How Do The Top Social Media Marketing Blogs Use Facebook

A few months back, Social Media Examiner revealed their picks for the top social media marketing blogs. Picked by a special jury and ranked by various factors, the blogs provide valuable advice to social media marketers, business and individuals alike.

This market audit is part of our market watch series, where we take a look at different industries and how brands and businesses perform on social media. Last month, we kicked things off with a meta study looking at how social media brands themselves use social media.

It’s only natural that now we take a look at the top SM marketing blogs. Of course, it should be noted that we have the utmost respect for our colleagues and that this audit is only performed to help individuals and businesses receive better insights on social media strategies and due to sheer curiosity of what works and doesn’t on social media.

Are the top blogs able to perform well on social media? That’s just what we are about to find out! Without further adieu, here are the top eight social media marketing blogs and their performance on Facebook.

Check the full market audit here.

The Top Social Media Blogs Market Audit

One of the first things you’d note is the fact that AgoraPulse, the focus of the audit and the top pick for a social media marketing blog, is not exactly performing up to the par with its competition on Facebook.

In fact, in the month of July, the brand managed to achieve a score of only 27 out of 100, placing them in the 7th position out of the eight examined blogs. Buffer, which is also a popular social media marketing tool, managed to ramp up the biggest score of the bunch, surpassing the second place with double the score of a total of 72 out of 100. The blogs by Amanda Webb and Socially Sorted took the 2nd and 3rd place respectively, while the social media marketing experts Sue B. Zimmerman, Peg Fitzpatrick and Dustin W. Scout tied up for the 4th, 5th and 6th spot with a score of 30 out of 100, with Mike Gingerich coming up the rear with a score of only 20 out of 100.

Things for AgoraPulse are additionally curious when taking a look at their Awareness chart for the month of July. The SMM blog did receive an audience growth of 2%, reaching 52,500 people.

However, their total engagement is surprisingly low at only 166 total engagements during the whole month. Of course, the consolation for this is that this is 3% increase compared to the previous month.

Low Market Share and Low ER for the Top SMM Blog

One of the first things that comes to mind when looking at such a low ER score is that probably the brand didn’t post as much on the social platform. Yet, this is not exactly the case. In fact, AgoraPulse shared as much as 20 posts during the course of the month, showing an active content posting strategy. Yet, the strategy didn’t exactly play out in their favor, as they’ve received an average of 0.02% ER on their posts.

Even though they had a small number of posts, their ER rates still paint a picture of the overall Facebook engagement in different industries. Out of 11 link posts, the social media blog has received only 0.01% ER, while both their photo and video posts have received 0.02% ER.

Growth in the Landscape and Sentiment Score of the top SMM Blogs

The state of the landscape is also rather surprising. The top 8 social media marketing blogs have a total market size of only 226,882 followers on Facebook.

The market has also seen a slow growth of only 2 percent in the month of July. Granted, this is rather understandable, having in mind the fact that Facebook growth is the slowest during the summer especially in the B2B sector.

When it comes to the top blog, AgoraPulse, it stands for 23% of the total size of the market with 17% faster growth than its competitors. Nevertheless, the blog did receive only 1% of the total engagement.

Its sentiment score of 63 is on the positive side, with the keyword bubble of customer responses flowing around the ‘great’ keyword. However, AgoraPulse is stomped by its competition and takes the 5th place in overall audience sentiment.

Unsurprisingly, the most familiar brand, Buffer, received the highest sentiment score as well with 94 out of 100.

Zimmerman and Fitzpatrick are also respected by their audiences with 75 and 74 respective sentiment scores in the month of July. Things are rather balanced for SociallySorted and Amanda Webb with 70 and 62 respective scores, while Stout and Gingerich are receiving a mixed response with 52 and 51 respective scores.

Top Likes and Highest Engagement Rates

The top posts reveal a similar picture. Buffer outshines all of its competitors, having the post with highest likes and highest engagement. What’s interesting though is that both posts reveal a nice picture of what a social media marketing strategy should be focused towards on Facebook.

The top likes posts is a community shared photo with 54,589% more likes than the average number of likes on posts from AgoraPulse. A bird-eye view of central park, the photo has little to nothing to do with social media management.

Nevertheless, this goes to show that generalized content among specialized content often performs better. While you should avoid saturating your page with general content to a point that your brand is not recognizable, having a social media break from promoting your brand is the right step forward.

Furthermore, the appreciation of content provided by the community can do wonders for your social media strategy on both Facebook and Instagram. First and foremost, it provides you with completely free content. However, it also increases the engagement of your audience and can help you build a new trend or a hashtag going, depending on the size of your brand and your overall ER.

The top video post is also not that surprising. A rather humanizing post that is humorous and presents a joke that compliments its brand, the Buffer video of a biker effortlessly running down its competition has performed the best out of all posts in the landscape. The post has received a total number of 757 shares and while its engagement is slightly lower than the aforementioned photo, it nonetheless managed to surpass its competition.

Granted, Buffer is a company, compared to most other social media blogs on the list, which are run by marketing experts and individuals. Nevertheless, it goes to show that those marketers while providing with amazing advice on how to run your social media strategy are not doing much to pump up their own Facebook social media game.

What can you take from this?

The market audit we performed on the top social media marketing blogs goes to show that appreciating your audience is always the best strategy.

Instead of constantly bombarding them with news, updates and content that is related to your brand and industry, try to appeal to their human side. Interact with them and take their feedback into account. What’s more, a few jokes here and there won’t harm! Quite the opposite, in fact!

A well placed video with a great caption can skyrocket your reach and ER to new heights. In addition, we’ve also learned that photos and videos still perform way better than links posts and that this trend is probably here to stay. With that in mind, make sure to schedule a few photos and videos to build up your audience towards a better Facebook marketing strategy.

And if you are not certain whether a strategy would work or not, you can always check on what your competitors are doing by performing a market audit via Locowise! Sign up for our 7-day free trial today!