Hundreds and thousands, pizza ovens and fried chicken galore: a high calorie February on the Zavy scoreboard

February. For marketers, it’s the month that goes far too quickly. In between summer holidays, public holidays and quick-fire lockdowns, executing carefully crafted marketing plans seemed impossible – there was so much to do and so little time left to do it in.

Understandably, in February we saw the Top 25 brands predominantly share social content that gives quick wins and high engagement. Posts about discounts, new products and of course, competitions.

Here are the top three posts of February: KFC Mates Zinger Meal (product, discount deal), Whittaker’s Hundreds and Thousands (new product announcement), New World’s Ooni Pizza Oven competition.

Let’s take a closer look:

Here’s the Zavy Map dashboard, which shows post-by-post diagnosis of the performance of each post made in Facebook. In this view, we’ve aggregated all the brands together and the dots represent the different types of content that the Top 25 shared on Facebook in February.

The Y axis shows shares and engagements, and the X axis shows overall sentiment. The size indicates the volume of likes the post has received.

The blue dot is competitions – high engagement, high sentiment – the red is brand, purple is product posts, green is posts about corporate social responsibility and the little yellow dot with the high sentiment at the bottom of the page is culturally relevant posts. 

You can see that the blue dot soars high above the rest. This is natural: there is a real economic incentive in commenting on a competition post.

It also pays to bring some positive sentiment into your competition comment – the more the entrant enacts loyalty and fandom, the more likely they may think they are of winning. Few people (although, unfortunately, they exist) are going to try to enter a competition by ragging on the brand and being negative in the comments.

So, although competitions get engagement, they can be a little empty.

Zavy’s research shows the most important metrics to track relate to engagement – positive comments and shares. The high the total volume of these achieved across your posts, the more significant the impact.

And while yes, comments are great – shares are better. That’s when someone advocates for your brand by passing your activity on to their networked acquaintances.

Let’s go back to our Map dashboard and see what happens when we remove comments from the mix. 

Suddenly, the red brand dot, purple product and green CSR dots don’t look so bad – and the blue competition dot – although still high, isn’t leading.

We need a good mix of content on social to do different jobs for us.

We need product posts and offers to spark excitement and get conversions, relevant competitions for spikes of engagement and reach, brand promotion to keep us salient, cultural activity and CSR to connect with our audiences and get some real two-way engagement.

So where would your dots sit on our map?

Taking the time to zoom out and look at the mix of content your brand is putting out on social and the kind of engagement it drives is useful. If your brand is relying a little too much on competitions, consider how you can weave more brand or CSR content into your social plans. Or if you’re not doing any at all – think about how impactful a well-calibrated competition could be.

Want to see for yourself? Get in touch with us here to book a demo.

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