Is Your Content Failing At The Creation Stage?
By all accounts, the content universe is expanding. Among the Fortune 500, brand activity across social media platforms has become nearly universal. By the end of 2014, 83% of the Fortune 500 had corporate Twitter accounts with a tweet in the past thirty days, up from 77% in 2013.
Facebook usage among the Fortune 500 jumped 10 percentage points year-over-year to 80%. And among top brands, maintaining a LinkedIn account is essentially a pre-requisite; 97% of the Fortune 500 have active LinkedIn profiles.
According the latest report from the Center of Marketing Research at the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth, the Fortune 500 also showed a clear interest in expanding their digital repertoire beyond the major platforms. Pinterest adoption among the Fortune 500 quadrupled to 36% year-over-year, while Instagram adoption doubled to 20%. Interestingly, Foursquare saw the greatest increase in adoption, rising from 9% to 51%.
Image via http://www.umassd.edu/
For a big-picture look at the increase in the output of brand-generated content, look no further than our own Content Marketing Paradox report. In our analysis of 8,800 B2B and B2C brands across 2013 and 2014, the overall output of content per brand per channel increased 78% across 2013 and 2014 alone!
Marketers clearly have their content firing on all cylinders. But is it working?
Take another look at the graph above. Across 2013 and 2014, as the volume of content per brand per channel (teal) trended upwards, content engagement (purple) tanked. Across the same time frame, the number of interactions per post per 1,000 followers actually fell by more than half, decreasing by 60%.
These results make one thing clear: distributing content is easier than creating content worth distributing.
With the help of new tools and technologies, marketers have consistently managed to pump out more and more content over time. The dwindling levels of engagement with marketing content, however, tells a different story. For marketers, these results raise a red flag about the quality of the growing outpouring of content.
With all the tools that make content distribution seamless, it’s time for marketers to engage in a content quality check. Consumers are drowning in content, and it is critical that companies create messages that cut through the clutter.
Content distribution is easy, but content creation is hard. At TrackMaven, we’re here to help. For proactive marketing tips for creating better content, check out our resources page for channel-specific reports and research.
To learn more about how TrackMaven customers are using competitive data to create better content, request a demo of our Competitive Intelligence platform, and a Maven will be in touch!
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
