19 May Engagement Is The New Black | Social You Should Know
As many brands have discovered, building a social audience doesn’t mean that fans and followers will necessarily connect, or even that curated audiences are even the right target. Increasingly, fan and follower engagement is becoming a measurement of success, especially that of core brand target consumers. In this week’s edition of Social You Should Know, we’ll take a look at engagement and how brands are getting it.
Taco Bell Drives Engagement With New Instagram Ads.
In its first month of Instagram advertising, Taco Bell came close to doubling its following. Its Instagram ads also had much higher rates of engagement than some of its organic posts, some almost 400% higher according to a recent article in Adweek. Instagram ads also proved successful at reaching a target audience. Still, many “social native” brands like Supra Footwear are already very adept with Instagram organic engagement. It will be interesting to see how fan interaction rates fare as brands pile in.
Content Aggregation Can Increase Discovery and Engagement
A social management tactic on the rise is aggregation of content into interactive platforms like Rebelmouse and Tagboard. Aggregation platforms pull together various forms of social content to create a content experience for a brand, campaign or promotion. This approach offers several benefits including content search optimization and visualization which is shown to drive greater levels of engagement. This Tagboard for Elmer’s and Champions for Kids brings together promotional content for the brand’s #Bagitforward campaign into a single site. This content was produced over the past 4 years and provides ongoing engagement for Elmer’s in the key back to school timeframe in addition to building awareness for its cause marketing efforts.
For Top 50 brands, Google+ Posts Deliver Twice the Interaction of Twitter
Social engagement rates are fairly low for established platforms but still kick display engagement rates in the pants. A Nate Elliott blog post cites Q1 2014 Forrester Research that shows Google+ and Facebook with nearly identical interaction rates as a percentage of brand fans at .069% and .073% respectively. Twitter trailed both with a rate of .035%. Additionally, Nate’s story also references a Nielsen study that found that 22% of adults online visited Google+ in the past 60 days. As with all media, it’s more effective to target the consumer rather than the channel.
