Social media mar­ket­ing can play an impor­tant part in many brands’ con­sumer pur­chase fun­nels. How can brands uti­lize data to direct and opti­mize their social media mar­ket­ing efforts?

Social media mar­ket­ing SaaS provider SocialFlow has released a defin­i­tive new report ana­lyz­ing trends from a data­base of more that 1.6 mil­lion organ­ic social posts from lead­ing pub­lish­ers, mar­keters, and agen­cies.

One of the key find­ings of the report has revealed that imple­ment­ing a data-dri­ven approach to social media mar­ket­ing deliv­ers 91 per­cent greater reach, and 25 per­cent greater engage­ment, than a sched­ule based approach.

The report rep­re­sents one of the largest and most reveal­ing social media stud­ies in recent years, par­tic­u­lar­ly from a brand mar­ket­ing per­spec­tive. The 1.6 mil­lion posts, pub­lished through Face­book, Twit­ter, and Google+ between April and July of this year, reached more than 361 mil­lion unique users and gen­er­at­ed near­ly 1.5 bil­lion social actions.

Key Findings

1. Data-Driven Posts Deliver 91% Greater Reach, 25% Greater Engagement Than Scheduled Posts

Imple­ment­ing a data-dri­ven approach to social has a huge­ly pos­i­tive effect on return and engage­ment, accord­ing to the report. Being data-dri­ven means uti­liz­ing pre­dic­tive algo­rithms to accu­rate­ly pre­dict the opti­mum time and fre­quen­cy to post con­tent.

Often, as Guy Kawasa­ki has voiced, it can be ben­e­fi­cial to strate­gi­cal­ly post the same con­tent on social media three or four times a day (why set­tle for 600 inter­ac­tions, when you can have 2,400?).

Over­all, it has two ben­e­fits for a brand’s social strat­e­gy. Brands are able to:

• Scale their efforts with­out neg­a­tive­ly impact­ing avail­able resources.
• Use the increased con­tent to bet­ter inform teams of audi­ence behav­ior and engage­ment lev­els, which allows them to opti­mize future cam­paigns.

2. 1% of Organic Social Posts Creates 99% of the Engagement

The data indi­cates a clas­sic ‘long tail’ dis­tri­b­u­tion for engage­ment lev­els. SocialFlow’s report indi­cates that the ‘head’, or lead­ing 1 per­cent of posts, is dom­i­nat­ed by Media and Enter­tain­ment com­pa­nies.

Real­is­ti­cal­ly it’s dif­fi­cult or impos­si­ble for brand mar­keters to expect sim­i­lar lev­els of engage­ment for their con­tent as break­ing news and enter­tain­ment sto­ries, so a sound approach to social for brands should be based around build­ing con­sis­tent, small wins, with­in the long tail.

3. Real-Time Posts Most Benefit Media and Entertainment Companies

The study also revealed that for Media and Enter­tain­ment com­pa­nies (the main pro­duc­ers of real-time posts), while only 10 per­cent of real-time posts out­per­formed data-dri­ven posts, that 10 per­cent of high per­form­ing posts gen­er­at­ed 90 per­cent of all total engage­ment.

Real-time posts from tech­nol­o­gy, retail, and oth­er ver­ti­cals did­n’t expe­ri­ence any such ben­e­fit to real-time posts. Instead, brand mar­keters expe­ri­ence a 55 per­cent greater lev­el of engage­ment from data-dri­ven posts.

Tech­nol­o­gy and retail com­pa­nies accord­ing­ly have adopt­ed data-dri­ven strate­gies more so than oth­er ver­ti­cals, pub­lish­ing data-dri­ven posts 91.6 per­cent of the time.

Top 3 Takeaways

SocialFlow sum­ma­rized three take­aways for brand mar­keters look­ing to improve social per­for­mance based on the insights in the study:

1. Sched­ul­ing social posts is an inef­fec­tive use of your con­tent.
2. Unless you’re a media or enter­tain­ment com­pa­ny, real-time post­ing will like­ly be less effec­tive than data-dri­ven opti­miza­tion.
3. Organ­ic social pub­lish­ing should be as data-dri­ven as the rest of your mar­ket­ing.