Social Performance Measurement For Agencies
The Meta Study: How Social Media Platforms Do Social Media Marketing
Ivan Ivanov posted on 25 July 2017
Last week we introduced a new feature to our platform. For those unaware, Market Audits on Locowise allow you to easily perform an audit of a brand and compare the results with the competitors.
Providing the information in easily editable PPT presentations and PDF for your convenience, the Market Audit is an easy way to receive insights on a social media marketing strategy when pitching a prospect or when analysing a market you’re not familiar with.
It takes two minutes build a Market Audit and you don’t even need the admin access to any of the social profiles you analyse.
Seeking to utilize this amazing feature ourselves, we decided to start a new blog series called Market Watch. In the new series, we are going to compare some of the top brands on social media in an array of industries and try to see what can be learned from their performance and statistics.
And what better way to start off the series than taking a look at how social media platform brands themselves use the top platforms. Without further adieu, let’s get started.
To perform our Market Audits, we decided to look at the top five social media platforms and their brand activity on social media. Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, YouTube and LinkedIn are the most common networks used by both individuals and marketers alike. Having brands of their own, all five platforms have for the most part active Facebook, Instagram and Twitter profiles.
With this in mind, we conducted our Market Audit on how the top five social media brands have used the top three platforms in the month of June 2017. We ran three Market Audit reports.
One for their activity on Facebook, one for their activity on Twitter and one for their activity on Instagram. Click on the links to view the actual Market Audit reports as they come directly from Locowise or continue reading for some of our analysis.
Let’s see if their social media game is as effective and popular as their respective platforms.
On Facebook Facebook published only 1% of the posts in this landscape, but received 82% of all the engagement
Starting with our Facebook Market Audit, the results weren’t that surprising. Out of the five brands, Mark Zuckerberg’s network took the first spot in overall SMM (Social Media Marketing) in June with a total brand score of 73.
Brand Score is our proprietary Locowise score that gives you an instant and accurate measurement of how successful any brand is in the landscape is. We focus on the leading indicators of a high performing effort and give a score from 0 to 100.
What’s surprising here is that despite the growing popularity in the engagement and user base Instagram has seen in the past few months, the photo sharing network was surpassed by all the competitors. LinkedIn and Twitter take second and third place respectively with one point difference, with YouTube taking the fourth spot with a score of 62 points.
Facebook also holds the first spot in the market share value on its own platform with 64% of the total audience of near 300 million followers. The landscape saw a growth of 0.58% as a whole in June, but Facebook grew 41% slower in the month of June than the other four social platforms.
Surprisingly, Facebook stood for only 1% of all the new posts posted by the five brands in June. Unlike its competitors, the social network posted only about once per week, while its competitors post daily.
Of course, that didn’t stop them from gaining an 82% share of the total engagement in this landscape. This is primarily due to the top post boasting as much as 11+ million views, 836k likes, 9.4k comments and 20k shares.
It was a video of Mark Zuckerberg speaking at the first ever Facebook Communities Summit.
In comparison, the top shared post from the competitors was LinkedIn’s video on why you should leave your phone alone when preparing for an interview posted on the 7th June with almost 3 million views, 8.6k likes, 648 comments and 3.6k shares.
People on Facebook like Twitter more than Facebook
What’s even more interesting is that the sentiment of the audience on Facebook seems to be extremely positive towards Twitter and not so much towards Facebook.
In fact, the social network took the third place in our Sentiment Score ranking. Among the most popular words used as a response to the Facebook brand were the following.
Account
Page
User
Problem
Pride
It would seem that Facebook users use the Facebook page to complain about problems and issues they have with their Facebook accounts.
This is extremely surprising compared to the results from our Instagram and Twitter Market Audits.
In fact, on Twitter, Twitter had a sentiment score of only 11 points. The obvious conclusion being that people on Facebook like Twitter more than Facebook and even more so, they express their love for Twitter on Facebook far more than they do on the short-post blogging platform itself.
This, however, doesn’t hold true for Instagram. In fact, the photo sharing platform boasts the highest sentiment score on its own platform. This can easily be seen from the top words expressed by its audience as well. People described the posts from the brand as cute, nice, love, beautiful and amazing.
People Use Twitter for News, Facebook for Conversation and Instagram for Photos
In most of our social media guides, we express the opinion that social media marketers should focus on how people use each respective platform. While all three platforms have things in common, the way they are used by everyone is completely different. This, of course, is mostly logical. But the stats that back up the claim are even more surprising.
In fact, in the three Market Audits we performed there was a huge difference between the top engaging keywords on each platform.
On Facebook, the top keywords that worked for its four competitors included career, way, indoors, adult. All four words express natural conversation and items people cared about.
At the same time, on Twitter, the top keywords were OneLoveManchester, @quavostuntin, @LiamPayne and OneLoveM. All items were related to the current events that happened throughout the month of June.
At the same time, the keywords that worked for Instagram on the photo sharing platform included WHPcolorstudy, Photo, Color and no person, with all those terms being closely related to photography.
The Top Post on Instagram has 1,653,401 Likes, the Top Twitter Post has only 34,342 Likes
It’s not surprising that each brand holds the biggest market share on their respective platforms. As it can be seen from the screenshots from the Market Audit, Facebook, Instagram and Twitter have a market share on their platforms of 64%, 96% and 33% respectively.
What we find to be interesting is that while the five major social platforms are keen on using both Facebook and Twitter, they still don’t seem to be aware of how to properly use Instagram.
What’s even more surprising is that despite the 96% percent of the audience on the photo sharing platform belonging to the brand itself, Instagram’s total market share size still comes in second with 235,163,512 followers, followed by the market share of Twitter of 184,617,234 followers.
The top post on the photo sharing network also comes from their brand profile. Yet, while the total market share on Instagram among the five social media brands is around 10% smaller than the total market share of the same brands on Facebook, the top post on the photo sharing platform in the market in June has received almost 100% more engagement.
What Can We Conclude from These Results
If you use Locowise or have been reading our blog for a short while, you are probably aware that we often post updates on how people use the platform and the total numbers and statistics related to those platforms.
With this in mind, you might have also noticed that for the past couple of months, Facebook’s engagement is going down, while Instagram is gaining users faster than ever.
That being said, it’s easy to see that we might be experiencing a cultural shift towards the diversification of social platforms. Yes, people still use Facebook, but while a few years back it was the prime network for news and photo sharing, today it is not.
Today, the social network is mostly used in an array of ways related to personal matters. At the same time, Instagram has turned into the prime place for photo sharing, while Twitter is the platform of choice for news and current events.
All this holds true for the five brands of the top social media platforms as well. But what the Market Audit report shows is that while all brands implement great strategies on Facebook and Twitter, Instagram tends to be neglected.
In fact, as aforementioned, while it has the second biggest market share in terms of the combined audience of these 5 brands and the top engagement rates, the photo sharing platform achieves all that primarily with its own brand. Is this true for your market as well?
Want to find out whether your competitors are still not implementing proper SMM strategies? Want to receive all the information in a coherent manner that is easily shareable and professionally looking? Check out our new and exciting Market Audit feature today! Of course, don’t forget that it is only one of the many features we provide to our users. Learn more here and subscribe for a full 7-day free trial of Locowise today!
