As several media outlets reported, the Trump campaign focused heavily on door-knocking in key swing states despite COVID-19 case surges in many of those same states. Hundreds of thousands of doors were knocked on per day by Trump field supporters on the ground. The Biden campaign mostly ceased its ground campaign in contrast and diverted its resources heavily to advertising across TV, radio, print, outdoor and digital channels.

In the lead up to election day, Facebook’s ad transparency tool, Ad Library, confirmed this huge discrepancy between the Facebook & Instagram ad spends of the Biden and Trump campaigns:

Joe Biden and Kamala Harris both outspent their Republican counterparts by nearly double. The spend totals above are aggregates and take into account other Democrat and Republican pages.

With such a big ad spend by the Democrats (over $1M per day), you would expect this to translate to comparatively high content performance (ie: higher interactions on content published by Democrats) however this wasn’t the case at all – in fact not even close.

Here at Social Status, we used our Competitor Analytics tool to analyze over 100 State Democrat and Republican Facebook pages and found the Republicans beat out the Democrats when it came to post performance. State Republican pages achieved over double the Interactions (Reactions, Comments and Shares) on Facebook compared to the State Democrat pages:

When you look at the breakdown of Facebook Reactions (Love, Haha, Wow, Sad, Angry) another interesting story emerges. In our analysis, we split each Reaction into a percentage vs the overall number of Interactions. Facebook Reactions importantly provide an explicit indication of sentiment. The problem with trying to gauge sentiment in the Comments of posts is that English is such a difficult language – even the best sentiment engines only achieve 60-70% accuracy. Even when a human takes over, there is often disagreement about whether a certain comment is positive or in fact negative. This is why we prefer to gauge sentiment from Facebook Reactions.

Below we can see that posts from State Democrat pages achieved nearly twice the amount of Love Reactions while posts from State Republican pages achieved over twice the amount of Angry Reactions:

This raises an interesting point about the kind of content published by these pages and how it makes people react. A popular theory held by many social marketers is that emotive reactions (Love or Angry) can help increase organic reach of a post. While we’ve seen some anecdotal evidence of this, there are several other stronger signals which increase organic reach such as shares, friend-tagging and video views.

Top posts by US State Democrat pages on Facebook:

Top posts by US State Republican pages on Facebook:

Social Status works with Government departments, politicians and political parties all around the world to quantify and measure candidate and/or party performance on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and YouTube.

The post US Election 2020 Facebook Analysis appeared first on Social Status.

However, the proliferation of social media has perhaps been the biggest game changer for sporting sponsorship in recent years. Sponsors are not only given a platform to communicate directly with their customers, they are also given an excuse to communicate with them, engaging with them in a cultural rather than corporate way.

How many sponsors can you count in this video?

“Before sport consumption was unilateral: allowing spectators just admiring “the show” without any further engagement. Social media introduced interactive character to the global sport participation” – Optimy. 

Social media has also changed the way Sponsor’s are able to directly assess the effectiveness of their sponsorship with specific partners.

Sign up for the Social Media ROI: Best Practice 2017 Masterclass Webinar 

We analysed the Facebook pages of 28 Origin Sponsors, looking at over 896 posts and 206, 890 interactions and here is what we found.

Of the top 10 Most Engaging Sponsor Posts, 3 of the top 5 posts directly referred to the State of Origin/State of Origin Players. Across all Sponsor Posts, we could see that posts that identified with the NSW Blues, earned higher rates of engagement than posts that mentioned the QLD Maroons.

Taking out the top spot, for the Most Engaging Post was GIO Insurance with an Engagement Rate of 25.06% compared to the competitor ER Average of 1.25% and a 2,380 total interactions!

Not only did GIO Insurance have the Most Engaging Post for any Origin Sponsor, they also had the most overall Page Engagement, with an ER of 11.07% compared to the competitor average of 1.25%.

GIO also saw higher levels of growth, with a Growth Rate of 3.05% compared to the competitor average of 2.53%.

The potential social media plays in sponsorship has great potential. The platform’s ability to allow sponsors to communicate bilaterally with consumers, can lead to greater brand affinity, loyalty and engagement – as we can see with GIO.

The post GIO Is the Real Winner of The State of Origin appeared first on Social Status.

The results were interesting, and it seems some university social media teams are ‘down with the kids’ more than others.

Perhaps one of the more interesting examples of this is James Cook University.

With just over 57K followers, their fan base is considerably smaller than other universities. However, an understanding of their target audience meant that a clever 1-day campaign consisting of 3 posts was the winning formula for interaction success.

On April 21st 2017, James Cook University launched their Facebook Campaign to win Groovin’ The Moo tickets with a static image announcing that the competition would be taking place throughout the duration of the day.

The conditions meant that audience members would need to stay active on their page throughout the day while waiting for the Live Videos to enter – a mechanism which built hype and excitement around the campaign.

Now there were a number of things that attributed to the three post’s 8K comments and 28K views;

Like and Comment-to-Win Entry Mechanic

The like and comment-to-win entry mechanic is popular when the ad objective is engagement as we saw in this campaign. This mechanic attributed to the 8K comments received across the three posts as well as a 129.5% Comment vs. Reactions Ratio (average for competitors was 21.8%).

Facebook Live Video

Rather than using static assets, all three competition posts were in the form of a looping Facebook Live video. With users commenting on Facebook Live videos at 10X the rate of regular videos, this media form attributed to a significantly larger viral audience reach to JCU’s 57K followers, resulting in 28K views across all three posts.

1 Hour Time Window

Perhaps the key to this innovative promotion was the 1 hour time intervals. This created a sense of hype and immediacy to the audience, and exploited viral engagement.

If you would like to receive a copy of our ‘Australian Higher Education Industry Facebook Report’ or are interested in a specific industry report – please email info@socialstatus.io.

The post How James Cook University Generated 7.9K Comments in One Day appeared first on Social Status.

And with Australian chocolate consumption on the rise, you can be sure that chocolate retailers are just as happy.

According to Roy Morgan research, Cadbury is by far, Australia’s most popular chocolate brand, taking out 10 of the top 15 most widely consumed chocolates (consumed by 53.2% of Australians).

However, with the approach of Easter, Australian owned and made chocolate company, Haigh’s, is generating some serious traction on social – dominating in Engagement and Growth for the last month against some of the more prominent global brands.

Haigh’s have celebrated the last 30 days with an average Engagement Rate of 1.08% (competitor average = 0.14%) and a Growth Rate of 1.84% (competitor average = 0.23%).

Haigh’s took out all of the Top 10 Most Engaging Posts

Haigh’s strong performance on social correlates with their online sales having peaked in light of the busy Easter season with Haigh’s spokesperson, Fiona Krawczyk, predicting that they will sell over 4.5 million eggs of all sizes and 50,000 Easter bilbies.

Not bad when you consider the average cost of one of their Easter Eggs is approx. $20.12 and $19.60 for one of their Bilbies, totalling an estimated sales of $91.5million (2% more than last year).

The post Aussies Show Support on Social for Local Chocolate Maker, Haigh’s, This Easter appeared first on Social Status.

Since then, the video of the incident has gone viral and resulted in the trending of hashtag #newunitedairlinesmotto. The public has taken to social media platforms such as Twitter to condemn United Airlines and create their own submissions for replacing the airlines “fly the friendly skies” advertising tag.

The hashtag #UnitedForcesPassengerOffPlane was the top trending item on Sina Weibo, which is considered the Chinese equivalent of Twitter – with over 270 million views.

Here’s what we’ve seen.

and these

But investors were not laughing.

United Continental Holdings has seen some $255 million cut from its capitalisation which stands now at around $22.246  billion, from 22.501 billion at the close on Monday, according to FactSet data.

What has this meant for their own social following?

Their Engagement went through the roof on Tuesday 11th, due primarily to the page posting CEO, Oscar Munoz’s, response to the incident.

The post garnered 123.5K interactions and a whopping 11.86% Engagement Rate – but it certainly was not all good.

What was perhaps most surprising, was United Airline’s absence from communicating with their customers. Rather, as can be seen in the above comments, attempting to monitor them by selectively deleting comments.

The post Backlash for United Airlines as User Generated Content Results in Falling Share Price appeared first on Social Status.

81% of consumers research online before making a purchasing decision.

Consumer’s are becoming far more invested at every stage of the purchasing process. With access to such diverse product offerings online, consumers are spending the time to research cosmetics through vlogs, online tutorials and forums.

Consumer’s are seeking to eliminate any risk pre-purchase, and want to know how to use a product and what it will look like on before committing to a sale.

This increase in pre-purchase interest has led to the inclusion of video tutorials of/by brands online, to allow consumers to get a feel for the look and application of a product before putting it into their carts.

This video of one of Australia’s most influential beauty bloggers, Chloe Morello, features her using Make Up Store Australia’s (MUSA) products.

MUSA shared this video on their Facebook page, resulting in a 34.09% Engagement Rate, taking out the number #6 spot in the Top 10 Most Engaging Retail Posts for the month of November 2016.

The increase in step-by-step makeup tutorials and the endorsement of products being used, has led to a movement of amateur makeup artists.

These tutorials, by both brands and respected beauty influencers, has created the belief that professional quality makeup looks are ascertainable without formal training or paying to go to a professional makeup artist.

This movement is only exemplified with over 25 million uses of the #mua hashtag on Instagram alone.

These amateur makeup artists are now engaging in 2-way dialogue with both brands and influencers, using social channels to demand more product knowledge, driving these higher levels of interaction and engagement we have been seeing.

Not only this, but these amateur makeup artists are using social channels as digital portfolios to showcase their artistry, often tagging and hashtagging the used brands to their own personal followings, further increasing the buzz surrounding the industry online.

85% of beauty consumers say that they would trust a cosmetic review by a YouTuber over any other method.

With statistics like these, it is no wonder brands such as MAC, Estee Lauder, Make Up Store Australia and many others have engaged with influential beauty YouTuber’s such as Lauren Curtis and Chloe Morello.

A post shared by Lauren Curtis (@lozcurtis) on Jan 11, 2017 at 6:51am PST

With consumers watching anywhere between 6-30 hours of these YouTube tutorials, their ability to influence and reach large audiences is undeniable.

Not only this, but consumers have expressed the ease in which they feel they can communicate with influencers due to their perceived accessibility.

Another reason we have seen an increase in engagement with beauty brands online, is their willingness to participate in competition posts.

As we’ve touched on before, competition posts are traditionally successful in creating high levels of engagement due to their like-to-win, share-to-win and comment-to-win entry mechanics.

If you would like to know more about how your brand compares or insights into your industry, contact us at info@socialstatus.io

The post Why the Beauty Industry is Dominating Online Engagement appeared first on Social Status.

Once in a while, we come across some stand out pieces of content on social media. Admittedly, it’s the data that first spikes our attention. But then curiosity takes over, because we just have to know what on earth made that piece of content stand out in an ocean of others.

This was exactly the case for a video shared by Crossfit Jenks, a Crossfit gym based in Oklahoma, USA.

The video tells a story of a very special member of their gym, Sydney. Sydney is currently living with an extremely rare autoimmune disease and has been on a liver transplant list for over a year.

Oh. And did we mention that she is the 2015 Crossfit Champion!?

But what also makes this video interesting from a data perspective, was its ability to transcend the immediate Crossfit Jenks’ following through its viral nature generating an unprecedented engagement for the page (competitor ER average was only 0.71%).

Clearly this video is an extremely emotive and inspirational story of the resilience of a special individual that resonated deeply with the audience. Considering the average video length on Facebook is 55.3 seconds, with the average view duration being 30% less than that (Crossfit’s video was 6 times that) (locowise.com), this only exemplifies how engaged the audience was with the content, despite the long form nature of the video.

Let’s take a closer look at some of the themes that made this video so engaging.

The Power of Storytelling

It’s an age-old pastime that dates back to the beginning of time and has been adopted in many shapes and forms by businesses all over the world.

This video engaged in the storytelling composition as it invited the audience to join Sydney on her journey: from her battle with her deteriorating health, to her first experience at Crossfit Jenks with her family, to her winning the 2015 Crossfit Championship.

Research has shown, and what is evident in this post, is that there is a strong link between the sentiments video content evokes, and the sharing intent it creates for users as the emotional appeal makes consumers more willing to share the content with their network (clickz.com).

As a result, Crossfit Jenks were able to engage their audience by creating overwhelming feelings of adversity, happiness, motivation and admiration, resulting in it being watched more than 236K times and being interacted with 2,971 times.

Influencer Marketing

By sharing Sydney’s story, Crossfit have established her status as an influencer as her face becomes synonymous with the Crossfit brand.

She now represents the community that they have built and in turn, her personal attributes of adversity, resilience and inspiration are affiliated with the Crossfit brand itself.

Sydney’s story acts as a personal recommendation (whether purposefully or not), creating positive affiliations for consumers with the Crossfit brand.

With 92% of people saying that they trust personal recommendations over brands – even if they don’t know the individual making the recommendations, this becomes extremely important (customerthink.com).

Quality of Video Production

What also makes this video stand out, particularly amongst the other video content on the Crossfit Jenks’ Facebook page, is its production – the professional filming and editing stands out amongst a sea of DIY mobile videos currently populating their Facebook page.

By engaging with professionals to capture Sydney’s story, it is clear to the audience that they have a respect for the content being captured, showcased by its well thought out nature.

Overall, this video was a clear statistical standout in its category for its ability to engage with audiences – and it’s clear to see that it was the ability of Sydney’s story to facilitate an emotional response.

Not a dry eye here at Social Status. #TeamSydney

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The post #TeamSydney – How Crossfit Used Storytelling to Increase Their Engagement Rate to 174% appeared first on Social Status.

Originally published on Medium.

It was one of the longest federal election campaigns in Australian history. While the media scrutinized marginal seats, poll results and key battlegrounds like Western Sydney; there was another key battleground that was equally important, if not considerably more important: social media.

We here at Social Status love data. So we naturally decided to look into the world of Australian Federal politics on social media during the election campaign. We tracked all posts published by the official Facebook pages of the Federal politicians and political parties during the election campaign and what we found surprised us.

Looking across thousands of Facebook posts during the campaign there was one post that clearly stood out. With a 23% engagement rate, it was the single highest engaged post across all federal politician posts during the entire election campaign: Barnaby Joyce holding a $2 bag of tomatoes with the caption “Just catching up with a bag full of cousins at Bingara.”

For those not up to date with the ongoing Barnaby Joyce and Johnny Depp feud, this was the inciting incident on the Jimmy Kimmel Show about a week prior:

The moment in question is at 04:54

What clearly shone through was the off-script, unexpected approach in response to Johnny Depp being interviewed on Jimmy Kimmel Live calling Barnaby “inbred with a tomato”.

Barnaby’s ongoing feud with Depp cut through Mediscare, tax cuts, NBN and negative gearing. As Aussies, we love a bit of self-deprecating humor and I think as marketers and advertisers, we forget how powerful this national pastime is.

Facebook talk about creating “thumb-stopping” moments in the Newsfeed and what Barnaby published was the epitome of that. When you look at the proportion of Shares vs Total Interactions, you can clearly see this content had a huge amount of viral reach.

It was a great response, totally unexpected on the campaign trail and importantly the tone was Barnaby through and through. The post humanized him and cut straight through the election wallpaper posted by the majority of the other candidates.

How can you humanize your message and bring a bit of unexpectedness to your content strategy?

The post How a bunch of tomatoes delivered Barnaby Joyce social media victory appeared first on Social Status.

It was near impossible to even occasionally glance at any of the matches without noticing the presence of the Commonwealth Bank. From naming rights, to signage, to uniforms, to TV ads and so on. CommBank’s involvement with Australian cricket stretches back over 25 years but this year marked the start of a four season partnership with the Test Team and the Test Series.

Given this partnership it made absolute sense for CommBank to extend their alignment with The Ashes to their social channels particularly Facebook and Twitter. On December 5 CommBank published 4 photos of cute cats miniature scenes from the 2nd Ashes Test Match on their Facebook page. This marked the start of what was to be a highly successful series of Ashes themed posts delivering CommBank on average 8x higher engagement on Facebook than their non-Ashes posts.

The beauty of these posts was their ability for CommBank to be topical and comment on memorable moments as the Test Series unfolded. Importantly it brought a bit of personality to an otherwise, relatively straight and predictable corporate brand Facebook page.

Best of all, people loved sharing this content. In fact CommBank’s top 10 shared posts in the last 2 months were ALL Ashes themed. Of course shares is a vital user action sought after by Facebook marketers. When fans share posts, this increases the content reach to friends of fans. Besides paying for reach, creating highly sharable content is currently your best bet for increasing the reach of your content on Facebook.

In the last 2 months, nearly half of CommBank’s posts were Ashes themed. The rest were mostly Product related and a few Community related posts. Naturally product posts don’t do very well on Facebook, but many brands use product posts immediately after high-performing posts where they can reap the benefits of slightly higher increased reach whilst delivering a brand or product message.

So how did CommBank’s posts perform overall in the last 2 months? The average post engagement rate for their Ashes themed posts was 0.585% and for their non-Ashes themed posts 0.072%. In other words, The Ashes posts delivered 8x the engagement over the last 2 months – indeed a great result for CommBank.

These top-performing posts didn’t just go out on CommBank’s Facebook page but also on their Twitter profile delivering rich media into the Twitter stream that really resonated with their followers:

Congratulations Mitchell Johnson! A superb five wicket haul in the Boxing Day test! pic.twitter.com/j4cTePoiU1

— CommBank (@CommBank) December 27, 2013

One step closer to a clean sweep! Aussie, Aussie, Aussie… #Ashes #uniteAus pic.twitter.com/7CAhURckfB

— CommBank (@CommBank) December 29, 2013

Also, make sure to check out Jonno Simpson’s great recap of the broader cricket discussion on Twitter around the #Ashes, #TheUrnReturns and a particularly great execution by Cricket Australia of the #CongratsPup hashtag in The Sunday Times:

Please click to congratulate Pup on 100th Test. We’re using everyone’s @ names for a special tribute https://t.co/OtXsbZRGZu #CongratsPup

— cricket.com.au (@CricketAus) December 11, 2013

Here’s the ad in The Sunday Times with your @ handles to say #CongratsPup for his 100th Test. pic.twitter.com/03J7O2zAqq

— cricket.com.au (@CricketAus) December 15, 2013

The post The Urn Returns Commonwealth Bank Social Media Hat-trick appeared first on Social Status.