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2017 Hispanic Social Marketing Report
INTRODUCTION
HOW SOCIAL MEDIA CAN MOVE YOUR BRAND WITH HISPANICS
By Adam R Jacobson
Publisher, Hispanic Market Overview
From Facebook to Snapchat, and from YouTube to Instagram, social media has been woven into the fabric of our lives. For the Latino consumer, social media platforms are fully integrated into how one communicates with friends and family near and far – via video, audio, photography and text messages.
It’s hardly a secret that social media and Hispanics go hand in hand. In May 2015, eMarketer declared that the U.S. Hispanic consumer makes social networking “a crucial part” of their digital lives.
A full-scale report titled “U.S. Hispanics: What’s True, What’s Not True and What’s Sort of True in 2015” found – two years ago – that U.S. Hispanics differ from the total population because “social media plays a distinct role in their digital activity.”
This validated what was, and is, considered to be conventional wisdom among marketers and brand managers.
Here are some of eMarketer’s predictions for 2018:
• Hispanic social network users will total 39.4 million people, up from 32 million in 2015. This compares to 115.6 million Whites, a slight rise from 111.1 million Whites in 2015. Similarly, growth among Blacks is slow, moving to 24.8 million Blacks in 2018 from 23.2 million in 2015. Asian growth is also tepid, moving to 10.9 million in 2018 from 9.5 million in 2015.
• Some 79.5% of U.S. Hispanic internet users will access social networks at least monthly, versus 71.4% of all U.S. internet users.
• Of all social network users, Hispanics will account for 1 in 5 people.
The strong family ties typically seen among Hispanics, and how this transposed to social media use, was examined in great depth in summer 2014 by Ipsos MediaCT for Facebook. One key takeaway from this report: Nearly half (48%) of U.S. Hispanics’ Facebook friends were family members, compared to 36% of total U.S. Facebook users.
Meanwhile, marketers have a plethora of choices when it comes to how to culturally communicate with U.S. Hispanic social media users. CMOs and brand managers are well aware of the need to be authentic, and why a simple translation or transcreation – even in the digital universe – may not bring the same impact as a fully developed initiative with Hispanics at the heart of the effort. With “in-language” now a secondary conversation to “in-culture,” the way Hispanics use social media very much brings one’s language front and center to any discussion a marketer should have with its social and digital media team.