Data-Driven Social Posts Deliver 91% Greater Reach, 25% Greater Engagement [Study]

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...

Pat Hong By Pat Hong from Linkdex. Join the discussion » 0 comments

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.

This arti­cle first appeared on the Linkdex blog.


Do you take a data-dri­ven approach to your social media mar­ket­ing? Is social media a valu­able chan­nel for your brand?

Pat Hong

Written by Pat Hong

Editor at Linkdex/Inked, Linkdex

Pat covers the SEO industry, digital marketing trends, and anything and everything around Linkdex. He also authors Linkdex's data analysis and reports, analysing the state of search in various industries.

Inked is published by Linkdex, the SEO platform of choice for professional marketers.

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