Here’s an interesting finding about social media: The overwhelming majority of posts on the major social media sites engender no engagement.
As in “none at all.”
And this goes for posts uploaded by marketers and publishers as well as one from “ordinary” users.
This finding comes from SocialFlow, a social media software and content dissemination firm which analyzed ~1.6 million organic posts on Twitter, Facebook and Google+ that reached a total of ~361 million people.
What the SocialFlow research found was that ~95% of those posts results in no engagement at all.
By contrast, only ~1% of the posts produced really strong engagement — defined as 20,000 interactions or higher per post. Many of those posts are uploaded by big entertainment and media companies and dealt with — you guessed it — celebrity gossip and so forth.
Other findings from the SocialFlow research show that higher engagement rates tend to happen for “data-driven” posts — ones that are targeted to certain audience segments based on predictive algorithms pertaining to those segments’ behaviors.
Not surprisingly, posts that tend to attract higher engagement are more likely to be on “trending” topics. But high-engagement posts about breaking news or celebrity reporting deliver little benefit for marketer of brands beyond the ones involved in entertainment and media companies.
Technology, healthcare and not-for-profits, by contrast, aren’t very good fits for such news, even if the posts themselves attract more engagement and interaction.
The SocialFlow research underscores yet again that, despite the continuing evolution of “interactivity” in marketing, the 90-9-1 rule still generally applies.
That’s the notion that for every piece of content seen, 90 people “look and lurk” only … 9 people may choose to engage with the content … and only 1 person is responsible for creating the content to begin with.
They’re all important factors to keep in mind when considering social revolution and its implications.
