of marketers and consumers to try to get a understanding of the current media market the future media market. The company has been doing this for quite a while.
This year they surveyed more than two thousand customers uh for these results. Jamie Gelpin is the chief marketing officer of Sprout Social. She joins us to be a zoom from Cago. Jamie, how are you? I'm doing great? Hi Tim and Hi Katie. Happy birthday. Thank you so much, Jamie. I appreciate it. It's good to have you with us. Jamie. Hey, big takeaways from this because I'm wondering when it comes to social media. You know, consumers were really fickle, right.
We move from platform to platform and brands have to to understand how to engage us on these platforms. What did you find this year that was different than the previous eight. Yeah, we do move platform to platform, but we don't give up the old platforms like we just keep adding. Um, Katie, you you hate to leave your phone. That's probably because you have literally thousands of apps that you're just going back and forth between Twitter and Facebook.
Really out here, Jamie, But you're right, she's also a big TikTok or Jamie, She's gonna go the oh. I'm I'm also a big TikToker. Can't wait to talk about it. Um, and I'm not. I can't exactly say that I'm in the millennial generation either, so um so I love this report. First of all, this is probably my favorite day. Yesterday
when we were least it at Sprout. We've been doing this for nine years and what's really cool about it is we've seen these trends like EBB and flow right and it's what's powerful about this data is it's a juxtaposition between what brands says. We ask brands and then we also ask consumers, and then we put those two together to see, Okay, what do we need to be thinking about both from a brand perspective, a marketing perspective,
but really the overall company. And I will say I'm going to add another big old platform to this story because probably the biggest thing that stood out for me UM from this year's report is not just the interest but the quick and outsized investment in new technologies metaverse a r VR like that really came to the forefront and it probably UM the trend for me is like really reminiscent of the early two thousand's. Yes, I can
go that back that far as a marketer. We have the Internet, that's barely like we were just coming out of a o L. We didn't have the Internet, UM, but social was just like coming on that scene right Like Facebook just opened up. You didn't have to have a dot e d u email anymore. My Space friends stirre right and and marketers were really slow to adopt it. But that is not the case with metaverse. Like we learned from that that we are we are jumping in.
Six of marketers are planning to invest a quarter of their budget and metaverse activities in the next twelve months. Does that mean we actually have a definition for what the metaverse is? Mm hmm. The metaverse is going to change,
just like we didn't have this. I believe the definition of social has also changed tremendously, Like it is going to change, but brands are trying to figure it out, right, Like we just had Fashion Week UH for the first time in the metaverse most recently, and we've got like QSRs like Chipotle playing around um with different activations, and so we're going to see a lot here UM. But
this is just the beginning. And I'm really I'm really proud of marketers and brands for for jumping in a lot so than we've seen in another UH and other times. The metaverse is definitely one of my bat signals. I could spend an hour on it, but I do want to get to TikTok because it takes up so much of my day. I feel ancient when I'm on that platform. Sometimes I look at think about the video I'm watching when I say, is this a high schooler? Am I watching a high school right now? But it feels like
that they've just really burst onto the scene. I mean a few years ago, I definitely didn't even know what TikTok was. How what what do we know about that rise? Looking at this index? Yeah, so I think this is again like brands exponentially investing in in things like the metaverse, similar with TikTok, Like it is literally consumer behavior and consumer usage of TikTok has doubled in the last two years. You mentioned like you you didn't know about it a
couple of years ago. We didn't really know about it before, and in that time it has become the number one biggest platform for usage across It seems like we might have lost Jamie Gilpin. We're gonna work to get her connection back, Katie. I'm going through the report here from Sprout Social, and one thing that I find so fascinating about this is one of the one of the takeaways that they got was that the top platforms consumers and brands anticipate using the most over the next twelve months. Uh,
these are the top five. Okay, consumers inticipate using Facebook the most. Respondents said that, then YouTube, then Instagram, then TikTok, then Snapchat. So two of the top five that consumers end up using the most or think they're going to use the most in the next couple in the next twelve months. Those are owned by Meta Platforms, a company who shares have just been absolutely beat up as it
tries to transition the amount. Interesting to see Facebook in the top spot there, I mean, I've I wouldn't have expected to see them if you I just think my own personal usage, I really don't. I opened it today because it's my birthday. But let's get back to Jamie Gilp in the cmo at Sprout Social who joins us
from Chicago. Jamie, I don't know if you could hear me say that, but I was pretty surprised to see what one of the takeaways that two of the plot five platforms and in fact just one number one and number three Facebook and Instagram. How do you how do you reconcile that with the way that meta platform cameraparent company of Facebook Stock has just been getting beat up. Oh I could you can spend a day on metaverse. I can spend a day on the stock market right now,
especially with tech stocks. We are also a tech stock UM and so I think UM user behavior, like how the platforms are bringing us is not is literally no indication on stock price right now. There's lots of other things that go into that. But if we just stick on behavior, which is what I'm more passionate about, UM of consumers, this kind of lends to the comment I made before, like we don't leave the platforms that we
started on. So consumers that started on Facebook or Twitter, or Instagram or LinkedIn right like or or YouTube, we're still on those. Those are still on our phone. We're still going to those on a daily a daily basis. But we're also adding now TikTok and now the metaverse and now the metaverse, and so it's really about like the compounding usage, not just that we're leaving those those platforms altogether. And Jamie and the last thirty seconds we have with you, what was the big surprise for you
in this report? You know, it's not necessarily a surprise, but probably more of a takeaway for brands Um, we we know this like consumers, whether it's generational differences or not, like we want authenticity, we want uncurated, we want real, off the cuff type of content from each other, but
we also wanted from brands. And so TikTok, I think is like the perfect example of a platform that that made use of this just natural trend that consumer trends that consumer was actually driving where you know, we don't want the curated content, right, and so how do brands really get comfortable in that type of environment where they are not super produced? Right? We're just being real? Um, and being real that's the name of a new social platform,
to be real. We can't forget about that one. Jamie Gilpin, chief marketing officer at Sprout Social, joining us BA Zoom from Chicago, that is going to do it for this Wednesday edition of Bloomberg Business Week. For the entire Bloomberg Business Week team, I'm Jim Stentovic signing off for Katie Grayfeld as well.