Brands have moved from looking at follower counts to focusing on interactions. The good news is that getting more interactions is pretty simple: Post more. The bad news: It takes a lot of people to do this well.
A new study from social CRM player Spredfast found that for each message that a brand posts on social media, it gets 400 interactions from consumers on average. The study, which looked at 154 companies with average social bases of 1.8 million, found top-performing brands are now publishing 4,900 messages on average (per quarter), with an average engagement of 2 million interactions.
“These messages, or social content, each provide new opportunities for audiences to engage with social brands,” said Jim Rudden, CMO of Spredfast. “While quantity doesn’t equal quality, our Social Engagement Index shows that as brands increase contributors, groups and activity, their external engagement rises disproportionally.”
Therein lies the rub. In order to do this well, brands need to hire real social teams, not just a fresh-out-of-school kid to “do the Facebook and the Twitter.” In fact, top-performing brands Spredfast studied — based on social structure, configuration and activity — have 29 people participating in social programs within the organization. Brands have moved beyond the time when one social chief or even a small social media team is expected to own all social activity.
When it comes to driving interactions, brands might be publishing too little on Facebook, it turns out. Spredfast’s brands published an average of 50 times per day on Twitter versus 16 times on Facebook. And yet, Facebook yielded 549 interactions per message compared to 60 per tweet.
“Creating a well-planned, well-managed program allows for companies to connect internal resources with social customers, coordinate internally to ensure the right messages are being distributed to the correct people and accounts and that all this can be pulled together in a meaningful way,” Rudden said.
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