Social Media – Should Brands Be Looking to Promote Right Now?
Aside from emails, social media has witnessed a massive surge in engagement as the pandemic continues to unfold. With LinkedIn as the highest-ranked for B2B content engagement so far, Facebook also saw a 70% increase in usage of all its apps for the month of March. These two platforms have proved to be winners in the growing content marketing trend.

LinkedIn:-
LinkedIn reported increased engagement as people kept coming to engage in profound ways. According to LinkedIn, COVID-19 had not affected employer branding up until late February and early March. The platform saw at least 1 out of 4 companies mention COVID-19 in its posts. The data shows how COVID-19-related posts went up within a matter of weeks.

By mid-March, it had already dominated the main stories and brand postings had started to reflect the same. By the week of March 2, COVID-19-related posts were 4% of all company posts on LinkedIn. Two weeks later they were 24% of all posts.

The data shows that the COVID-19-related posts made up nearly 50% of the companies posts in the legal industry followed by the public administration. Healthcare, non-profits, and public safety were among other industries that made up the rest. During the same time, employees who were able to work from home had to make adjustments, impacting the companies' messaging. Marketers grappled with the new setting by posting more about working remotely - showing that 15% of company posts had been about this topic from mid-to-late March.

Twitter:-
The data shows that the COVID-19-related posts made up nearly 50% of the companies posts in the legal industry followed by the public administration. Healthcare, non-profits, and public safety were among other industries that made up the rest. During the same time, employees who were able to work from home had to make adjustments, impacting the companies' messaging. Marketers grappled with the new setting by posting more about working remotely - showing that 15% of company posts had been about this topic from mid-to-late March.

There's an increased demand for more video content by users. With streaming channels like Netflix, Hulu, Amazon Prime, and Disney+ leading the pack, people are spending their time engaging with content about news, sports, and watching content creators.

It's important that you understand the impact of your words be it through a blog post or even as mere as a tweet, especially around this time. What you say and how you say matters now more than ever. People on Twitter are most interested in seeing brands take on supportive (45%), informative (44%), and positive (35%) tones on social media.

Digital Advertising – to Advertise or Not to Advertise?
An increase in media engagement isn't necessarily translating into increased ad revenues. A slower economy has resulted in the crashing of markets and supply chains, prompting advertisers to either pull or pause their ad spend. Hence in the digital marketing industry, the digital ad spending predictions have, therefore, declined from $712.02 billion to $691.7 billion across all forms of media.

The Interactive Advertising Bureau highlights that 1 in 4 media buyers and brands have postponed all advertising for the first half of 2020, while Facebook reported 89% of advertisers took action with their budget in response to the pandemic - stating "45% saying they have adjusted media type usage or shifted budget among media types".

March 2020's survey of internet users in 13 industries revealed that nearly 4 in 10 US respondents from ages 16 to 64 agreed that ads should continue per usual, and a similar share (35%) were neutral, compared with 28% who disagreed. The global results were also on par with those in the US, at 37%, 36%, and 27%, respectively.

A large share (54%) of the US marketers have said that ad digital content centering around travel shouldn't be near COVID-19-related content, nor should food and beverage or automotive. Whereas 55% of respondents agreed that health and pharmaceutical ads were okay.

While consumers don't expect brands to stop advertising, brands need to rethink their strategy calendar and respond to the changes appropriately. Campaigns that were planned pre-pandemic may no longer be considered appropriate now as consumers look for information about how the crisis is being tackled and how they can stay safe and other such content marketing examples related to the virus should be used. Likewise, in another March 2020 survey of ad trends, 77% of respondents said they wanted advertising to "talk about how the brand is helpful in the new everyday life," and 75% said the ads should "inform about (the brand's) efforts to face the situation."

It’s Time for Empathetic Employer Branding
Whether it's honoring healthcare workers, supporting local communities, or caring for the employees, messages that are putting people first are performing the best. Brands that convey empathy and togetherness in their messages are seeing the most engagement and rightfully so. As the audience connects more towards a human-touch, anything that has to do that reflects the current reality is being liked and encouraged.

Some of the COVID-19-related posts that companies are seeing more engagement with have often included keywords like, "health", "help", "people", "support", "employees", "social distancing", "health authorities", "public health", "take care", and "healthcare workers".

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