World Cup’s Popularity and Three Other Social Media Insights

July 3, 2014FACEBOOK, SOCIAL MEDIA, TWITTER

It’s Friday and you know what that means! It’s Insight Day!

 

We run a lot of social media accounts here at One Twelfth. In the middle of creating compelling copy, adding templates to pictures, and pondering how we can get our audience to engage, we observe and research the statistics behind the posts.

 

We do it to get a grasp on factors that could potentially aid us in the future, and to remind us that there is an end-game in all of the Excel spreadsheets and Powerpoint presentations we construct during our content creation and ensuing research.

 

Thankfully, there is a method to the madness.

 

We create these insights not only as a reminder to us in the future, but to aid businesses in their approach to social media. Engagement and building an audience on Facebook or Twitter is a lot more difficult than it sounds, especially if you’re a business that isn’t nationally or internationally known.

 

It’s simple to create a page and then post, but that’s only the easy part. The difficult part arises when creating the posts, thinking of the ideal methods to get your page the recognition and awareness you think it deserves.

 

Well, One Twelfth is here to help. We have aggregated two weeks worth of insight and research and formulated four insights that will help aspiring social media managers build an audience, create reach, and obtain engagement.

1. Pictures over everything

 

If you’re going to make a post on Facebook or Twitter or any social media account, make it count.

 

Take the time to use some perspective and think what type of content is engaging?

 

Links? If you have an audience that has time to read, then links work well. But not everybody has the time to click on a link, be redirected to another website, and then read an entire article. It’s too time-consuming, especially on social media where most people simply want to observe and move on to the next piece of information.

 

A status that’s nothing more than words? You can do better than that. Unless you’re already established and have built up an audience that understands your tone and voice, then making a post that’s just a statement is going to be swept up in the clutter on a Twitter/Facebook timeline.

 

If you want to engage and begin building an audience, then you need to attract an audience. You need to make posts that scream, “Look over here!” when people are scrolling through whatever social media page they’re on.

 

What better way to attract attention than a post that’s larger than others and is more visually appealing than a picture? Going by our insights for the past week, not much.

 

Since we were too busy to put out our insights for last week, we’ll use the past two weeks as our sample size.

 

In terms of reach, the seven pictures we posted had an average reach of 82 people, compared to a reach of almost 77 people for seven links. Three of the four top performers, in terms of reach, featured pictures.

 

The difference is staggering when it comes to clicks. While we had an average of 8.1 clicks for pictures, we only had an average of 5.8 clicks for links, and that’s actually inflated from one anomaly that did almost twice as well as any other linked post.

 

Five of the seven posts with links hardly registered any clicks at all. When it came down to it, people were far more compelled to click on an engaging picture, rather than a link that would distract a user from their scrolling on social media.

 

2. People read posts when the sun is up, not when it’s coming up.

 

Judging by how one of our accounts performed, our audience did not treat the page like they would a newspaper.

 

There are two significant rises that took place in reach. One occurred between 6am and 9am, when Facebook users likely opened up the app after waking up to recall everything they missed in the middle of the night.

 

Two occurs between 9am and noon, when Facebook users are likely getting to work and reading either before they begin their work responsibilities, or procrastinating their responsibilities until later in the day.

 

Now comes the intriguing part of our insights.

 

Our reach was at its best in the mid-afternoon. Granted that most people are awake and on a computer already, but wouldn’t you suspect that work would get in the way?

 

It’s at noon when the reach begins to level out, before it reaches its peak mid-afternoon between 1 and 3pm. Once 3pm hits, and Facebook users are reaching the end of their work-day, the reach begins to decline before almost bottoming out at 8pm.

 

Oddly enough, we experienced an increase in reach from 8pm to 10pm that was almost on par with the increase in reach between 11am and noon. Our guess is Facebook users are winding down after work, have already had dinner, and are on Facebook recapping anything they missed in between driving home from work and eating.

 

Once we get past 10pm, however, there’s a steep decline, which is to be expected.

 

The results were fairly predictable (there’s a rise in reach between 6am and noon, users aren’t on Facebook in the middle of the night), but it was interesting to see that our reach was at its greatest in the mid-afternoon, and continued for about two hours, when we expected a dropoff.

 

3. Social media and the World Cup, like hand in glove.

 

As you can guess, the 2014 World Cup is doing fairly well in social media.

 

It’s certainly not limited to the United States, either, as the whole world is taking part in a monumental Twitter/Facebook movement that is eclipsing some of the country’s most talked about sporting events.

 

In fact, “in the first week alone, Facebook reported more interactions about the tournament than it had for the Sochi Olympics, Super Bowl and Academy Awards combined.”

 

Given that the Winter Olympics don’t perform as well as the Summer Olympics, and the past Super Bowl was a blowout, it still remains to be said that the World Cup’s influence on the global community has been enormous, especially on social media.

 

Although the Super Bowl still holds the 2014 record for most tweets about a single event, 25 million in all, the World Cup trounced the Super Bowl’s previous record of the most tweeted about moment.

 

Chilean defender Gonzalo Jara’s penalty shot that ricocheted off the post to send Brazil to the next round generated almost 389,000 tweets, which bested the 382,000 tweets that erupted following Percy Harvin’s kickoff return for a touchdown in the Super Bowl.

 

The effects are seen on a smaller scale, as well.

 

On one page we run the account of, the most liked post from the past month featured support for Argentina during their recent 1-0 win over Switzerland.

 

On One Twelfth’s Facebook account, aside from the posts that had a great deal of success that we’ll soon get into, one of the top performers was a picture of James Rodriguez during Colombia’s win over Uruguay.

 

If there’s a major event occurring, take advantage! It doesn’t matter if you’re one of a few hundred thousands tweets or Facebook posts, everybody’s talking about that event and they want to see everyone else’s opinion. You never know if your post is going to be the one that catches fire and draws attention to your page.

 

Significant moments, too, are also a great time to make a post. Take Luis Suarez’s bite on an opponent, for example. Instead of just observing, we capitalized by conjuring up a post shortly after the moment occurred and got 21 likes, one share, and three comments out of it.

 

Timing is key, though! Don’t post too quick and risk putting out an idea that wasn’t well thought out, but don’t post too late when everyone has already moved on.

 

4. People love a good personality

Have you ever driven past a bunch of cops or firefighters congregated together in discussion and wonder to yourself, “I really wish I knew what they were talking about”?

 

Similar respects can be applied to Facebook, where the most popular business pages are the ones that have personality and offer first-hand looks into what their employees do.

 

People are interested in the lives of others. It makes them wonder what kind of tasks and lives they’d see on a daily basis if they chose a different path in life.

 

If you have own a small business and want to create engaging content for your Facebook page, there’s one thing that will draw in likes every time: Transparency.

 

Yes, readers love it when they can get an insider look at what you do. People are genuinely interested in what takes place behind a business, and there’s no more effective way than taking a picture either of your employees at work or things that people will find interesting about your job.

 

We’re a marketing company, so you’d assume posting links relaying a reader to an interesting story about marketing would have some success, right? Not always.

 

What Facebook posts always work for us? Pictures of One Twelfth employees and their daily regiments as a One Twelfth employee.

 

It doesn’t matter what we’re doing either. We generated a combined 23 likes and two comments between a picture of us working with clients and a picture of us out at lunch.

 

Even a scenic picture of where I park everyday, which is on Biscayne Bay, generated more likes than any of the links we send out. Our audience liked it not just because it was a nice picture, but because they got an inside look at what the person behind the screen does.

 

Think about what interests you if you’re scrolling away on Facebook. If an engineering company posts a link to an article one day, and posts a picture of engineers at work another day, which would you be compelled to click on and like?

 

It’s not just visually appealing, it’s engaging, fun, and allows your audience to see what the daily life of an engineer or copywriter or electrician or whatever your profession is like.

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