How promotion affects engagement for SA brands on Facebook

Jenna Bloch

The ideal situation is that their target market who wants to be in contact is finding them directly, the challenge is that the converse is also true, many customers want to switch off and don’t want interaction with a brand. Welcome social advertising in the way of content promotion. Content promotion allows a brand to boost their content to individuals who make up their target market but have not necessarily subscribed to follow them. Content promotion also helps a brand to ensure that their content pieces for engagement are shown in the newsfeed of those subscribed to their pages, essentially it ensures that they are not ignored in all the noise that is out there on social media.

To see how much of an impact promotion has on engagement we had a look at the top 10 South African insurance brands on Facebook and compared the levels of engagement on organic versus promoted posts during the period of Q3 2016.

The 10 brands analysed included:

• 1st for Women Insurance

• Budget Insurance
• Discovery Insure
• Hollard
• King Price Insurance
• MiWay
• OUTSurance
• Old Mutual (SA)
• Prime Meridian Direct

• Santam Insurance

To put everything in context here is a short summary of the performance of these Facebook pages:

• With over 118,355 fans Old Mutual (SA) has the highest fan base

• Santam Insurance who has 31,858 fans had the highest percentage of People Talking About Them (PTAT) 17.46%, followed behind closely by Old Mutual with 13%
• Overall Old Mutual (SA) published the highest amount of brand posts (138) while OUTsurance published the least amount of posts (18).

• Even though Santam Insurance only posted 31 posts they have the highest engagement score for the period. Old Mutual was a very close second.

The graph below shows the how much engagement each brand received from their posts published to Facebook.

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Although Old Mutual (SA) and King Price had almost the same amount of published posts, Old Mutual (SA) almost had double the amount of engagement. It is interesting for us to compare the type of post Santam had versus Old Mutual (SA) and which insurer promoted more posts that may have resulted in the high engagement rates.

More often than not when a brand receives high levels of engagement with minimal amount of posts, one tends to think that this was due to those posts being promoted. Nowadays in order to get your posts noticed a brand needs to invest in some degree of promotion.

The graph below shows you what portion of posts each brand promoted.

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Below you can see that when it comes to engagement King Price had the highest engagement on promoted posts while Santam had the highest engagement on organic posts, followed by Old Mutual SA.

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It is important to note that even though Santam had the highest organic engagement it was their paid posts resulted in much higher levels of engagement. This shows that in order to get the most out of your posts in terms of engagement, you do need to invest in promotion.

From the graph above you can see that MiWay and Prime Meridian Direct received minimal engagement from their organic posts, they were the only insurers who did not invest in promoted posts. Hollard and Budget Insurance both only published a few more posts than MiWay and Prime Meridian Direct, but received substantial amounts of engagement in comparison due to their promoted posts.

The graph below depicts the percentage change in a brand’s overall engagement score when they promote a percentage of their posts.

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From this graph we can see that Hollard received the greatest surge in engagement by promoting published posts. 62.9% of Hollard’s posts were promoted, resulting in an 820% increase in engagement.

Overall these were the most engaging brand posts over the three-month period.

King Price’s top content was a video about Braai Day that was funny and building hype around the event. It was shared numerous times; it is easy to see how it received a high engagement score. Both Santam and Old Mutual (SA) received high engagement rates on specific campaigns that they were running. Specifically, Old Mutual’s post with the second highest rate of engagement was in reference to a competition.

The Santam posts were all themed to the same campaign where they asked fans to provide their ideas to make South Africa a safer place.

To ensure that content is engaging and that it receives the necessary reach to get your brand’s message across be certain that you are providing your target audience with the information or more importantly the entertainment that they want to receive. By promoting a post, you are able give your campaign some leverage and improve engagement rates. Often a small investment can go a long way.

Download the full Top 10 Insurance Brands on Facebook in South Africa report to view a full list of stats for the insurance industry during the third quarter of 2016.

This report was compiled using Unmetric, a social media analytics tool that connects with all major social networks, offers automated reporting and robust campaign intelligence, yet is simple and easy to use. The perfect tool for viewing all your social media analytics in one place.