For the last seven years, much of its staff and stakeholders have spent a significant part of their time working to create Social Media Trends<\/em>, a massive report describing the current state of online interactions and activity on social media.<\/p>\n Each year’s efforts require roughly eight months of research, from the first “let’s do this” meeting to the final “look at what we did” celebration. Researchers typically interview tech leaders and include opinions and data from thousands of users around the world.<\/p>\n The result is a comprehensive ebook that’s recognized as the state of the art by the social media community. It’s generally considered to be easy to read as well as visually stunning. It must be downloaded, an action that Hootsuite’s marketers use to track who is interested and perhaps invite them to engage with other company content.<\/p>\n So, how can this labor of love \u2013 but still a labor — be improved? Rock Content<\/strong> helped Hootsuite find a way.<\/p>\n This Thursday, I co-presented at Content Marketing Institute’s Demand Generation Summit session with Lisa Vecchio, Hootsuite’s Director of Global Campaigns. We shared with the event audience the brand new approach taken for the annual Social Media Trends 2025<\/em><\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n We discussed how Rock Content<\/strong>‘s Ion platform<\/a> brought a brand new experience to the readers of this year’s report. Taking advantage of the new interactive format, the user could navigate through the featured trends like ROI, social commerce, and customer experience, with videos, case studies and quizzes that invited them to interact with the content.<\/p>\n The experience also includes an ungated ebook that users can download, but Hootsuite invested in creating more in-depth and gated content like webinars, info sheets and playbooks, bringing tips on how marketers can succeed in each one of the trends the report featured. That’s where Hootsuite gained its downloads (and qualified leads!). The experience was a balanced mix of un-gated and gated content. <\/p>\n You might ask: “If I explain each trend and make ungated content available, I won’t generate any leads”. Hootsuite’s experience demonstrated that this is a clear marketing myth.<\/p>\n The shift to an interactive experience ultimately led to higher engagement, as information was easier for consumers to access, including most of the information being available online, rather than through a massive file download. <\/p>\n Talking about general numbers: unique traffic visiting these pages increased 34% as well as time on that page (up 119%), while the number of downloads grew by more than 30%.<\/strong><\/p>\n I’ll go deeper to explain the strategy behind it.<\/p>\n Hootsuite began its efforts with the Social Media Trends<\/em> report seven years ago, when marketing tech and customer behavior were slightly different than today.<\/p>\n Audience demands have definitely shifted since then, and now there\u2019s this near-constant expectation for immediate access and personalization. Back in 2018, even 2019, users might have tolerated a lengthy download for a good white paper. Try that in 2025 and people are probably bouncing in less than ten seconds. There\u2019s this intuition now\u2014call it collective digital impatience\u2014that stale formats and slow-loading or locked content just don\u2019t fly. Once users realize they\u2019re being nudged into a funnel, half of them just close the tab. Hard to blame them.<\/p>\n Consumer preferences are always shifting, as are the tools that measure how well marketers are able to reach clients and encourage them to take action.<\/p>\n When the Social Media Trends<\/em> report was launched for the first time, the average Hootsuite user may have had more time to consume content, and more importantly, more patience.<\/p>\n But with the proliferation of online content customers have evolved and expect more. Any obstacle or unexpected user experience difficulty, like poor user interfaces or bad content can drive people to move on to other content or product options.<\/p>\n Sometimes, even the distinction between \u201cgated\u201d and \u201cungated\u201d is more subtle than it sounds. People will fill out a form if they honestly believe they\u2019re getting something substantial in return, and it isn\u2019t just the same blog post dressed up as a PDF. So it\u2019s not always about throwing open the gates and giving away everything, but about earning enough trust in those first few moments that they want to keep going. Some marketers try to dance around this with clever widgets or \u201cinstant unlocks\u201d\u2014but let\u2019s be real, users catch on fast. Authenticity tends to work better, at least in the long run.<\/p>\n Much of the online advertising in the past worked by interrupting consumers and getting their attention with something bright and shiny. Today that type of experience isn’t accepted anymore and being interrupted by a brand can cause a negative experience and sentiment<\/strong>. The point is not that we should stop digital advertising; but we need to change the approach, conveying emotions and adding personalisation<\/p>\n According to Millward Brown, 82% of the people skip ads as much as possible<\/a>, and 27% use ad blockers<\/a> to not see ads on desktop and mobile, an eMarketer study shows.<\/p>\n Dealing with unwanted content experiences can go beyond abandoning a shopping cart or closing a survey midway through. It can trigger extreme behaviors, such as canceling a subscription or posting a negative comment on social media.<\/p>\n Since clients expect good content experiences, businesses must adapt to the consumers’ changing behavior. It means that marketers need to focus on designing better experiences, and making sure each piece of content is a meaningful part of the whole experience<\/strong>.<\/p>\n Content experiences are made of several pieces of content spanning across all stages of the buyer journey, with the goal of driving customers toward activation. Each piece of content can be consumed individually or as a single element of a more complex journey. For this reason the full content experience is greater than its individual components.<\/p>\n As marketers, we can un-gate the content and make their access as easy as possible for the public. This goes against what’s considered a common practice in digital Marketing: requesting consumer information on every page or requiring registration before allowing people to access certain content, even the free one.<\/p>\n But, as demonstrated by Hootsuite’s case, when you un-gate and make use of content experiences across the full journey, people will engage more<\/strong> and will provide the first-party information that you need to achieve your Marketing goals. <\/p>\n![\"\"\/](\"https:\/\/lh6.googleusercontent.com\/MW5rbE_pfVaMjHIdshLl5c1Fn26ZzhKetVA7LVd115HpnKEpeE3L90Sr4eSFIk5zgnunWXC5UnhNDi5ZByVmhlCjFeieR-cZvuiGQfy5TWyjl64YtLQ3ZxUc_6zSSgdq3qCr7n8TRNDASxTeCQ\")
Un-gate your content<\/h2>\n