Your Social Content Is Failing. So Now What?
According to Social Media Examiner’s 2014 Social Media Marketing Industry Report, 97% of marketers engage in social media marketing, and 92% of marketers consider social media important to their businesses. But is social media content effective?
Based on our analysis of 13.8 Million pieces of marketing content, the answer is resoundingly, “No.”
We analyzed the effectiveness of marketing content from 8,800 B2B and B2C brands posted across Twitter, LinkedIn, Pinterest, Facebook, and Instagram over a 24-month period. Across the board, the data show that engagement with brand-generated social media content is declining.
Take a look at the graph below, which shows the interactions per post per 1,000 followers across Twitter, LinkedIn, Pinterest, and Facebook by month.
All of the social networks are seeing lower engagement ratios now than in the past.
LinkedIn’s engagement ratio peaked in May 2014. Twitter’s peaked in March 2014, while Pinterest’s peaked in October 2013 (the first month for which we have a rich Pinterest data set). All have since declined.
Facebook saw a particularly dramatic drop in its engagement ratio across 2013 and 2014. Recently, Facebook’s engagement ratio is stabilizing and slowly rising, but remains far below where it was at the start of 2013.
Even on Instagram — a network which boasts supercharged engagement levels — the ratio of interactions with brand-generated Instagram content is plummeting. Take a look at the graph below, which shows the interactions per post per 1,000 followers by month.
The engagement ratio for both Instagram pictures and Instagram videos peaked in December 2013 and February 2014, respectively, and are since on a steady decline.
Why Is A Majority Of Social Media Content Failing?
The forces contributing to the declining impact of marketing content are myriad: multi-channel marketing has become the norm rather than the exception, and our increasing ability to distribute content at scale means a larger glut of content is reaching audiences faster than ever before.
Marketers have certainly gotten good at distributing content — but how good is the content being distributed? According to our research, most content fails before it ever gets distributed. Most content fails at the content creation stage.
Good content can survive bad distribution, but smart distribution can’t save bad content. As Twitter’s director of brand strategy, Ross Hoffman, told The Wall Street Journal in an interview on the value of a brand’s social media audience, “The onus of good content is on the marketer.”
DOWNLOAD OUR FULL REPORT TODAY to see how brands are winning and losing the content marketing battles on different channels, and learn how the best marketers rise above the noise with smart content.
Kara Burney is the Content Marketing Maven at TrackMaven, the Competitive Intelligence platform for Digital Marketers. Have content marketing questions or topics you'd like covered on the TrackMaven blog? Tweet her your ideas! See more of Kara's posts
