The Ugly Brand Truth of Social Media
Social media intelligence solution Unmetric has released research that shows how brands have embraced social media and the trends that have emerged over the past year.
Unmetric researched 27 U.S. CPG brands, presenting both household and personal care brands, including Bounty, Charmin, Dawn, Dial, Gillette, Huggies, Kleenex and many others.
With new social networks like Snapchat and some challenger social networks like Instagram, it might be tempting for some brands to try out these new platforms. However, with Facebook reporting 234 million active users in North America, and dominating other social networks in terms of user engagement, the focus for CPG brands for now should remain on Facebook. Twitter performs poorly in terms of engagement but finds a niche for answering customer questions.
+ Publishing Less Content: There was a 77 percent drop in content published on Facebook between 2013 and 2016. Dawn, for instance, virtually stopped publishing content on its Facebook page in 2016. Total posts were down by 98 percent in 2016 (11) compared to 2013 (474).
+ Interactions Per Post Increasing: While the amount of content published by CPG brands has fallen below 2013 levels, total engagement on brand content has increased significantly in terms of interactions per post. An influencer outreach campaign on Twitter in April 2016 helped Tide earn over 430 interactions per tweet - 630 percent higher than the average CPG brand.
+ Facebook Video Interactions: The study found that brands relied on videos to bring in the most interactions and accounted for 32 percent of the overall content shared on Facebook. Windex published the most shared video in the CPG sector - a video with 7,594 shares which was about a DIY snowglobe.
