The Sorry State of Social Media Engagement

Engagement is everything in social media marketing. Without engagement, algorithms won’t favor our content, and audiences won’t take actions to become customers. Thus, we would expect the biggest, best, most well-known brands in the world to expend serious effort and resources on building engagement.

How much engagement, as a percentage, would you guess the top brands earn on social media channels like Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter?

As part of our new whitepaper, Social Strategy Optimization, SHIFT examined the social engagement rates of top brands in B2B and B2C social media marketing. Let’s take a look at how brands are doing.

Methodology

SHIFT Communications extracted the social media engagement rates for 57 major B2B and B2C brands over a 12 week period from their respective Facebook pages. The brands were chosen by market cap and recognition. Engagement is defined as the combination of likes, comments, and shares. Engagement rate is defined as the total number of engagements divided by the number of Page Likes. No distinction or differentiation was made between paid and unpaid content.

B2C Brand Social Engagement

B2C brands overall exhibited declining engagement rates in the last 12 weeks:

We see an average engagement rate of 0.31% for major B2C brands. The only reason for such a significant spike at the end of July was due to the Olympics and heavy social advertising. Even still, out of 10,000 people, 31 of them will engage with a B2C brand.

B2B Brand Social Engagement

B2B brands fared less well than their B2C counterparts:

We see an average engagement rate of 0.12% for major B2B brands. Out of 10,000 people, 12 of them will engage with a B2B brand.

The Fortune 10

The Fortune 10 sits in the middle, as expected for a combination of B2B and B2C brands:

We see an average engagement rate of 0.22% for the Fortune 10.

Combined Perspective

When we stack up the different engagement rates, we see a similar story: all major brands, B2B or B2C, continue to experience declining engagement rates:

For organizations whose marketing is partially dependent on engagement, this is a significant problem.

Who’s “Winning” Engagement

Of the top brands, which are doing reasonably well with engagement?

We see organizations like Citi and Phillips 66 doing reasonably well, far better than their peers. Other major brands aren’t quite as fortunate.

How to Build Engagement

Engagement is vital, and many brands aren’t doing well at it. How are you doing at it? Do you wish you had better social media engagement?

In Social Strategy Optimization, you’ll learn the driving force behind social media engagement, as well as how to develop strategy, tactics, and execution to grow it. You’ll see the state of the art in engagement measurement using IBM Watson and learn what you’ll need to do to achieve your engagement and growth metrics.

Download your copy today!

Christopher S. Penn
Vice President, Marketing Technology