When working with clients to build effective social media campaigns, and the strategies for their success we always start from the back by asking what is the activation that is needed for the campaign to be a success. When we determine the act that a client needs to complete then it is far easier to develop the campaigns that will allow for success, and then thru the monitoring of the actions taken we fine tune the campaign to constantly be striving for improved results.
Likewise we always ask does this new Social Media Trend have the capacity to connect with the consumer in an effective way. If the consumer is using this social media experience to connect with the companies and brands it buy’s then fine, but more often you find that there is no connection, and in reality the only time they engage in active social behavior with a brand is when they have something negative to say.
So, before developing and entering into any social strategy you always need to be investigating and asking your consumers how will they benefit from engaging in this activity, and can we craft a campaign that actually activates a behavior that we desire as a marketer.
This research shows that 99% of all organic social posts create almost no engagement with the brand…so know why your doing the campaigns and how your going to drive the actions that will make it successful before you launch. If your relying on organic social media to drive your results you will need to know how to activate the behavior that will drive this action.
Study shows 99% of organic social posts create almost no engagement
Social media optimization platform SocialFlow conducted the study between April 1 and July 31. In total, the organic social posts it analyzed reached more than 361 million unique users and generated nearly 1.5 billion social actions.
Of course, SocialFlow is an interested observer and the data used to create the study does only take into consideration tweets, status updates, and social output sent through their platform.
Businesses should not jump to the conclusion that social media marketing isn’t working, however. As with marketing to the “long tail,” businesses that do moderately well with social posts could get great results, and companies should not be put off by the findings, says SocialFlow CEO Jim Anderson.
“The massive scale of the most successful one percent of posts makes everything else look small by comparison,” Anderson told me. “To use a television analogy, most every show’s ratings look weak if you compare them to the Super Bowl. But that doesn’t mean that everyone else should just give up on creating great programming. And the same is true with social.”
In Internet community analysis the “1 percent rule” is nothing new. That concept, however, is usually referred to when discussing content creation. The rule states that for any given community, 1 percent of the members actively create new content. You may have also heard of other variants, such as the “90–9–1 principle,” which comes up when you’re talking about wikis, forums, and other collaborative groups; 90 percent of community members read the content, 9 percent edit it, and 1 percent actively create it.
SocialFlow‘s study enables us to apply the 1 percent rule in an alternate sense, in that only 1 percent of social content creators are seeing any kind of response or action from their output. This seems to fly in the face of the 90-9-1 principal, which suggests that 9 percent of the audience should be actively participating with the content.
This may be due to the sheer amount of social output being generated and the speed with which posts disappear from our feeds and streams. I wondered if that is why key Internet influencers, such as Guy Kawasaki, post the same content four times per day.
“Repeat posting can be quite effective, but you need very different strategies for Facebook and Twitter,” Anderson said. “That’s one reason why we have ‘content recycling’ as an area for future study; there are some really interesting insights to be gleaned here.”
The study also delves into the difference in engagement between real-time updates, scheduled posts, and data-driven output.
In the report, real-time updates performed well in the media and entertainment industries, where being up-to-date and reactive are of the highest importance. Real-time output didn’t fare well within the technology, retail, fashion, health care and nonprofit verticals, who see better results when using scheduled or data-driven posts.
Data-driven output — posts whose time of publication is determined by predictive algorithms — was shown to create 91 percent greater reach and 25 percent greater engagement than scheduled posts.
Scheduled posts have been a topic of conversation since the dawn of social media marketing. With the advent of tools like Buffer, Hootsuite, Hubspot, Beatrix, and the recent pivot in Klout’s focus towards scheduling, a number of data scientists and commentators have attempted to determine the “best times” to post updates on various social platforms. Dozens of articles, infographics, presentations, and webinars are dedicated to the subject of social output timing.
Anderson believes these findings are creating their own new set of issues.
“Posting at the recommended time has a lot of problems,” Anderson said. “First, the recommendation is based on one data set, which is usually pretty small and may bear no resemblance to your specific audience. Second, if there was such a thing as an ‘ideal’ time, and everyone then adjusted their posts to go out at that time, it would no longer be ideal.”
The implications from the report, available to read in full from their website, do raise some interesting questions for the future of scheduled posts and whether the next wave of social media marketing solutions should be focusing more on truly predictive, data-driven algorithms.
Moreover, the study highlights a potential issue with the current state of B2C and B2B social posting; the sheer amount of one-way content being broadcast via company and organization feeds. If the 90-9-1 principle is to apply in the future to social platforms as it does to wikis and other Internet communities, businesses may get better results — within the still substantial long tail of social media — via output that promotes real conversations or creates opinion.
TPG Social Media