From animal welfare to arts to criminal justice and beyond, this report has it all when it comes to the ultimate guide to nonprofit social media. We studied top posts, hashtags, engagement rates, and more from 100 of the world’s most engaging nonprofits on social to help your nonprofit prepare for Giving Tuesday and the year ahead.

Drop a donation to your favorite nonprofit and then get reading!

Spoilers! See the full Nonprofit rankings.

Grab the report here

Top 10 Nonprofits on Social Media (overall)

It was a great year for nonprofits on social who earned epic engagement using everything from adorable puppy adoption pleas to behind-the-scenes pointe shoe content to bats that are guaranteed to steal your heart (more on that later).

Bat fans, rejoice: Bat Conservation International has taken the gold for the second year running! American Ballet Theatre climbed the ranks in a big way to land the silver, while Planned Parenthood repeated its podium finish with a bronze. Innocence Project, Amnesty International, National Trust, and HAYTAP also pulled off top 10 repeats, while the US Campaign for Palestinian Rights, the ACLU, and Seattle Humane landed in our top 10 for the first time.

Top Nonprofit Overall: Bat Conservation International

Bat Conservation International is a fan favorite on social for a reason: their colorful and quirky posts engage fans on every channel they post on and go a long way towards making bats less scary. BCI uses everything from colorful graphics to weird but gripping bat memes to entice and engage followers in their quest to protect bat populations across the country.

BCI generally posts less frequently than their average competitors but makes every post count with above-average engagement rates and totals. The nonprofit pulled all that off with way fewer followers than their average rival. Fewer posts + fewer followers usually equals lower engagement, but not for BCI who harnessed the power of bats to fly straight into followers’ hearts.

BCI ranked 8th on Facebook thanks in part to posts like this featuring, wait for it, bat poetry (no, the bats did not write it). The poem by environmentalist and poet Anna Ferguson Montague delighted bat fans on BCI’s favorite day of the week: Baturday. With a 56.2% engagement rate by follower, BCI should definitely look into commissioning more bat poems. The nonprofit earned 5x the engagement rate of their average nonprofit competitor on Facebook despite having a quarter of the fans. Part of that incredible engagement can be explained by posts like this that earned nearly six million impressions, suggesting BCI’s content reached far beyond their follower count.

Adorably spooky Reels like this one helped BCI earn 2x the engagement total and 5x the engagement rate of their average competitor on Instagram. The Reel featured five spooky/sweet bats guaranteed to turn anyone into a bat conservationist. BCI earned a 147% engagement rate and more than 1.2 million estimated impressions on the post, proving that in the right hands, even the most niche causes can go viral.

This beautiful photo tweet celebrating Bat Appreciation Day earned a 14.2% engagement rate and more than 85K impressions by inviting followers to turn out for this important holiday that BCI actually did not make up. Many of the nonprofit’s posts feature real bats in all their glory, but shaking up the style to something more artistic helped engage fans new and old who might not be fully on board with bat content just yet. BCI continues to impress by doing more with less: the nonprofit earned 10x the engagement rate by follower on Twitter but tweeted about half as often as their average competitor, and did it all with one tenth of the followers.

Not every nonprofit we studied this year managed to keep abreast of the constantly-evolving TikTok trend landscape, but BCI definitely gave it their best shot. The video put a bat-themed spin on the trending clip from Lizzo’s song Boys by swapping the meaning of the song to Bats Of varYing Species. Fans and followers ate up the playful post to the tune of a 12.4% engagement rate by view and more than 340K views. Not every trend will feel applicable to your nonprofit, but videos like this remind us that getting in on the right trend at the right time can be an engagement slam dunk.

BCI has really invested in TikTok this year, with a 38% increase in follower count and above-average posting frequency by about 30%. The nonprofit’s efforts are paying off with more than 2x the engagement total and 6x the engagement rate by view.

Top Nonprofit Social Media Trend 1: Holiday-themed posts

From observing national holidays that align closely with any given nonprofit’s mission to cute manatees celebrating Halloween, holiday posts led to an engagement uptick across all four channels we studied this year.

Save the Manatee Club finished 31st on Instagram and 25th overall thanks to the success of photo posts like this one featuring a costumed manatee presiding over a gaggle of pumpkins. The Halloween-themed post earned a 27.8% engagement rate by follower and more than 7.3K impressions by keeping in the holiday spirit. User-generated content is a great way for nonprofits to stretch tight staff and tighter budgets like in this post which sourced a photo from the larger STMC community.

Environmental activism nonprofit Greenpeace took to its TikTok platform during Pride Month to remind followers that an important part of fighting for climate justice includes protecting trans rights. The nonprofit ranked 17th on TikTok this year thanks in part to this simple video that earned a 10.5% engagement rate by view, which is about 10x the nonprofit TikTok median. Making the most of holidays and themed months like Pride can help your content stay relevant all year long.

Top Nonprofit Social Media Trend 2: Giving Tuesday

Giving Tuesday is a critical time for nonprofits looking to fundraise, and many of the top nonprofits we studied encouraged donations creatively for maximum engagement and minimal grumbling.

Second-place winner American Ballet Theatre’s posts about Giving Tuesday ranked consistently across channels as some of their most engaging of the year, making the nonprofit one to watch for inspiration. ABT’s series encouraging donors to engage throughout the day to see dancers doing feats of increasing difficulty as donations rolled in led to fun and social engagement online and at the ballet studio. Not every channel saw an engagement increase with posts that mentioned Giving Tuesday, but nonprofits saw a 1.44x engagement rate lift on Facebook when talking about the day of giving.

Playful content performed well on social when it came to Giving Tuesday as well, like in this impressive bat portrait from overall winner Bat Conservation International. Rather than ask directly for donations, BCI reminded followers about Giving Tuesday with tweet content featuring Gen-Z slang about a look “giving” (which means it’s good) and “serving” (which means it’s even better). The tweet earned a 1.3% engagement rate, which is about 4x the nonprofit Twitter median this year. Not every donation request on social has to feel like a desperate or urgent plea: adding fun or casual content into your campaign can give followers a break while still keeping your nonprofit at top of mind.

Top Nonprofit Social Media Trend 3: Behind-the-scenes content

Taking supporters and donors behind the scenes is a tried and true strategy for nonprofits around the world because it helps people deepen their connection to their favorite organization’s mission and impact. Backstage content on social media can serve the same purpose, even if there’s not actually a stage to peek around the back of.

Education Post focuses on schooling opportunities for bright kids around the world, which very much includes the stunning music coming out of this classroom in Africa. This Reel helped EdPost finish first on Instagram–no surprise with the impact of this post, which earned nearly three quarters of a million engagements and more than 11 million estimated impressions. Many organizations might feel tempted to post a slick video with high production values, but EdPost knew the content would resonate with fans based on nothing more than unbelievable music from the mouths of truly talented kids.

Going behind the scenes isn’t just for the arts. The Blank Park Zoo finished 13th on Facebook thanks to this video post about training one of their giraffes to feel calm and comfortable during x-ray imaging. The video went viral to the tune of 13 million views and more than 18K engagements by involving fans in a side of the zoo they probably would never be able to experience from a casual stroll through the park. Behind-the-scenes content like this helps strengthen followers’ and donors’ relationships with the causes they support and is an important tool in any nonprofit social media marketer’s toolkit for sustaining engagement over time.

Top Nonprofits on Social Media: Instagram

Congrats to Education Post for winning big on Instagram this year, and to American Ballet Theatre and the US Campaign for Palestinian Rights on their respective silver and bronze finishes. Overall top 10 finishers Seattle Humane, Bat Conservation International, HAYTAP, and the Innocence Project also saw impressive rankings on Instagram. Doctors Without Borders, Joffrey Ballet, and Hillel International finished strong on Instagram but didn’t quite break into the overall top 10 thanks to some lagging ranks on other channels.

Nonprofits earned an average engagement rate of 0.51%, which sits well above the all-industry Instagram average of 0.43% that we saw in this year’s Social Media Industry Benchmark Report. These nonprofits posted just as frequently as the average organization on Instagram this year at 4.8 posts per week. Higher engagement rates with similar post frequency means nonprofits are punching above their weight on Instagram.

Featured nonprofit: American Ballet Theatre

American Ballet Theatre is a force to be reckoned with on social, especially on video-focused channels like Instagram and TikTok. With 4x the followers of their average nonprofit competitor, the nonprofit has a leg up (pun intended) on engagement: ABT rocked 6x the engagement total at 2.44M compared to 392K competitor average, and more than 3x the engagement rate. Especially notable is that ABT posted about 1/3rd as frequently as their average competitor on Instagram and still managed to top the engagement charts, suggesting the content they do publish is high quality and reliably able to snag those likes and comments.

Behind-the-scenes content reigned supreme for the Boston-based ballet company, from pointe shoe ASMR to rehearsal footage to seemingly impossible tasks like fouetté challenges. The nonprofit also found creative ways to encourage donations and created plenty of nostalgic opportunities for followers to wax poetic about their favorite ballets over the years.

Followers ate up pointe shoe ASMR from a corps de ballet member of ABT’s company to the tune of a 26.3% engagement rate, which is more than 50x the nonprofit Instagram average. ASMR is all about pleasing sounds and images, so the crunching, crinkling, gluing, and sewing of pointe shoes is the perfect way to tickle followers’ brains. Professional ballet dancers modify their shoes nearly every day, so capturing the ritual for social media is a great way to capitalize on content just waiting to be shared.

ABT posted a carousel with moments from the fall 2023 season to help fans remember their favorite moments with a little boost from the Instagram algorithm. The carousel post earned a 9.84% engagement rate and more than 1.37 million estimated impressions, not to mention nearly 80k likes. Instagram re-serves the second frame of a carousel to followers if they didn’t engage with the first, which often leads to higher engagement rates and means this post type should definitely remain in the mix for nonprofits.

Nonprofits constantly have to find balance between sharing the results of their mission-driven work and asking for donations to help fund it. ABT wasn’t afraid to get creative about encouraging donations with a little help from the dance company by promising amazing feats from the dance company if their online community could hit certain fundraising milestones. In this Instagram Reel, ABT delivered on its promise that dancer Léa Fleytoux would balance on pointe for an entire minute if 50 followers donated on Giving Tuesday. The feat impressed followers, earning the organization an 8.02% engagement rate and encouraged further donations for ABT’s next milestone of 100 donations. Finding new ways to ask for donations is a challenge that many nonprofits face, but they can definitely take a page out of ABT’s book with their Giving Tuesday campaign.

Top Nonprofits on Social Media: TikTok

The National Down Syndrome Society snagged gold on TikTok this year (while landing just outside our overall top 10 ) with Planned Parenthood and RepresentUs also standing strong on the TikTok podium. Many of our overall top 10 winners also performed well on TikTok like American Ballet Theatre, Seattle Humane, Bat Conservation International, National Trust, and the US Campaign for Palestinian Rights. Best Friends Animal Society and the American SPCA stood out in a big way on TikTok but have some improving to do on other channels if they want to crack the overall top 10 next year.

Nonprofits earned a 0.99% engagement rate by view and posted videos about once per week on TikTok, which is about half as often as our multi-industry average. Imagine what these organizations could do with the resources to post even more frequently.

Featured nonprofit: Planned Parenthood

Health care and sex education nonprofit Planned Parenthood grabbed the silver on TikTok this year and bronze overall thanks to stellar content and strategic partnerships. With about four times the followers as their average nonprofit competitor and 4x the engagement totals, it’s no surprise that this nonprofit is ranking well this year. Planned Parenthood posted about twice as often as their average competitor at 1.87 videos per week and saw about twice the views. The nonprofit also rocked 6x the engagement rate by view at 18.8%, which is definitely a stat they can write home about.

It’s worth noting that Planned Parenthood’s follower counts and engagement totals are off the charts, but its engagement rates by follower on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter are actually a little lower than the competitor average. Really big accounts like Planned Parenthood sometimes have to accept lower engagement rates in favor of eye-popping engagement totals. We balance engagement total and rate in our ranking to account for nonprofits like Planned Parenthood, which also helps smaller nonprofits and brands with impressive engagement rates but teeny engagement totals stay competitive in our rankings.

Planned Parenthood had strong success with sharing news stories about things like abortion and contraception with a related GIF playing in front of it, like in this video about expanding abortion access with Phoebe and Rachel from Friends dancing on a loop in the foreground. The video earned a 17.8% engagement rate by view and more than 12K engagements, suggesting adding a little silliness to serious news pays off when it comes to engagement.

The nonprofit wasn’t afraid of humor, especially when it comes to raising awareness for reproductive freedom. This video features Planned Parenthood providers looking around their clinic for medical reasons to restrict abortion everywhere from desks to drawers and coming up empty, earning a 13.3% engagement rate by view and nearly 400K views. Tone matters when it comes to storytelling, and many nonprofits have learned that going playful instead of somber can engage more supporters in their causes.

Many nonprofits rely on partnerships to boost awareness and reach new audiences, and Planned Parenthood is no exception. Partnering with TikTok celebs like @JamesIsSmiling earned the nonprofit a 9.95% engagement rate on TikTok this year. Switching up your brand’s representative online can help new audiences and followers find your nonprofit’s content while offering variety to your existing fanbase. In this case, James has partnered with Planned Parenthood since 2023 to share stories about STDs, reproductive rights, trans rights and more and their posts are always thoughtful, conversational, and engaging. Many nonprofits don’t have the budget to pay an enormous roster of influencers, so finding the right alignment is critical for nonprofits looking to stretch their dollar while reaching new audiences.

Top Nonprofits on Social Media: Facebook

The Alzheimer’s Assocation topped the Facebook charts for nonprofits this year, with PetSmart Charities and Seattle Humane hot on its heels. The rest of the Facebook top 10 ranged far and wide, from healthcare nonprofits American Cancer Society and Red Cross to animal welfare organizations Anti-Cruelty, the Humane Society of the United States, and Bat Conservation International, with the Wounded Warrior Project and Carnegie Hall coming in as wild cards.

Nonprofits on Facebook earned a 0.06% engagement rate and posted just under 6x per week, which is more than on any other channel we studied this year. This high post frequency makes sense even with lower engagement rates on Facebook, since posting on Facebook is often a lot less labor-intensive than creating TikTok videos or Reels. As we can see in the chart below, status updates and photos are the most engaging post types by rate for nonprofits on Facebook, so it makes sense that nonprofits are churning them out more frequently.

Featured nonprofit: Seattle Humane

Rival IQ is based in Seattle and filled with pet-loving humans, so it’s no surprise we were jazzed to see Seattle Humane topping this year’s Facebook charts. The animal welfare nonprofit had about ⅕ the Page Fans of their average nonprofit competitor while boasting 4x the engagement total and rate, suggesting their social strategy is seriously dialed in. Posting more than twice as often as their rivals certainly helps explain those big engagement totals, and strong content that tugs at everybody’s heartstrings explains the rest of Seattle Humane’s success on social this year.

As you might imagine for an animal shelter, Seattle Humane was all about calls for adoption on Facebook this year, like this post about pup Pretty Girl that earned an impressive 12.3% engagement rate. With so many followers looking for their next furry family member, these posts performed well consistently for the nonprofit. We used our natural language processing to analyze popular topics and phrases, and posts that celebrated a successful adoption earned a 2.41x engagement rate lift over Seattle Humane’s average posts–no surprise, since everyone loves a happy ending.

Every animal welfare nonprofit is bound to rely on cuteness at some point or another, and Seattle Humane was no exception. The nonprofit showed off cute dogs to their full potential in this post about 18 tiny doggos that were surrendered to the shelter that earned a 5.58% engagement rate and more than 500K estimated impressions. Sharing pets for adoption is an important part of Seattle Humane’s mission, but telling the stories behind the surrendered or found pets is critical for connecting pets with their forever homes like in this heartstring-tugging post.

A big part of nonprofit communications has to be about donations and giving, but Seattle Humane gives equal air time to thanking donors for their contributions large and small like in this video post. The post rocked a 2.39% engagement rate which is nearly 40x the nonprofit industry median thanks to cute dog-friendly baked goods and even cuter pups. Asking for donations and thanking donors is a constant cycle for nonprofits around the globe, and while balancing the two can be tough, Seattle Humane has it down.

See how your nonprofit ranks.

Download the full report

Top Nonprofits on Social Media: Twitter

The Innocence Project had a big year on social including snagging the Twitter gold, and other top 10 overall finishers US Campaign for Palestinian Rights and HAYTAP also have a lot to be proud of on Twitter this year. Amnesty International, the ACLU, and Bat Conservation International also rode their Twitter success all the way to our overall top 10, while Heartfulness, Carter Center, Save the Manatee Club, and Doctors Without Borders had stronger showings on Twitter than on other channels we studied.

Nonprofits saw lower engagement rates on Twitter compared to other channels in our report at 0.03%. This stat isn’t too surprising, since Twitter consistently earns lower engagement rates than any other channel across all the industries we track in our Social Media Industry Benchmark Report. Small engagement rates didn’t slow down their post frequency which came in at 4.6 tweets per week.

Featured nonprofit: Innocence Project

Legal justice advocacy nonprofit the Innocence Project is no stranger to topping our engagement charts placing third overall and 15th on Twitter in last year’s nonprofit report. The nonprofit zoomed to first place on Twitter thanks to gripping tweets calling for support for exoneration. The Innocence Project tweeted about 50% more frequently than the average nonprofit which gave them lots of opportunities to connect with concerned and motivated followers. With an eye-popping engagement total of 539K compared to 38K for the average nonprofit and more than 5x the engagement rate of their peers, this nonprofit is one to watch.

The Innocence Project focused heavily on turning the nation’s eyes towards Marcellus Williams’ execution by the state of Missouri this year in many of its social posts and tweets. These compelling and somber tweets generated action and support but were sadly unsuccessful at saving him from his fate. This tweet in the final lead-up to his execution saw a 39.7% engagement rate and more than 10 million impressions from followers tracking his story around the globe.

Tweets tagged #MarcellusWilliams saw a 12.4x engagement rate lift compared to the Innocence Project’s average tweets as followers shared their support for Williams and followed the news about his appeal and sentencing. Our AI-powered Popular Topics feature also analyzed language from Innocence Project’s tweets and found that tweets that mentioned “innocent man” performed 14x better than the nonprofit’s average tweet, suggesting having a clear point of view on Williams’ sentencing and execution helped the Innocence Project reach further than they might’ve with more neutral language.

While the Innocence Project is great at encouraging urgency around upcoming exoneration opportunities, the nonprofit also excels at telling the stories of innocent men and women failed by the US justice system like Kalief Browder. This photo tweet featured an eye-catching image and an invitation to followers to remember Browder for his wrongful death and fight for justice. The tweet earned a 2.21% engagement rate and more than 75K impressions as followers left their remembrances of Kalief and called for investigation into his innocence even after his death by suicide in 2015.

While urgency is really the name of the game for the Innocence Project, the nonprofit also peppers in plenty of hopeful stories like Sandra Hemme’s. This photo tweet celebrating Hemme’s freedom from jail after 43 years of being wrongfully imprisoned earned a 0.70% engagement rate, which is more than 23x the average nonprofit engagement rate this year. Reminding followers of the life-saving impact the Innocence Project and other exoneration-focused organizations can have is critical for fostering and maintaining the financial and community support needed to sustain criminal justice nonprofits.

Check out the latest Social Media Industry Benchmark Report for even more benchmarks.

View the report now

How is My Nonprofit Performing on Social Media?

See what the best nonprofits are up to on social with our Live Social Media Benchmarks featuring top posts, engagement rates, high-performing hashtags, and tons more. Pro tip: you can even add these benchmarks directly into your Rival IQ account for always-on monitoring of these top organizations.

Or, go head-to-head with a free report on Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, or Twitter to see how you stack up against your top competition. Discover what makes your competitors tick with key insights and actionable advice you can start using now to come out on top.

If you’re hungry for even more stats, grab a free 14-day trial with Rival IQ.

Methodology

We surveyed hundreds of nonprofits between October 1, 2023 and September 30, 2024 on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and TikTok. We included a selection of nonprofits from Forbes’ Top 100 Charities list and a sample of nonprofits from our broader database of organizations around the world. Using this data and a weighted formula, we generated an overall engagement ranking for each nonprofit and narrowed the list to the top 100 brands based on our criteria. The top-ranked nonprofits have high engagement rates with average or better audience size and posting volumes. We reviewed a mix of boosted and organic posts.

We define engagement as measurable interaction on nonprofit social media posts, including likes, comments, favorites, retweets, shares, and reactions. Engagement rate is defined as the total engagement divided by audience size except on TikTok, where it’s defined as the total engagement divided by views.

Due to Instagram API limitations, we’re able to pull accurate Instagram engagement numbers only for creator and/or Instagram business accounts.

See how Rival IQ can help top nonprofits.

Explore our nonprofit solutions

The Case for Benchmarking

Why benchmark instead of just measuring how your nonprofit’s individual performance changes over time? Because social success is relative. Benchmarking means figuring out what’s working (and what isn’t) for organizations in your industry and measuring your success against that.

It’s really important to go beyond likes and favorites because audience size matters: 200 likes is great engagement for a nonprofit with 1,000 followers but is a drop in the bucket to an organization with 100,000 followers. Engagement rate helps us take audience size into account to see who’s really reaching the highest percentage of their fans and followers with their social posts, which are the nonprofits you need to beat.

Wrapping it up

Congratulations to all the organizations in this report for continuing to lead and redefine nonprofit social media! We can’t wait to see what you get up to in the year ahead.

Want to share your thoughts with us about nonprofit social media? Drop us a line on Instagram!

Start analyzing with a free Rival IQ trial.

Get my free trial

The post Top 100 Nonprofits on Social Media appeared first on Rival IQ.

With the 2024 sports seasons in full swing, we’re excited to bring you the latest social media highlights, insights, and winners from all 179 teams in the seven major North American professional sports leagues.

Enjoy a plethora of case studies from NFL, MLB, NWSL, NBA, WNBA, MLS, and NHL brands who piled up the engagement on social, in addition to a bucketful of trends to help your brand increase engagement on Instagram, TikTok, Facebook and Twitter.

Dive into the top pro sports teams of the year.

Grab your report here

Top Overall Sports Teams on Social Media

The Cincinnati Bengals not only #RuleTheJungle, but they also rule the professional sports teams social media rankings, grabbing the gold out of all the brands we studied in 2023. The Bengals pulled this off thanks to a balanced content strategy that customized posts to the unique audiences of every major social channel. The Buffalo Bills and Inter Miami CF put up a strong fight, rounding out No. 2 and No. 3 on our podium, respectively.

Other pro sports teams like the Houston Astros, Kansas City Chiefs, Philadelphia Phillies, Seattle Mariners, Philadelphia Eagles, L.A. Dodgers, and San Diego Padres had strong years in 2023, rounding out our overall Top 10.

Top Brand: Cincinnati Bengals

Who dey? Dey just the pro sports team social media champs, and they should be proud. The Cincinnati Bengals ranked in the Top 10 of all four social channels we measured this year, including Top 3 rankings on Instagram and TikTok. Thanks to a never-ending flow of short-form video, the Bengals’ social squad leveraged TikTok to maximum efficiency, as 9 of its top 10 posts (total engagement) were published the world’s trendiest platform.

They also paired photos with cheeky and well-timed captions, with many top performers on Instagram, usually featuring superstar quarterback Joe Burrow. As one of their captions bluntly stated: “No such thing as too much @joeyb_9 content.” And they were right, as more than half of the Bengals’ top 25 social posts in total engagement featured “Joe Cool” himself.

We don’t know if felines are early risers, but the Cincinnati Bengals’ social media team definitely is, with posting the highest concentration of its content before noon, especially during the pregame hours between 9-10 a.m. (EST). They enjoyed spikes in engagement rate by follower during postgame hours, in particular, usually sharing a plethora of game highlights, post-game interviews, and engaging statistics graphics between 3 and 5 p.m.

Top Trend 1: Short-Form Video Reigns Supreme

It’s no secret that most social media channels are prioritizing short-form video in their feed algorithms, but professional sports teams are an industry that excels at Instagram Reels and TikTok videos, in particular. Of the 179 teams analyzed, their TikTok videos and Instagram Reels combined for 2.2 billion engagements, comprising more than one third of all total engagements in the industry in 2023.

San Diego Wave FC was the top-ranked NWSL team on TikTok, also ranking in the top five of all pro sports teams in TikTok engagement rate by follower. Its strategy was simple. Post videos about rookie Melanie Barcenas as much as possible. Barcenas made her Wave debut in 2023 the age of 15, making her the youngest player to ever play in the NWSL, and San Diego rode the Gen Z “wave” to TikTok success all year long.

Their motto is #FlyEaglesFly, and boy did the Philadelphia Eagles soar in 2023, earning a No. 7 overall ranking, largely in part to its success with Instagram Reels. Take this Reel for example, showing off their beloved live mascot, Noah the Eagle, who kicked off a Sunday Night game versus the Miami Dolphins in October. No disrespect to the Eagles’ official mascot, Swoop, but the fans in Philly sure loved seeing their local Elmwood Park Zoo resident make an appearance at their beloved Lincoln Financial Field, to the tune of more than 8 million engagements on this post alone.

Top Trend 2: Candid Moments

Game highlights are great and all, but pro sports team fans seem to prefer soaking up social media posts showing the human side of their favorite athletes. Posts featuring funny sideline moments, mic’d up audio clips, locker room footage, and pre-game fashion regularly earned high engagement rates by follower for brands. With so many superstar athletes carrying international fame — and their own massive social media followings — the secret sauce includes a healthy dose of content revolving around their personalities off the court/ice/pitch/field.

Call it clickbait if you want, but there’s no denying that cute kids hold a special place in the social media world. The Memphis Grizzlies took advantage of an adorable courtside moment with star point guard Ja Morant and his 3-year-old daughter Kaari during pregame warmups. In a world where superstar athletes are often judged by their performance, social posts featuring their families do a wonderful job of mixing up content to keep things positive. Fanbases are passionate, often resulting in critical engagement on social media, and pro sports teams leverage content like this to lighten the mood.

Keeping the family vibes going, take a look at this fun Instagram post by the Atlanta Dream, featuring team vice president and part owner Renee Montgomery. The strategy here is clear; Just a mom and her son (Angel) dancing to music in their courtside seats during a timeout at a game in August. The simple 5-second video checks two of the good-vibes boxes: catchy tunes and a wholesome family moment , and it earned the Dream nearly 1 million Instagram engagements.

Top Trend 3: Fan-Centric Posts

It sounds like a no-brainer, but what better way to engage with your fans on social media? Make the content about them, duh! Many of our top-ranked pro sports teams did just that in 2023, posting a wide range of fan-centric content, including in-game jumbotron footage of game attendees at the venues, players signing autographs for children, babies wearing branded sports apparel, and pre-game festivities and tailgates.

While all pro sports teams use a variety of tactics on their video boards to engage with fans during games, the Tampa Bay Lightning broke from the trendy celebrity look-a-like schtick, and instead challenged ticket holders to make faces matching the emoji on the jumbotron. The live results are comical, and the social media results are even better, as this video piled up a whopping 1.2M engagements on TikTok.

Professional athletes are often generous with their time, giving autographs to fans at official team functions and in their personal lives. But in this case, Detroit Tigers superstar — and future Hall of Famer — Miguel Cabrera made a young fan earn his autograph. The boy was wearing the jersey of the opposing team, and Cabrera refused the autograph because of it. The fan’s solution? Switch jerseys with his brother, who happened to be wearing Cabrera’s jersey. His resourcefulness worked, as “Miggy” rewarded the child with his game bat for his efforts. The Tigers’ social media team beautifully edited the captured footage of the moment into an Instagram Reel, to the tune of 137k engagements.

Top Sports Teams on Instagram

Pro sports teams knocked it out of the park on Instagram in 2023, with a median engagement rate by follower of 1.39%, which is way higher than these brands earned on Facebook and Twitter (but way lower than on TikTok). It’s no surprise that pro sports brands perform so well, as the industry ranks No. 2 on Instagram (behind only Higher Education) in our 2024 Social Media Industry Benchmark Report. Pro sports teams posted more than 18 times per week on Instagram — nearly three times per day — which is tops among all industries we measured in that same report, by a landslide.

Inter Miami CF took the gold on Instagram this year, with the Cincinnati Bengals and Philadelphia Eagles rounding out the medalists. Overall top 10 finishers Kansas City Chiefs, Philadelphia Phillies, Buffalo Bills, Los Angeles Dodgers, and San Diego Padres also stood out on Instagram, while the San Francisco 49ers and Los Angeles Angels stood out on Instagram, but didn’t score well enough on other channels to make it into the overall top 10.

Featured brand: Inter Miami CF

Inter Miami managed a big win on Instagram this year thanks to nonstop coverage of international superstar Lionel Messi. The brand brings us a taste of international fútbol, along with its rabid fanbase, helping the Herons finish on the podium in our overall rankings, as well. Inter Miami FC also ranked No. 1 on Facebook and Twitter, and if it can move up the charts on TikTok, it has a strong chance at earning our No. 1 overall sports team on social media in next year’s report.

The Herons outperformed all the competition on both Instagram engagement rate and total: the brand earned a median engagement rate of 4.35% and nearly 280M total engagements. That’s a big number, folks. Like, REALLY big. Inter Miami CF’s Instagram engagement total alone was more than the combined cross-channel total engagement of 176 of the 179 teams we studied, averaging about 353k engagements per post. Beautifully designed graphics and cleverly edited videos helped, but so did adding an astonishing 14.6 million followers on Instagram in 2023.

Inter Miami CF’s social media team clearly prepared for the arrival of Messi, as it regularly rolled out consistent, branded graphics for every possible scenario, including welcome messages, goals scored, sponsorships, highlights, etc., and its fans ate it all up. This Instagram Reel celebrating his first goal with the club racked up nearly 6.2 million engagements alone. We guess the separation really is in the preparation.

Messi wasn’t the only international fútbol superstar to join the Herons in 2023, as Inter Miami CF also signed Uruguay legend Luis Suárez to the roster. Just as they did with Messi, the club leveraged Suárez’s international fame to not only help its chances of winning an MLS Cup, but to increase brand visibility through its social channels. When they made the announcement in December, the rich got richer, with this carousel post earning nearly 5.3 million engagements, positioning the club for even more Instagram success in 2024.

At the end of the day, pro sports fans care most about one thing, and that’s winning. Like many other successful pro sports brands on Instagram, Inter Miami CF regularly shared match highlights in the form of Instagram Reels, and this post was no exception. Messi made a rousing debut for the club with a stoppage-time winner to beat Liga MX’s Cruz Azul 2-1, and this Reel highlighting the goal earned an astonishing 39.1% engagement rate by follower, nearly 28 times the industry median for Instagram posts.

Top Sports Teams on TikTok

Kudos to the Chicago Bulls for earning TikTok gold this year, and to overall top 10 finishers Buffalo Bills and Cincinnati Bengals for joining the NBA team on the winner’s podium. The Houston Astros — another top 10 overall finisher — also had a superb performance on TikTok, along with the Golden State Warriors, Pittsburgh Steelers, Detroit Lions, Memphis Grizzlies, Las Vegas Raiders and Milwaukee Bucks rounding out our top 10. The Astros are the standout MLB team on the list, while the New Jersey Devils (NHL), San Diego Wave FC (NWSL), and Inter Miami CF (MLS) were the top-ranked TikTok accounts in their respective leagues.

If you’ve read our 2024 Social Media Industry Benchmark Report, you’ll know that TikTok engagement rates dwarf those of all other social media channels. If you read that report, or our 2024 TikTok Benchmark Report, you’ll also remember that we measure engagement rate by view on this platform, instead of by follower, because counting the number of times a viewer liked, commented, or shared and dividing it by the overall number of views measures just how compelling your content was.

Pro sports teams drew a whopping 9.45% engagement rate by view on TikTok this year and posted just 3.4 videos per week, the fewest of all the social channels we measured in 2023.

Featured brand: Chicago Bulls

The Chicago Bulls have a storied history and are one of the most recognizable brands in all of pro sports,  but the NBA team set itself apart in 2023 by standing out on TikTok, in particular. So how did the Bulls’ social media team pull off this feat in arguably the most competitive social landscape in 2023? Adding 1.5 million followers (third most of all 179 teams we studied) certainly helped, but the Bulls also ranked in the top 5 in engagements per video and engagement rate by view, despite posting slightly below the industry median of 3.4 videos per week. Let’s dive into the content that helped the Chicago Bulls slam dunk on TikTok.

Behind the scenes footage was the Bulls’ go-to in 2023, regularly showing what it’s like for the players during pre-game sessions, practices, travel, and other team obligations and events off the court. A simple bag of candy was all that was required for its social squad to put together this fun TikTok video, which accumulated nearly 8.8 million engagements, the most of any single TikTok post from the 179 teams we studied, and the second most of any post across all social channels.

The social team continued with its cheeky shenanigans to kick off October’s spooky season with this #ScarePrank post. While it’s unclear if he was put up to it, guard Coby White’s sneaky scare of teammate Zach LaVine during the Bulls’ official media day was a hit on TikTok. LaVine wasn’t impressed, but the team’s social media followers were definitely pleased.

We are ALWAYS here for mascots, and the Bulls didn’t disappoint. A common theme we noticed across all channels was pro sports teams posting content of celebrities attending their games or events, usually rocking branded team apparel. Leveraging celebrity influence has been a tactic for all industries for as long as we can remember, but Chicago pulled it off to perfection here, combining their beloved Benny the Bull mascot with acclaimed musician Billie Eilish in this wildly successful TikTok video.

Top Sports Teams on Facebook

Pro sports teams earned a median engagement rate of 0.3% in 2023, which is nearly double the next closest industry featured in our 2024 Social Media Industry Benchmark Report. Pro sports teams were also 5x more active on Facebook than the average brand (4.69 posts per week) in that study, trailing only the Media industry, posting more than 24 times per week. There were too many engaging posts from the realm of professional sports on Facebook this year, so let’s take a closer look at what worked well for just a few of these brands.

Let’s start with another tip of the cap to Inter Miami CF, which was the top-ranked Facebook brand in our study. Other overall top 10 performers also cracked our Facebook top 10, including the Buffalo Bills, Kansas City Chiefs, Houston Astros and Cincinnati Bengals. The Las Vegas Aces, Toronto Blue Jays, Indiana Fever, Cincinnati Reds, and Texas Rangers all had stellar Facebook performances in 2023, as well.

Featured brand: Las Vegas Aces

The Las Vegas Aces took home the honor of our top ranked WNBA team in our overall rankings (No. 19), and that was largely thanks to its herculean efforts on Facebook, where they ranked in the Top 5. The Aces earned a 1.82% engagement rate by follower, which helped lead the charge of successful women’s teams’ dominance in that metric. Nine of the top 10 pro sports teams in engagement rate by follower on Facebook came from the WNBA and NWSL.

The defending WNBA champs were well-represented at the 2023 WNBA All-Star game, and they leveraged it into social media gold, as their duo of Chelsea Gray and Kelsey Plum won the KIA WNBA Skills Challenge as part of the festivities. Their resulting highlight reel of the contest piled up nearly three million views and more than 42k engagements, proving that you don’t always have to reinvent the wheel on social media, and ol’ reliable (game highlights) will keep fans engaged throughout the year.

We talked about this in past industry reports many times, but it always pays to get celebrity appearances or collabs in social posts. This Facebook post is no exception, as the Aces’ social squad not only leveraged a photo of star guard Jackie Young and celebrity musician Usher, they took an extra step by writing a caption specifically geared toward hometown fans. It worked to perfection with a mind-boggling 100% engagement rate by follower. That’s 333x the mean of all 179 teams we studied on Facebook, folks.

Time and time again, it’s been proven that the best recipe for success on social media is winning. The Aces’ leveraged their status as defending champions all season long in 2023, but put the icing on the cake in October, repeating as WNBA champs, guaranteeing they will be a force to reckon with on social media again in 2024. This fantastic (and candid) celebration photo of the players after the game was simple, timely, and nailed the “mood” factor, earning more than 40k engagements.

Download the full rankings here

Grab your report for free

Top Sports Teams on Twitter

Major League Baseball stole the show on Twitter in 2023, slugging their way to eight spots in the Top 10. Inter Miami CF continued its overall success, earning Twitter gold, with cross-town baseball teams Los Angeles Angels and Los Angeles Dodgers earning silver and bronze, respectively. Rounding out the Top 10 was overall winner Cincinnati Bengals, along with the San Diego Padres, Texas Rangers, Seattle Mariners, Atlanta Braves, Baltimore Orioles and Cincinnati Reds.

Pro sports teams earned their lowest engagement rates of the year on Twitter at just 0.07%. This jives with the platform’s general decline, which saw engagement rates drop 20% overall in our 2024 Industry Benchmark Report. Despite this, pro sports teams earned the highest engagement rates of all the industries we measured, tweeting nearly 42 times per week (no, that’s not a typo), nearly 13x more than our cross-industry average, trailing only our Media category for the highest post volume.

Featured brand: Baltimore Orioles

The Baltimore Orioles were one of many successful pro baseball teams on Twitter in 2023, thanks to an engagement rate by follower more than 4x the industry mean. The brand was all about nostalgia, chasing its first division championship in nine seasons, keeping its 850k Twitter fans engaged during their historic run all season long. The Orioles also grew the platform with an additional 30k followers, which is no small feat, considering nearly a third of the 170 teams we studied actually had a net follower loss in 2023.

Did we mention winning? Yes? Well, we’re going to do it again, because it truly is the greatest catalyst for engaging social media content in pro sports. The Orioles rolled out gorgeous graphics all year long on Twitter, culminating in this tweet celebrating their A.L. East division championship in September, which earned an engagement rate by follower 61x the industry mean.

Did we mention winning yet? No? Good, because this locker room celebration photo kept Baltimore’s good times rollin’ on Twitter, racking up nearly 19k engagements, to go along with endless smiles. The Orioles’ engagement peaked during its late-season run to the playoffs, and for the playoffs themselves, earning an engagement rate of 0.37 — more than 5x the industry mean — from September through October.

One trend we consistently saw across all pro sports teams were posts celebrating the fans, which goes to show that when you make it about your followers, and less about your brand, the fans will keep coming back for more. This tweet was just one of the Orioles’ many sharp-looking graphics in 2023, which also doubled as a highlight, showing off some of their best photography from the year, all in one post.

Check out the latest Social Media Industry Benchmark Report for even more benchmarks.

View the report now

How is my Team Performing on Social Media?

Comparing your pro sports team’s social media performance has never been easier.

Need even more competitive analytics? Go head-to-head with a free social media analytics report on TikTok, Facebook, Instagram, or Twitter to see how you stack up against your top competition. See what makes your competitors tick with key insights and actionable advice you can start using now to come out on top.

If you’re hungry to run a deeper analysis, grab a copy of our social media competitive analysis template and see how you stack up.

Methodology

We surveyed 179 pro sports teams on social media between January 1, 2023 and December 31, 2023 on Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, and Twitter. Using this data and a weighted formula, we generated an overall engagement ranking for each brand. The top-ranked pro sports brands on social media have high engagement rates with average or better audience size and posting volumes.

We define engagement as measurable interaction on social media posts, including likes, comments, favorites, retweets, shares, and reactions. We used engagement rate by follower to measure engagement on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter, which is defined as the total engagement divided by the number of followers. We used engagement rate by view to measure engagement on TikTok, which is defined as the total engagement divided by the number of views.

The Case for Benchmarking

Why benchmark instead of just measuring how your pro sports team’s social media individual performance changes over time? Because social success is relative. Benchmarking means figuring out what’s working (and what isn’t) in your industry and measuring your success against that.

It’s crucial to go beyond likes and favorites because audience size is hugely important: 100 likes is great engagement for a brand with 1,000 followers but is a drop in the bucket to a brand with 100,000 followers. Engagement rate helps us take audience size into account to see who’s really reaching the highest percentage of their fans and followers with their social posts, which are the outdoor brands you need to beat.

Start analyzing with a free Rival IQ trial.

Get my free trial

Wrapping it up

We hope you had as much fun as we did digging into what made pro sports teams stand out on social media. Maybe we inspired you to head out and catch a game for your favorite local team.

Did we miss a pro sports team on social media you love? Want to share another industry we should rank on social? Don’t hesitate to reach out to us on Twitter.

The post 2024 Top Professional Sports Teams on Social Media appeared first on Rival IQ.

We wish we could say we’d written this whole thing between snowboard runs, but instead we stayed inside to bring you the latest and greatest from top outdoor gear and apparel brands on Instagram, TikTok, Facebook, and Instagram.

Look for tons of case studies from the outdoor brands raking in the engagement on social, plus oodles of trends to help your brand plan for the year ahead.

Download the full outdoor brands rankings now

Grab your report here

Top Overall Outdoor Brands on Social Media

We have a winner! Burton Snowboards grabbed the gold out of all the outdoor brands we studied this year thanks to lots and lots (and lots) of dynamic content shot in the mountains. Winter gear rival Atomic and outdoor apparel brand Filson definitely gave Burton a run for its money, landing squarely on the winner’s podium.

Other outdoor brands like Simms Fishing Products, YETI, Patagonia, Specialized Bicycles, Hydro Flask, Arc’teryx, and Oakley stood out across multiple channels as well to finish out the year in our overall top 10.

Since we’re all about competitive benchmarking here at Rival IQ, we can tell you that outdoor brands and the retail industry in general lagged a little behind other industries in our annual Social Media Industry Benchmark Report. The outdoor brands in this study still have plenty to be proud of this year, so let’s get into spotlighting the strategic moves Burton used to come out on top and a few industry-wide top trends.

Top Brand: Burton Snowboards

Burton excelled across nearly every channel this year with especially strong performances on Instagram, Twitter, and TikTok (and ranking 22nd on Facebook is nothing to be ashamed of). It’s no surprise that many of Burton’s most engaging posts by rate focused on one thing: bringing fans to the mountain year-round. It can feel tempting for retail brands to focus the majority of their content on directly selling their products, but Burton’s success with showcasing what it feels like to be in the mountains reminds us that outdoor brands are lifestyle brands as much as anything else. Fans left comments in every season wishing for time on the slopes, which helped drive up Burton’s engagement even when there wasn’t snow on the ground.

The snowboard brand also had a lot of success with video, with Reels standing out on Instagram and videos dominating on Twitter and TikTok. Professionally-shot and user-generated content (UGC) also went a long way towards helping followers visualize themselves boarding down the slopes from their couches, and is definitely part of the larger trend we’re seeing of video’s popularity remaining on the rise.

Burton earned the silver on Instagram this year thanks in part to dynamite videos like this one featuring a snowboarder hitting a rail at top speed with a surprising amount of flex from his board. The Reel rocked a 7.57% engagement rate, which is more than 22x the outdoor brands median on Instagram this year. The post also earned more than 111K engagements and almost 2 million estimated impressions by showing off just how tough Burton gear is in the wild without being overly salesy.

Sourcing content from influencers and followers is a tried and true way to expand your content team’s footprint, and this top-performing post is a great example of how powerful UGC can be for outdoor brands.

The snowboarding brand wasn’t afraid to get a little cheeky on social this year, like in this throwback Facebook post featuring a news article that talked some serious smack about snowboarding. The photo post performed 8x better than the competitive median for outdoor brands on Facebook by turning bad press into good press and eliciting many a giggle from followers.

Burton could’ve posted a link directly to their blog post, but chose instead to screenshot the image directly. Since photo posts often outperform link posts on social, this move is a smart one.

Many outdoor brands stopped posting on Twitter this year, but Burton stayed strong and wound up grabbing the silver on this channel too. Video continues to stand out for the snowboarding brand, like this one which rocked a 1.32% engagement rate by follower and more than 75K estimated impressions. The video is a simple one: just a 10-second video of a snowboarder sliding peacefully down the mountain into the sunset–no production studio required. Repurposing content from other channels can help breathe a second life into videos your brand has worked so hard to create.

TikTok definitely requires a different type of content to catch people scrolling through their For You Page (FYP), and Burton wasn’t afraid to raise the stakes with their content for this channel. This video combines the magic of a brave boarder and a GoPro to show off an absolutely epic jump off the side of the mountain that definitely got people talking. The video earned more than 500K views and an engagement rate by view of 18.9%, which is more than 5x the median for outdoor brands on TikTok. Are we saying you have to jump off a cliff to get views on TikTok? Not necessarily, but it is the perfect channel for shaking up your content strategy and trying new things.

Top Trend 1: User-generated content

UGC makes sense in any industry, but is an especially smart move for outdoor brands who might not be able to spend every minute shooting content in the mountains or among the trees. We used our post-tagging feature to automatically tag every UGC post in the time period, and we found that user-generated content led to an engagement rate lift on every channel except for Twitter for outdoor brands.

Pivot Cycles finished 17th overall and 8th on Facebook thanks in part to strong UGC posts like this one focused on one of their core products, the Switchblade. The glamour shot of this stunning bike in the mountains earned a 3.09% engagement rate by follower on Facebook, which is 103x (!) times higher than the median Facebook engagement rate for outdoor brands this year. Likely putting some dollars behind the post and partnering up with a professional photographer also helped the post fly on Facebook.

This mesmerizing Reel from Jones Snowboards helped the brand rank 13th overall this year with nothing more than a killer vantage point and a boatload of fresh powder. The Reel earned a 16.7% engagement rate and more than 56K engagements as fans jumped into the comments to express their jealousy and tag their friends to plan their next snowboarding adventure. So many great outdoor posts like this one depend on one thing over all others: being in the right place at the right time. Relying on followers and friends of the brand to catch your products in action is an important tool in the toolbox of any outdoor brand’s social media marketing team.

Top Trend 2: Video

Unless you’ve been living under a social media rock, it’ll come as no surprise that video was the name of the post type game for outdoor brands this year. Reels were the top-performing content type for outdoor brands on Instagram, and TikTok’s exponentially larger engagement rates speak for themselves. As we saw in the previous trend, video content doesn’t have to be professionally shot or edited to go a long way on social.

This Reel from Atomic helped the brand earn second place overall and fourth place on Instagram with an eye-catching POV on an epic ski run. The Reel earned a 17.5% engagement rate and more than 71K engagements thanks to excited fans hopping into the comments to express their jealousy or inquire about gear. With nearly every outdoor brand upping their video game this year, unique perspectives like this one are a reminder that it’s important to shake up your content creation every once in a while.

Fishing retailer Shimano really puts the “bait” in clickbait with Facebook videos like this one featuring a POV of an amazing reef fishing catch. The video earned nearly three million views and an impressive 14.1% engagement rate by encouraging viewers to watch to the end of the video to see an epic catch. Video lends so much to storytelling, especially for industries like outdoor which rely so much on action and stunning views to help potential customers visualize using their gear and apparel.

Top Trend 3: Contests–especially on Instagram

Contests and giveaways have been a top-performing social media strategy for years, since it’s hard to turn down the allure of free stuff. The giveaway trend is alive and well for outdoor brands this year, but there’s a little nuance to the story: many of the most engaging posts of the year by rate for outdoor brands on Instagram featured giveaways, while there was no major lift for these types of posts on Facebook or Twitter. Contest posts contributed to a 1.7x engagement rate lift on Instagram and a 2x lift on TikTok, reminding outdoor brands that varying your content strategy by channel is just as important as ever.

Hydro Flask finished 8th overall and 3rd on TikTok thanks in part to the success of giveaway posts like this one offering followers the chance to win on the Boise State University campus. Hydro Flask didn’t need to get specific about their offerings to win big engagement to the tune of a 9.85% engagement rate by view and more than 55K views. A silly intro to the video also helped get people talking in the comments about where the brand’s Spring College Tour should head next, which further drove up engagement.

Giveaways like this one helped 31st place finisher Wild Country earn 14th on Instagram, one of its strongest channels. The climbing gear brand employed a few other smart strategies to catch attention for its giveaway: requiring low effort from followers to enter and posting a carousel instead of a static photo image helped the giveaway reach extra far on Instagram (no coincidence, since across all industries, carousel posts have higher engagement rates by follower than any other post type). Encouraging entrants to share their favorite motivational soundbite in the comments also helped spark conversation and drive engagement way, way up to the tune of a 12.6% engagement rate.

Dive into the top outdoor brands of the year

Download for free

Top Outdoor Brands on Instagram

Outdoor brands had a field day on Instagram this year with a median engagement rate of 0.33%, which is way higher than these brands earned on Facebook and Twitter (but way lower than on TikTok). Outdoor brands posted about 3.5 times per week on Instagram, or about every other day.

Simms Fishing Products took the gold on Instagram this year, with Burton Snowboards and Trek Bicycle rounding out the medalists. Overall top 10 finishers Atomic, Specialized Bicycles, and Oakley also stood out on Instagram, while Jones, Santa Cruz Bicycles, Petzl, and Pivot Cycles stood out on Instagram but didn’t do well enough on other channels to make it into the top 10.

Featured brand: Simms Fishing Products

Fishing brand Simms managed a big win on Instagram this year thanks to inspiring posts and more than its fair share of humor. The brand also finished in the top 10 in our overall rankings and on Facebook, but was further behind its competitors on Twitter and TikTok.

Simms managed to outdo its competition on both Instagram engagement rate and total: the brand earned a median engagement rate of 2.66% and more than 4.3M total engagements. Good content helped, but so did consistent posting at about twice the rate of other outdoor brands. Growing its follower count by 25% this year could’ve also played a role in the brand’s standout Instagram success.

UGC+humor=a match made in heaven for Simms and lots of other outdoor brands. This post featuring a fishing mishap in New Zealand entertained fans to the tune of a 16.8% engagement rate, which is more than 50x the outdoor brands median on Instagram. Fans ate up the video, and Simms benefitted a ton from being able to borrow content rather than having to create it all from scratch. As much as the social media managers for outdoor brands would probably love to be on adventures constantly to showcase gear, it’s not always logistically possible to be everywhere at once. Featuring content from other creators is a great way for brands to expand their footprint and build trust with followers about how their gear really holds up when put to the test.

Simms earned an even stronger 17.7% engagement rate with a quick looped Reel of fly fishing from an aerial view set to a Ferris Bueller soundbite. The video stood out thanks to a unique vantage point, a beloved movie reference, and some seriously amazing fish action to the tune of more than 115K engagements and nearly two million estimated impressions. UGC and a strong hashtag game also helped Simms boost its reach on this post.

This heartfelt Reel featuring a father-son duo fishing and talking about the finer points of life resonated with followers in a big way, earning an impressive 81.1% engagement rate and nearly half a million total engagements. Reminding viewers that buying (their) fishing gear can lead to precious moments like this is always a good way to show off what your brand can do for buyers. It’s also strong social media storytelling any way you slice it.

Top Outdoor Brands on TikTok

Congrats to Rossignol on the TikTok gold this year, and to overall top 10 finishers Arc’teryx and Hydro Flask for joining the ski and apparel brand on the winner’s podium. Burton Snowboards, our overall winner, also had a top-notch performance on TikTok, as did outdoor apparel brands Patagonia, Billabong, Quiksilver, and Chaco Footwear. REI was the standout retailer on the list, while Specialized Bicycles was the top-performing bike brand on TikTok.

Anyone who’s been paying attention to TikTok benchmarks knows engagement rates are much higher on this channel than on any of the others. Superfans of our TikTok benchmarking content will also remember that we measure engagement rate by view instead of by follower, because counting the number of times a viewer liked, commented, or shared and dividing it by the overall number of views measures just how compelling your content was.

Outdoor brands earned a whopping 3.46% engagement rate by view on TikTok this year and posted less than once a week at just 0.7 videos per week.

Featured brand: Hydro Flask

Hydro Flask has always been a serious contender in the race for outdoor brands social media gold, but the insulated water bottle brand set itself apart even more this year by standing out on TikTok. How did Hydro Flask land the bronze on this tricky, high-intensity channel? Doubling its follower count and publishing videos at nearly 3x the rate of the median outdoor brand definitely helped. The brand rocked a median engagement rate by view of 7.35%, which is more than 2x the outdoor brands median, and also earned four times as many views as its average competitor. Let’s dive into the content that helped Hydro Flask soar on TikTok.

Replies are an important piece of the TikTok puzzle because they help fans who engaged on one video find their way to your next piece of content. This video replying to a comment from a Hydro Flask fan earned an impressive 11.3% engagement rate by view and nearly 6 million views with nothing more than a close-up product shot and a Little Mermaid audio clip. Combining the oomph of a reply with a product announcement tease certainly didn’t hurt either.

Speaking of product announcements, Hydro Flask was all about the video equivalent of glamour shots on TikTok this year to tease new releases. The video featured some behind-the-scenes footage of the shoot plus the gorgeous main event in the thumbnail above to tease fans about the newest color in the Hydro Flask family. Hydro Flask has built a business on the “if I like it, I’ll buy it in another color” mindset, so finding a way to get existing Hydro Flask owners excited about their new drops is key. This video earned a 17.4% engagement rate by view and more than 1.3M views from people excited to add grapefruit to their collection.

Many of Hydro Flask’s most engaging videos on TikTok were under or around 10 seconds and focused on the product rather than the people behind it or customers. This video, which rocked a 10.9% engagement rate by view is no exception. Outdoor brands can show off their value to customers by showcasing their products in the wild, like in this video featuring a quick and easy infused water recipe using the Hydro Flask travel tumbler. Varying straight-up product marketing videos with ones where you give something like a recipe away for free can help fans stay engaged with your page and ultimately develop a relationship with your brand.

Top Outdoor Brands on Facebook

Outdoor brands earned a median engagement rate of 0.03% this year, which is about half what the average brand in our 2023 Social Media Industry Benchmark Report earned this year. Outdoor brands were also less active on Facebook than the average brand in that study, posting just 2.4 times per week. There were still tons of engaging posts from the slopes and the mountains for outdoor brands on Facebook this year, so let’s get into what worked well for these brands.

Way to go, Atomic! This ski brand grabbed the gold on Facebook and just missed out on the overall gold thanks to the valiant efforts of Burton Snowboards. Shimano and Petzl also rocked hard on Facebook this year, as did overall top 10 finishers YETI and Simms Fishing Products. The Orvis Company, Yeti Cycles (not to be confused with YETI coolers), Pivot Cycles, Fjallraven, and Exped rounded out the top 10 outdoor brands on Facebook this year.

Featured brand: Atomic

Atomic was all about athlete influencers on social this year, which helped the winter apparel and equipment brand secure gold on Facebook and rank second overall for outdoor brands on social media. They were no slouches on TikTok either, grabbing 11th, but didn’t tweet a single time this year, proving you don’t need the bird to soar on outdoor social media.

With a smaller follower count on Facebook than the average outdoor brand, you’d think Atomic would struggle for engagement, but it was quite the opposite: Atomic rocked the second highest engagement total and rate of all the outdoor brands we studied on Facebook this year thanks to rabid fans who couldn’t get enough of their content.

If you’re a fan of skiing superstar Mikaela Shiffrin, you probably own a pair of Atomic skis. The brand went all in on Mikaela this year with an ironclad partnership that had the skier popping up in many of Atomic’s most engaging posts on Facebook. This photo featuring Mikaela posing with a pair of Atomic skis sported an 11.6% engagement rate by follower and more than 26K engagements, with fans racing to the comments to congratulate their favorite skier on another epic season.

Speaking of influencer partnership and epic wins, Atomic wasn’t afraid to show off other top athletes affiliated with its brand, like this post about Aleksander Kilde’s big win in the Super 6 at the World Cup. The post excited fans to the tune of a 1.78% engagement rate, which is nearly 60x the outdoor brands median Facebook engagement rate. Like many brands who pay to play in 2023, Atomic took advantage of Facebook’s continuing relevance by boosting many of its top posts on Facebook, and this one is very likely no exception.

International audience? No problem. Atomic is actually based in Austria, and having a multilingual Facebook feed didn’t slow them down. This post featuring Swiss alpine skier Anuk Braendli written totally in German had an engagement rate on par with the English language post above this one. It can be tempting for brands to cater to English or Western audiences, but part of Atomic’s strength on Facebook comes from knowing where its customers are and the type of content that’ll work best for them, even if it might not work for every follower.

Top Outdoor Brands on Twitter

Shimano Fishing North America reeled in the Twitter gold this year, with Burton Snowboards and 5.11 Tactical hot on its heels. Patagonia and Burton were the only two overall top 10 finishers to also snag top 10 glory on Twitter this year, reminding us that individualized channel strategy really does matter. Columbia, HOKA, Brooks Running, Danner, Zpacks, and Trek Bikes rounded out the Twitter top 10 with standout performances.

Outdoor brands earned their lowest engagement rates of the year on Twitter at just 0.01%. Not too surprising, since they were tweeting on average just 0.02 times per week (and no, that’s not a typo). Twitter’s adoption rate is definitely on the decline for outdoor brands this year.

Featured brand: Patagonia

Patagonia used its way above average platform to do more than sell outdoor apparel on Twitter this year. The brand was all about activism, and its more than 600K Twitter followers ate it up to help Patagonia earn the second highest engagement total in the landscape. Frequency also helped Patagonia cut through the noise on Twitter: the brand tweeted a little more than once per day, which far outpaced other outdoor brands on this channel.

Patagonia wasn’t afraid to encourage followers to take action against projects and laws that it believed would harm the environment, like in this tweet about oil drilling initiative the Willow Project. The tweet combined urgency with a compelling video to earn an impressive 0.78% engagement rate by follower and more than 223K estimated impressions. The work of Patagonia and many other climate activists hasn’t managed to stop the project yet, but kudos to the brand for using its platform to take a stand.

The apparel brand leavened tweets about serious issues like the Willow Project with fun tweets like this one encouraging followers to reply with their guesses about the name of this mountain. Fans hopped into the reply stream with a mix of goofy and serious guesses alongside lots of love for their favorite California mountain to the tune of a 0.28% engagement rate and nearly 300K estimated impressions.

Stunning nature photography also helped Patagonia stand out on Twitter this year, like this tweet featuring a tree stump and likely the saw that felled it. Beautiful snaps like this prompted conservation dialogue and retweets among followers, which helped the tweet snag a 0.22% engagement rate.

It’s worth noting that there wasn’t a jacket or shoe in sight in Patagonia’s most engaging tweets by rate, reminding us that embodying your outdoor brand’s values can be just as impactful to your business as highlighting your latest product release.

See how your outdoor brand stacks up.

Grab your report here

How is my Outdoor Brand Performing on Social Media?

Comparing your outdoor brand’s social media performance has never been easier.

Browse our Live Outdoor Brand Social Media Benchmarks for a real-time look at top posts, engagement rates, high-performing hashtags, and tons more. You can even add these benchmarks directly into your Rival IQ account for always-on monitoring of these top brands.

Need even more competitive analytics? Go head-to-head with a free report on TikTok, Facebook, Instagram, or Twitter to see how you stack up against your top competition. See what makes your competitors tick with key insights and actionable advice you can start using now to come out on top.

If you’re hungry for even more stats, start a free 14-day trial with Rival IQ.

Methodology

We surveyed 120 outdoor brands on social media between January 1, 2023 and October 31, 2023 on Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, and Twitter. Using this data and a weighted formula, we generated an overall engagement ranking for each brand. The top-ranked outdoor brands on social media have high engagement rates with average or better audience size and posting volumes.

We define engagement as measurable interaction on social media posts, including likes, comments, favorites, retweets, shares, and reactions. We used engagement rate by follower to measure engagement on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter, which is defined as the total engagement divided by the number of followers. We used engagement rate by view to measure engagement on TikTok, which is defined as the total engagement divided by the number of views.

The case for benchmarking

Why benchmark instead of just measuring how your outdoor brand’s social media individual performance changes over time? Because social success is relative. Benchmarking means figuring out what’s working (and what isn’t) in your industry and measuring your success against that.

It’s crucial to go beyond likes and favorites because audience size is hugely important: 100 likes is great engagement for a brand with 1,000 followers but is a drop in the bucket to a brand with 100,000 followers. Engagement rate helps us take audience size into account to see who’s really reaching the highest percentage of their fans and followers with their social posts, which are the outdoor brands you need to beat.

Wrapping it up

We hope you had as much fun as we did digging into what made outdoor brands stand out on social media (and were at least a little inspired to plan your next hike or trip to the slopes).

Did we miss an outdoor brand on social media you love? Want to share another industry we should rank on social? Don’t hesitate to reach out to us on Twitter.

Start analyzing your outdoor brand's social with a free Rival IQ trial.

Get my free trial

The post Top Outdoor Brands on Social Media appeared first on Rival IQ.

However, like any marketing effort, posting without a solid strategy is rarely enough to drive engagement and convert audiences. The most successful beauty brands on Facebook are the ones that have honed their social media strategies to deliver targeted content that resonate with their audience.

To better understand how top brands are doing that, we’re exploring the effective tactics and trends employed by the top beauty brands on Facebook. But before we delve into the strategies, let’s take a closer look at the top 10 beauty brands that have excelled on the social network.

Top 10 Beauty Brands on Facebook

According to our latest Top 100 Beauty Brands on Social Media report, beauty brands scored a 0.03% engagement rate by follower on Facebook this year. When it came to posting frequency, there was a sharp decline compared to the year before, with beauty brands posting about 3.5 times per week, or nearly half as often as they did in 2021.

Despite the apparent step back from the Metaverse, there were still a handful of brands that knocked it out of the park with engagement rates that surpassed the median. The top 10 beauty brands on Facebook this year were:

1. Rare Beauty
2. Juvia’s Place
3. SKKN BY KIM
4. Mary Kay
5. Fenty Beauty
6. Estée Lauder
7. ColourPop
8. Kylie Cosmetics
9. Glossier
10. Sol de Janeiro
11. Charlotte Tilbury

To inspire your next post, we’re taking a closer look at the top three beauty brands on Facebook and taking notes on how they secured standout engagement levels. Let’s get started!

How the Top 3 Beauty Brands Excelled on Facebook

Rare Beauty: Creating a welcoming space in beauty

Founded by actress and singer Selena Gomez, Rare Beauty is a makeup brand centered on values of authenticity and uniqueness. Its mission to “help everyone celebrate their individuality by redefining what beautiful means” has clearly resonated as thousands of people have shown their support across social media.

On Facebook, the Rare Beauty Page has over 123K likes and 136K followers at the time of writing. Even more, the brand’s engagement rate of 0.72% was 24x greater than the industry median. What’s the secret to Rare Beauty’s success on social media? Genuine communication with its community of fans.

One notable post commemorated the brand’s two years with photos from the company celebration. With an engagement rate that was 184x the median, the anniversary post made it to the top three of Rare Beauty’s most-engaging Facebook posts of the year.

Not only did the post express how grateful the brand was to its customers but it also encouraged fans to feel more connected to the company by openly sharing how Selena and the Rare Beauty team celebrated the milestone. The effect? Thousands of positive engagements as fans showed their love for the brand, making the post a great example of engaging with fans in a way that makes them feel appreciated and included.

With a world-famous founder, it’s also no surprise that content spotlighting Selena Gomez herself helped Rare Beauty earn some of the highest engagement rates among beauty brands. Though Rare Beauty has plenty of gorgeous product shots and user-generated content, posts that starred the famous founder were practically a surefire way to boost engagement. In fact, the top 34 posts with the highest engagement rates all featured Selena.

Putting a face to your brand is always a great way to humanize it and build a deeper connection with your customers. In the case of Rare Beauty, regular content that showcases how the founder herself loves and uses the products has the dual effect of driving home the brand’s values of authenticity and encouraging fans to purchase its products.

Overall, Rare Beauty’s success on Facebook can be attributed to its commitment to establishing a human connection with its customers, as well as its ability to authentically showcase its products. By staying true to its core values and engaging with its audience in a meaningful way, Rare Beauty topped our list of top beauty brands on Facebook.

Juvia’s Place: Celebrating inclusive beauty

Juvia’s Place, a makeup brand created to bring inclusivity and the beauty of African heritage to the world, is another standout performer on Facebook with an engagement rate of 0.251%. With 411K likes and 787K followers on Facebook at the time of writing, the brand has built a community filled with lovers of its “bright, bold, and proud” products.

Juvia’s Place excelled on Facebook by working with a diverse roster of influencers and leveraging the power of video — a strategy that was perfect for showcasing its high-quality and inclusive beauty products.

For instance, the brand’s top-performing Facebook Post featured influencer Princess Rese using Juvia’s Place products to create a stunning makeup look. The video earned an impressive engagement rate of 20.7%, which is a staggering 690x greater than the industry median.

To inspire even more engagement, Juvia’s Place also never shied away from initiating interesting conversations about different makeup techniques. The below post garnered a 2.4% engagement rate by directly asking its audience to chime in on their thoughts about a new concealer hack.

By working with diverse influencers, showcasing its products in video content, and sparking discussions among its community of fans, Juvia’s Place effectively communicated its core message of inclusivity and quality. Undoubtedly, the brand’s success on Facebook serves as a testament to the power of authenticity and inclusivity.

SKNN BY KIM: Keeping it simple with star power

Created by reality star and businesswoman Kim Kardashian, SKNN BY KIM is a skincare brand that prides itself on its clean ingredients and technical science-backed formulas.

Despite being less than a year old, SKNN BY KIM has made enough waves on Facebook to be ranked third among the top beauty brands on the platform. Its Facebook Page has garnered 17K likes and 34K followers, and its smaller following helped it earn an engagement rate by follower that was 47x greater than the industry median.

Much like Rare Beauty, SKNN BY KIM benefited from the fame of its founder, once again showing just how powerful it can be to have a recognizable figure as the face of your brand. Fans would flock to show love to posts that featured the celebrity, such as the simple birthday post below that earned an incredible 9.05% engagement rate.

However, while much of SKNN BY KIM’s content featured static photos of the brand’s founder and products, its top-performing post was actually a video. The below clip of Kim’s appearance on The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon scored an engagement rate of 17.3% — that’s over 576x greater than the median!

The video’s success can serve as a reminder of two things: 1) video remains a powerful medium that encourages engagement and 2) repurposing promotional efforts is a great way to make your content work harder so you can maximize your ROI.

The Wrap Up

Rare Beauty, Juvia’s Place, and SKNN BY KIM have set the bar high for other beauty brands to follow. From leveraging the power of video to sharing user-generated content, these top beauty brands on Facebook excelled at posting content that resonates with their audience and aligns with their brand identity.

As you strive to enhance your brand’s social media performance, take inspiration from these top brands and experiment with different strategies to find what works best for you. With the right mix of creativity and data-driven insights, you too can drive stronger engagement on Facebook. Just remember to track your analytics closely and continue refining your approach over time.

The post Content Inspo from the Top Beauty Brands on Facebook appeared first on Rival IQ.

We’ve updated all your favorite metrics like retention rate, exit rate, replies, and so much more. We’ve also taken posts and Stories head to head so you can see exactly how your engagement measures up on these very different media types, and threw in some Reels data for good measure.

We included more handles, Stories, and frames than ever for a complete look at Instagram Stories to help your 2023 Stories planning.

Download the free PDF and follow along with all the greatest Instagram Stories hits.

Download the full 2023 Instagram Stories Benchmark Report

Get your PDF here

Key Instagram Stories Takeaways

Story frequency is pretty flat this year

For the first time in our reporting history, brands posted about as many Stories as in 2021. Flat isn’t bad, but it’s not growth either.

Reach Rate continues to fall

Your Stories (and posts!) are reaching a smaller percentage of your followers compared to last year. Stories are competing with Instagram posts as well as YouTube and TikTok for eyeballs.

Retention Rates are flat

Higher tap-back rates helped boost retention, but flat reply rates and increased exit rates balanced those successes to keep this critical metric flat for brands across the board.

Posts reach more than Stories

Instagram posts continue to see a much higher reach rate than Stories. Hook viewers with posts and deepen their engagement with Stories.

Download the full 2023 Instagram Stories Benchmark Report

Get your PDF here

Days with an Instagram Story

Are more Stories better than fewer? The best answer to this age-old question starts with benchmarking how often the average brand publishes a Story in a month.

A quick note on how to read these graphics: we’ve included median performance as well as metrics from the top and bottom 25% of brands so you can understand the full range for the Instagram Stories metrics that matter.

Story frequency is pretty flat, with the average brand posting an Instagram Story 11 times per month.

• The top 25% most active brands publish Stories about 17 times a month—roughly every other day.
• The least active 25% of brands publish just over 1 Story per week.

Story posting per month hasn’t changed much over the last few years: everyone is posting about as often as last year. This consistency means the majority of brands still post Stories just over twice per week.

Frames Per Day

Let’s talk Stories terminology: in our book, Stories represent a 24-hour period, while frames per day denote the number of individual photos or videos posted within a Story. Finding the “right” number of frames per day for your brand is just as important as figuring out how many Stories you should be posting in a given time period.

As you can see on the graph above, Stories with just a few frames are more common than Stories with more frames.

• About 40% of Story activity comprises days with only one frame.
• 1-3 frames account for about 65% of brand activity.
• About 15% of Stories have 7 or more frames.

More brands are using Stories in their marketing, but they’re not posting significantly higher frame counts. Finding your own brand’s average number of frames per day and factors that increase your retention rate can help fine-tune your frame frequency strategy.

Retention Rate

Retention rate by frame is one of the most important metrics for understanding how your Instagram Stories are landing with your audience. Why? Sticking around for your frames means you’ve grabbed attention and created a fan, instead of just a follower flitting through. This metric represents the percentage of viewers that have stuck around through any given frame of a Story.

• The more frames you publish, the lower your retention rate.
• Average retention rate was pretty flat this year.
• As always, the biggest dip is from 1 to 2 frames a day as users swipe past the Story.
• After that big initial drop-off, the retention decline slows down and stays above 75% through 6 frames per day.

This metric is one of the truest ways to measure the strength and resonance of your content: retention isn’t influenced by Instagram’s algorithm or in competition with another brand. It’s just your content, your viewer, and whether or not you can keep them tapping forward instead of exiting and moving on to the next Story. Focus on a first frame that hooks viewers, and then don’t be afraid to say everything you need to say: retention drops but doesn’t flatline with more frames.

Story Reach Rate

Story reach rate represents the percentage of your followers who are actually seeing your Stories. These reach rates are on the decline year over year, but don’t get discouraged—Stories are still an effective tool for many brands.

Brands saw reach rates decline in 2022 no matter their follower count.

• Mid-size brands between 50K-200K followers endured the biggest reach declines this year.
• Smaller brands with under 10K followers lost the least this year but still saw declines.

With more creators making Stories and competition from channels like YouTube and TikTok, there’s more competition for every pair of eyeballs that comes across your Story. If you made one change to increase your reach rate, it’s focusing your efforts on creating eye-catching and engaging first frames.

Another tool in your reach toolkit? Story Highlights pin your favorite frames to your profile page and help viewers discover your content long after its 24-hour expiration date in Stories.

Interactive sticker elements like links, shoppable posts, questions, and quizzes can also increase reach.

Post Reach Rate

Post reach rate, which is the percentage of your followers that saw one of your posts, declined again this year.

Handles with more than 200K followers saw the sharpest post reach rate declines in 2022. As usual, the larger your follower count, the smaller your reach rate.

Post reach rate has declined every year we’ve studied it as Instagram adds more ways for users to consume content (like Lives and Reels) and therefore further divides attention.

Post Reach Rate by Media Type

This metric helps brands understand the reach of a post expressed as a percentage of followers by media type, AKA carousel, image, video, or Reel.

• Brands saw their post reach rates decline for every media type in 2022.
• Images were hit especially hard with a 40% decline in reach rate.
• Video posts saw the smallest declines in reach this year but still suffered.
• Even Reels saw a decreased reach rate by about 25% this year.

Instagram is working hard to incentivize more video content to compete with YouTube and TikTok, so this is a good area to invest in in 2023 to engage both followers and the algorithm.

Reach Rate: Instagram Stories vs. Posts

Anyone who manages an Instagram account will tell you Stories earn reach that’s dramatically different from posts, so let’s compare the two side by side.

Small brands with follower counts up to 10K can expect around 4x more of their followers to see their posts than their Stories, with brands with larger follower counts seeing a disparity between the two at 5x or larger.

Stories continue to have a lower reach rate than posts for brands, but does that mean your brand should stop creating Stories? The short answer is no: Story impressions can be a great tool for engaging with followers and developing relationships over time.

Posts and Stories engage your followers differently and should be treated as two different tools in a marketer’s toolbox. Posts are great for a quick scroll, but if you hook viewers, Stories can really draw your audience in and keep them engaged.

By the way, if you’re wondering if there’s a right time to post on Instagram or an ideal posting frequency, we’ve got you covered.

Post Engagement per Impression

This metric represents the number of likes, comments, and saves per impression on a post.

Selecting the right denominator in your social media metrics really matters: defining engagement rate as engagements divided by followers will give you a different number than engagements divided by impressions. Whatever your preference, we’ve got you covered with this metric.

It’s worth noting that Post Engagement per Impression is usually available only for brands whose handles you manage–it’s hard to find this metric competitively (unless you’re a Rival IQ Engage Pro customer, because we’ve got estimated impressions right in our app).

Post engagements per impression declined regardless of follower counts this year.

• Mid-sized handles with between 50K-200K followers retained post engagement per impression best this year.
• The smallest and largest brands fared worse, with handles in both groups seeing about a 25% drop.

These drops in post engagement rate per impression are part of a larger trend of decreased engagement on Instagram as the platform battles for attention in the era of YouTube and TikTok.

Post Engagement per Impression by Media Type

Post Engagement per Impression gets even more interesting when you break it down by Instagram post type.

• Post engagement per impression decreased across every media type in 2022.
• Video posts saw post engagement per impression drop by more than 20%.
• Reels fared better than other post types, losing just 5% engagement per impression from 2021.

For those keeping score at home, static post types like images and carousels are still outpacing videos and Reels despite Instagram’s big investments in video this year.

Tap-Forward Rate

Tap-Forward Rate measures the percentage of your Story impressions that have a tap forward. It’s an interesting Stories metric because it can indicate both positive and negative attention: either the viewer has had enough of your content, or can’t wait another second to hit the next frame.

The more frames in your Story, the more likely it is that followers will tap forward. A few other key tap-forward stats:

• The median tap-forward rate at 5 frames per day is nearly 90%.
• Tap-forward rates stayed flat this year, suggesting attention spans haven’t decreased too much.
• If your Story contains more than 4 frames, more than 90% of your viewers are tapping forward to advance to the next frame.

Tapping forward isn’t necessarily a bad thing, but it does indicate that the viewer has either seen enough of the content or wasn’t interested in the first place. Keep your frames engaging and experiment with video to maintain your viewers throughout the entire Story.

Tap-Back Rate

Taps back indicate that a viewer wanted a closer look or to re-engage with a brand’s content, AKA every marketer’s dream. This rate represents the percentage of Story impressions with a tap back.

This year’s tap-back rate increased across the board, which is always good news. Stronger tap-back rates indicate that brands are creating content that’s just a little stickier and more engaging than last year.

• The median tap-back rate is 4.8%, but the top 25% of brands see tap-back rates closer to 7%.
• Taps back are a great indication of content that your followers want to consume more of.

When reviewing your Instagram Story performance this year, take a look at the Stories or frames that received the most taps back. Were they videos? Did they have a lot of text in them? Be sure to replicate those strategies or other Instagram Story best practices in your content planning.

Replies per 1K Impressions

Replies aren’t the easiest engagement to earn in Instagram Stories, but they indicate serious engagement from a fan or follower. Replies per 1K impressions expresses the number of replies per 1K impressions as a percentage.

Replies per 1K Impressions increased for most brands in 2022.

• Median reply rates were pretty flat this year–people have about as much to say to brands as they did last year.
• These reply rates are tiny because users mostly don’t reply—particularly in the bottom 25%, which has a teeny average reply rate close to 0%.

The best way to score an elusive reply is to ask for one by asking a question. Unfortunately, Instagram’s API continues to limit data from in-frame engagement stickers like polls and quizzes, so it’s tough to measure the impacts of these interactive elements on your engagement and reply rates.

Exit Rate

Exit rates measure the percentage of impressions that exit your Story before it ends.

Brands saw exit rates increase just slightly this year, which means viewers were about as likely to bail on a Story as they were last year.

• Exit rates start at about 12% for Stories with a single frame.
• The rate begins to really tail off at 5 frames per day and flattens out in the 4% range.

These numbers are small, and therefore nothing to panic about. Focus on strategic and engaging content, and try to do more of what worked for you in 2022 next year.

Wrapping It Up

Instagram Stories are still a critical tool in any marketer’s toolbox, and we loved seeing brands invest in Stories and get seriously creative in grabbing and keeping the attention of their followers. While posts are still reaching more eyeballs than Stories, it’s easy to see that many brands are still using Stories to deepen engagement with followers while taking them behind the scenes or getting playful.

What’s on your Instagram Stories agenda for 2023? Let us know on Twitter (or Instagram!).

Download the full 2023 Instagram Stories Benchmark Report

Grab it now

How to Find your Instagram Stories Data

Follow these simple(-ish) steps to find up to 90 days of Stories data natively in Instagram. Remember that these stats are available only for business profiles, creator accounts, or verified handles.

If you’re looking for more than 90 days of Story stats and the ability to view all your Story metrics in one place, you could always start a free trial of Rival IQ or access Instagram Insights in your existing account. Once you connect an Instagram business profile to Rival IQ, you’ll start capturing all your new Instagram Story data (alongside Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube, and TikTok stats, of course).

Methodology

Rival IQ analyzed over 72K Instagram Stories (and 281K+ frames!) posted between June and November 2022 to bring you insights for your 2023 marketing strategy.

We included 965 Instagram handles that had at least one Story published during each month of the time frame, and we only included handles with a reach of at least 100 views for each frame and a 1K total follower minimum. Handles were included only if we had all of their data for the entire time period, regardless of how frequently or infrequently they published Stories. These handles reached across multiple industries, including beauty, media, influencers, outdoor/adventure, marketing, and more.

Instagram Stories Metrics: Glossary

Instagram Story terms don’t have to be confusing, so here’s a glossary of all the important Story metrics used in this report and their definitions.

Engagement: Measurable interaction on Instagram Stories and posts, including likes, comments, replies, and shares.

Exit Rate: The percentage of your impressions that exit your Stories by swiping right, swiping down, or closing Stories.

Frame: A single photo or video posted to your Instagram Story.

Impressions: The total number of views of a frame in your Story.

Post Engagement per Impression: The number of likes, comments, and saves per impression on a post.

Post Reach Rate: The reach of a post expressed as a percentage of your followers.

Reach: The total number of unique people that saw a frame in your Story or your post.

Reply Rate: The percentage of your Story Viewers that replied to your Story on any given day.

Replies per 1K Impressions: The number of replies per 1,000 story impressions.

Retention Rate: The percentage of your Story Viewers on any given day that see all your frames.

Stories Reach Rate: Your Story Viewers on any given day divided by your follower count, expressed as a percentage.

Story: The set of frames posted to your Story within a single 24-hour day.

Story Viewers: The number of people who saw your Story on a given day.

Tap-Back Rate: The percentage of your impressions that have a tap backward to see the previous photo or video again.

Tap-Forward Rate: The percentage of your impressions that have a tap forward to see the next photo or video.

The post 2023 Instagram Stories Benchmark Report appeared first on Rival IQ.

We poured, chomped, and popped our way through 100 dynamite health food brands on Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, and TikTok (new this year!) for the ultimate guide to who’s doing well on social in this growing industry.

Crack open your favorite snack and then download the full rankings for extra insight into the top health food brands of the year.

Spoilers! See the full Health Food rankings.

Grab your report here

Top Overall Health Food Brands on Social Media

Fans of our first Top Health Food Brands on Social report will recognize heavy hitters like Jeni’s Splendid Ice Creams, Spindrift, Beyond Meat, and Impossible Foods in this year’s top 10. We’re extending a hearty welcome to OLIPOP, Real Good Foods, Kodiak Cakes, Siete Family Foods, Van Leeuwen, and siggi’s in the overall top 10 this year.

Don’t forget: we added TikTok to this year’s rankings, which means top health food brands had to perform well across four channels instead of just three. Jeni’s, OLIPOP, and Spindrift landed in the winner’s circle because of excellent social media engagement across the board, while brands like Beyond Meat, Impossible Foods, and Real Good Foods could’ve edged into the top 5 if they’d scored a little higher on tricky newcomer TikTok.

We’ll profile winning strategies from top brands throughout this report as well as key trends your health food brand should be paying attention to, but let’s start with overall winner Jeni’s Splendid Ice Creams.

Top Health Food Brand: Jeni’s Splendid Ice Creams

Midwest-based fancy ice cream brand Jeni’s Splendid Ice Creams won the overall and Instagram golds for our second report running thanks to colorful and authentic content paired with fun flavor offerings that engaged their audiences across all four major social channels. Part of the brand’s social success this year came from diverse posting strategies on Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, and TikTok rather than taking a successful post from one channel and reposting it everywhere.

Everybody loves a giveaway, and Jeni’s won big on Instagram this year thanks in part to successful contest posts like this one, which pulled in a whopping 12.9% engagement rate. We like to advise that you don’t need an epic swag package to grab attention, but as seen here, it definitely helps. Jeni’s kept the payoff high and the barriers to entry low to earn almost 50K engagements on the post, which is a great template for any health food brand looking to run contests to boost engagements and increase follower counts.

Influencers and brand ambassadors can make a huge difference for brands by authentically and enthusiastically bringing new products to their followers, and Jeni’s proves you can’t do better on the influencer front than with Dolly Parton. The Facebook post announcing the partnership in support of Dolly’s latest novel earned a 1.86% engagement rate, which is more than 46 times better than the median Facebook engagement rate for health food brands this year. A creative collab featuring a fun flavor and exclusive album in support of Parton’s new book helped create even more buzz around the announcement, and fans fell into the comments to share their love for Jeni’s and Dolly.

Jeni’s earned a 0.079% engagement rate on Twitter this year, which outpaces the health foods median by almost 4x thanks to sassy and playful tweets like this silly Photoshop job. Jeni’s social media team jumped into the cultural zeitgeist with this topical tweet about Pete Davidson’s latest girlfriend while still finding a way to show off one of their beloved ice cream flavors. The best social media teams post a mix of proactive and reactive content, and this is a smart example of the payoff of leaving room in your queue to respond to the latest trends and breaking news.

Jeni’s earned sixth place overall on TikTok this year thanks to high engagement on just 30 videos. Jeni’s most engaging TikTok video of the year by views earned an engagement rate by view of 3.03% and more than two million views with nothing more than a quick clip of our Lord and Savior Beyoncé and one of the ice cream shop’s signature flavors. Much like the brand’s success on Twitter, it pays to create content around cultural topics that are trending (but then, when isn’t Beyoncé trending?). Jeni’s TikTok videos feel much less formal and more playful than their content on other platforms, which is the best advice for any health food brand looking to break into this video-centric channel.

Top Trend 1: New products

We used our post tagging feature to automatically group posts that mention new products and releases, and found that new stuff led to at least a 20% engagement rate lift on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter for health food brands this year. Surprised TikTok isn’t on that list? More conventional posting strategies often fall flat for brands on TikTok, so it’s not too shocking that what works on other channels doesn’t work there.

Sixth place overall winner Beyond Meat dazzled fans across all channels with tons of new product offerings, like this post about new Beyond Fried Chicken. The carousel post earned more than 34K engagements and a 3.37% engagement rate, which is about 10x the median Instagram engagement for health food brands. Many of the brand’s most engaging posts featured their expanding product line, which stirred up excitement among vegan, vegetarian, and plant-curious fans everywhere. It’s worth noting that the success of this post also comes from it being a carousel, which is one of the most engaging post types on Instagram. The channel traditionally serves carousel posts more than once until a follower interacts with it, which gives a brand multiple bites at the apple for impressions and engagements.

Real Good Foods earned second place on Facebook and eighth place overall thanks to effective product release posts like this one. The Facebook post earned a 2.03% engagement rate and more than 4K engagements by layering another successful health food social media tactic on top of attention-grabbing new releases: contests. Pairing new products with a giveaway helps excite fans and gets them tasting your frozen food or snack in their mind’s, uh, mouth while also generating social engagement in the form of contest entries.

Top Trend 2: Influencers and brand partnerships

Health food brands rely heavily on partnerships with distributors and national grocery chains like Walmart and Target to bring their products to the masses, so it’s no surprise that these brands are constantly mentioning their partners in social media posts. Micro- and macro-influencers also help bring new fans and engagement for fledgling health food brands and juggernauts alike with their endorsements.

Chocolate brand Unreal Snacks ranked 15th on Instagram this year thanks in part to engagement-grabbing Reels like this one, which rocked a 12.6% engagement rate and more than 8K engagements. A hilarious video helped elevate an otherwise informational post about where to find Unreal Snacks, which is a great strategy for anyone looking for a fun way to share with fans and followers about where they can find your product. Plus, partnering with well-known brands like Costco and Whole Foods helps legitimize your brand for new followers. Instagram was very into Reels this year, so it’s no surprise that this post type performed extra well for Unreal Snacks.

Planet Oat partnered with TikTok’s favorite dietician Steph Grasso to promote their larger bottles of oat milk on Instagram to the tune of a 5.19% engagement rate. The Reel showcased six different ways Grasso used Planet Oat throughout the week, and fans drank in the brand’s creative product marketing. Grasso shared her expertise and platform to help sell Planet Oat’s offerings to her millions of TikTok followers and thousands of Instagram followers. The success of this post is a good reminder for health food brands that finding the right influencer can make a huge difference for your brand, even if they’re not a mega-celeb.

Top Trend 3: Contests and giveaways

Giveaways are a tried and true engagement strategy across all channels and industries according to our research, and health food brands are no exception. Contest posts led to engagement lifts on Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter for health food brands this year, and we expect to see this trend continuing into 2023 and beyond because of how effective it is at garnering engagement and growing follower counts.

Beverage brand Santa Cruz Organic shows us how it’s done with a new product, brand partnership, and giveaway all in one engaging Instagram post. The video earned a 19.4% engagement rate and had more than a thousand comments from fans hoping to win the prize pack. Pairing a simple ask of fans to like, follow, and tag a friend with a tart and refreshing set of prizes won big for the brand on Instagram. The success of this post is a lesson to all that hopping on one trend is good, but hopping on three trends can be even better.

Health food brands ran fewer contests on TikTok on other channels, but brands like TikTok superstar OLIPOP still managed to crack the code. This short looping video rocked an 8.16% engagement rate by view and nearly 20K views with a little help from a trending sound and the offer of a case of OLIPOP soda. Fans had a blast guessing outlandish new soda flavors in the comments, and the brand took to replying to the funniest ones from the corporate handle to give the video an extra engagement boost. Contest posts don’t have to be time-intensive or come with the swag bag to end all swag bags to be successful.

See the full Health Food rankings.

Download for free

Top Health Food Brands on Instagram

Congrats to top Instagram finishers Jeni’s Splendid Ice Creams, Beyond Meat, and Erewhon! The rest of the Instagram top 10 included tons of other top-performing brands from this report like OLIPOP, Van Leeuwen, Spindrift, Impossible Foods, and Kodiak Cakes. gimMe Snacks and Jade Leaf Matcha joined Erewhon in the Instagram top 10 despite lagging on other channels.

Health food brands earned a median engagement rate of 0.32% on Instagram this year, which is way behind TikTok and way ahead of Facebook and Twitter. These brands posted 3.4 times per week, or roughly once every other day.

Featured Health Food Brand: Beyond Meat

Plant-based meat brand Beyond Meat grabbed the silver on Instagram and 6th place overall, edging out tons of other health food brands and its main competitor Impossible Foods at every turn. Beyond Meat grabbed a 0.81% engagement rate and at 3.85 posts per week posted just a little more frequently than the average health food brand.

Beyond Meat was also a top contender on Facebook and Twitter but didn’t stand out on TikTok, reminding other health food brands that you can’t always be good at everything. Let’s get into what made Beyond Meat stand out on Instagram.

Beyond Meat’s most engaging Instagram post of the year by rate was a photo post announcing a collab with KFC to bring plant-based nuggets to the masses. The post earned more than 72K engagements and an engagement rate of 7.05%, which is 22x the health foods engagement rate median on Instagram. Brand partnership posts can help widen reach for both brands by exposing followers to a new but adjacent brand for them to follow. Trading on KFC’s name here and in other posts about partnerships with Taco Bell and Pizza Hut helped Beyond Meat go even more mainstream, and including a screenshot from business rag Fast Company also helped legitimize the brand.

Speaking of brand partnerships, Beyond Meat also found a ton of success on social with key influencer partnerships with celebs like Kim Kardashian. This post featuring the heavy-hitting influencer rocked a 4.05% engagement rate by follower and was the brand’s third-most engaging post of the year by rate. Not every brand can find a Kardashian to work with, but getting the right influencer to represent your brand can make a huge difference, even if it’s just a micro-influencer.

Many health food brands found success on social this year with flashy new product releases, like this one about new Beyond Meat jerkies. The post earned a 2.27% engagement rate and over 23K engagements, including a thousand primarily positive comments from excited fans. Beyond Meat branched way out this year from its original ground beef substitute and took to social to release carne asada, orange chicken, fried chicken, and more. Simple and colorful posts grabbed the attention of followers and got them running to their local bodega or Taco Bell to get their hands on the brand’s latest offering.

Top Health Food Brands on TikTok

Health food brands broke into TikTok in a big way and smashed engagement rates on other channels with a whopping 3.12% average engagement rate by view. Brands weren’t as prolific here as they were on Instagram and Facebook, posting about 1.8 times per week.

Eagle-eyed readers will note that we’ve ranked health food brands by engagement rate by view instead of by follower for TikTok. Why? Counting the number of times a viewer liked, commented, or shared and dividing it by the overall number of views measures just how compelling your content was. If your video didn’t grab attention, viewers will be less likely to engage with it, and therefore you’ll earn a smaller engagement rate per view. If your video was compelling enough to cause viewers to take the extra step of engagement before swiping to the next video, that’s a good bet that it’s high-quality content.

Not all health food brands are created equal on TikTok: Kodiak Cakes, Spindrift, and Jeni’s Splendid Ice Creams performed well on TikTok and landed in the overall top 10, while other top scorers on TikTok Grenade, Purely Elizabeth, gimMe Snacks, REBBL, Harmless Harvest, Magic Spoon, Forager Project, and Three Wishes Cereal weren’t necessarily rockstars on other channels.

Featured Health Food Brand: Kodiak Cakes

Pancake and waffle mix brand Kodiak Cakes dominated on TikTok this year by employing one key strategy better than anyone else: playful videos. The brand wasn’t afraid to poke fun at itself or hand over the posting to its Gen Z employees, and those choices paid off to the tune of an 11.1% engagement rate by view. An above average video frequency of 2.4 videos per week also helped grab and keep the attention of fans.

Kodiak Cakes’ second most engaging video of the year when measured by engagement rate by view featured a brand partnership with Zac Efron alongside one of the Gen Z faces from the Kodiak Cakes TikTok team. The post earned a 15.5% engagement rate by view and more than 2.4 million views, proving that the right celeb and a little fun can reach way beyond your existing follower count. Kodiak Cakes made serious pancake-flavored hay out of this partnership with Zac Efron, with many of the brand’s most engaging videos featuring the celeb.

The Kodiak Cakes social team occasionally brought in a secret weapon that was practically guaranteed to skyrocket engagement: the adorable son of Kodiak Cakes’ CEO. This reply post to a user’s comment begging for more gave followers what they wanted, and they ate it up to the tune of a 15.8% engagement rate by view and more than 26K engagements. Quips and jokes about this curly Kodiak kid pepper many of the brand’s top TikTok videos and help Kodiak continue to feel like the family business it’s always been.

It’s also worth emphasizing that this video is part of Kodiak’s commitment to replying to many or all of its comments on each post. Nesting a video into a reply is a good way to keep fans and followers in the conversation stream, and can be a source of reactive instead of proactive content.

The Gen Z geniuses behind the Kodiak Cakes TikTok weren’t afraid of a trending sound, and used a memorable song from The Quite Frankly Show to tell the founding story of Kodiak Cakes. The post earned more than 350K engagements and an 11% engagement rate by view with nothing more than a few white guys dancing badly to an old song. This video and its 3.2 million views are a good reminder that listening to your social media team when they ask you to do something dorky is always a good idea.

Top Health Food Brands on Facebook

Good on good culture for taking the gold on Facebook this year for health food brands, with Real Good Foods and Beyond Meat hot on their yogurt-y heels for the silver and bronze. Other overall top 10 brands like Siete Family Foods, Jeni’s Splendid Ice Creams, and Kodiak Cakes also performed well on Facebook this year. Brands like RXBAR, Top Seedz, Simple Mills, Bob’s Red Mill, and Kite Hill rounded out the top 10 with strong success on Facebook while struggling on one or two other channels.

Health food brands earned a median engagement rate of 0.04% on Facebook this year and posted about twice a week, which is pretty darn infrequent compared to the all-industry median at 5.9 posts per week according to our recent research.

Featured Health Food Brand: Real Good Foods

Healthy frozen food purveyor Real Good Foods grabbed second place on Facebook with an average engagement rate of 0.24%, which is about 6x the average health food brand on Facebook this year. The brand wound up in the Twitter and overall top 10 rankings as well thanks to smart strategy and effective giveaways. But Real Good Foods employed a key tactic that any health food brand can start using right out of the box: posting more. The brand posted about 14 times per week, or about two posts a day instead of the two posts per *week* of their other health food competitors. Posting so frequently helps Real Good Foods earn higher engagement totals by giving them more bites at the apple with every post rather than depending on a few key posts to earn their engagement throughout the week.

Real Good Foods was all about the giveaway on Facebook this year, with nearly all of the brand’s most engaging posts by rate offering product or gift cards in exchange for social engagement. The post above asked fans to follow RGF and tag friends for the chance to win a $100 gift card, and fans ate it up to the tune of a 2% engagement rate and nearly 3,500 entries in the form of comments. The success of this post is a good reminder that you don’t need an elaborate prize package or entry system to entice fans to enter your giveaway while boosting your engagement. RGF has really taken this strategy and run with it on Facebook by offering regular contests with low barriers to entry and high engagement rewards.

Real Good Foods’ national reach comes from successful partnerships with mega brands like Target and Walmart, and this simple photo post encouraging RGF fans to shop at Target and use the store locator earned a 1.59% engagement rate and more than 3K engagements. This giveaway post in disguise asked fans to tag their Target-loving friends and made mention of a prize only in the photo, showing RGF has trained its audience well to expect and participate in regular giveaways. More than 2,800 fans jumped into the comments to enter, which helped the post perform 6.6x better than the average RGF Facebook post.

RGF was all about the photo posts on Facebook this year: the brand was more likely to post a photo than any other post type by a mile, and photo posts earned about 150% of the engagement rate of the next most engaging post type. With photo giveaways playing such an integral part of the brand’s Facebook strategy, it’s not too surprising that this post type dramatically outstrips others in terms of frequency and success by engagement rate. Real Good Foods has clearly found what works well for its fans and has gone all in on that tactic.

See how your health food brand stacks up.

Grab the rankings here

Top Health Food Brands on Twitter

The race for Twitter glory was fierce this year, with first-place RXBAR and third-place Caulipower shining on Twitter but struggling a bit on other channels, while overall second-place OLIPOP also grabbed the Twitter silver. Other overall top 10 winners like Beyond Meat, Real Good Foods, Spindrift, and Siete Family Foods performed well, while Hain Celestial and Grainful stood out on Twitter but ranked towards the middle of the pack overall because of less than perfect performance in the Metaverse and beyond.

Health food brands were less active on Twitter than other channels we studied, tweeting just 1.4 times per week. With less of a focus on Twitter than on other channels, it’s no surprise that health food’s average engagement rate of 0.02% lagged behind Instagram, Facebook, and TikTok. Will Twitter continue to fade in relevance to health food brands moving forward? Time will tell.

Featured Health Food Brand: OLIPOP

Fancy soda brand OLIPOP was a force to be reckoned with on social in general this year, with a second place overall finish fueled by a #2 ranking on Twitter and a #4 ranking on Instagram. The brand earned a 1.88% engagement rate on Twitter, which is nearly 100x better than the median health food brand for those keeping score at home. OLIPOP tweeted about twice as frequently as their median competitor at 3.2 tweets per week, which also helped the brand by bumping up its engagement total for the year. OLIPOP made the most of Twitter’s 1:1 conversations with tons of replies, giving fans full access to ask questions or high-five their favorite soda brand.

It’s worth noting that many of the health food brands we studied have small follower counts on Twitter, which almost always leads to small engagement totals because there are fewer people to see your tweets. Measuring social success by engagement rate helps control for audience size and lets us measure brands with small and large followings right alongside one another.

OLIPOP’s most engaging tweet by rate relied on some heavy-hitting brand partnerships with Walmart and singer Camila Cabello to earn its off-the-charts 42% engagement rate. Fans flocked to like and retweet their excitement in support of the international superstar’s partnership with OLIPOP. An eye-catching photo perfectly coordinated with the OLIPOP product line and a sassy caption helped garner even more engagement, as did the power of teaming up with Walmart. Not every health food brand can land such high-profile partnerships, but finding the right ambassador for your brand can go a long way towards social success.

Nearly 40% of OLIPOP’s tweets this year featured a status update, proving the brand didn’t shy away from the chance to use text instead of photos to get its point across. The brand doubled down on this copy-first strategy with tons of replies to kibbitz with followers. This tweet announcing a banana soda offering earned a 6.96% engagement rate thanks in part to the brand taking care to respond to tons of replies to the tweet in its signature snarky tone. It’s worth noting that Twitter winner RXBAR beat out OLIPOP for the gold thanks in part to its epic commitment to Twitter replies, and is a good reminder for any brand that taking the time to reply to fans pays off on social.

Sometimes, you don’t have to reinvent the wheel to earn strong engagement, as seen in this mouthwatering product announcement tweet from OLIPOP that earned a 7.05% engagement rate. Creating a prebiotic version of fan favorite cherry cola was a hit across all channels for the brand this year, with fans jumping to reply with their enthusiasm. Brand partner Walmart kept an eye on the conversation for anyone looking to purchase OLIPOP at the megastore and replied with helpful instructions, which is above and beyond, especially for a brand with as much community to manage as Walmart. New product offerings like this one topped the charts for health food brands this year across the board, so don’t be afraid to develop something new to catch the attention of your fans.

See how your health food brand stacks up.

Grab your report here

How is my Health Food Brand Performing on Social Media?

Comparing your health food brand’s social media performance has never been easier.

Browse our Live Health Food Social Media Benchmarks for a real-time look at top posts, engagement rates, high-performing hashtags, and tons more. You can even add these benchmarks directly into your Rival IQ account for always-on monitoring of these top brands.

Need even more competitive analytics? Go head-to-head with a free report on TikTok, Facebook, Instagram, or Twitter to see how you stack up against your top competition. See what makes your competitors tick with key insights and actionable advice you can start using now to come out on top.

If you’re hungry for even more stats, start a free 14-day trial with Rival IQ.

Methodology

We surveyed 100 health food brands on social media between January 1, 2022 and September 30, 2022 on Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, and Twitter. Using this data and a weighted formula, we generated an overall engagement ranking for each brand. The top-ranked health food brands on social media have high engagement rates with average or better audience size and posting volumes.

We define engagement as measurable interaction on social media posts, including likes, comments, favorites, retweets, shares, and reactions. We used engagement rate by follower to measure engagement on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter, which is defined as the total engagement divided by the number of followers. We used engagement rate by view to measure engagement on TikTok, which is defined as the total engagement divided by the number of views.

The Case for Benchmarking

Why benchmark instead of just measuring how your health food brand’s social media individual performance changes over time? Because social success is relative. Benchmarking means figuring out what’s working (and what isn’t) in your industry and measuring your success against that.

It’s crucial to go beyond likes and favorites because audience size is hugely important: 100 likes is great engagement for a brand with 1,000 followers but is a drop in the bucket to a brand with 100,000 followers. Engagement rate helps us take audience size into account to see who’s really reaching the highest percentage of their fans and followers with their social posts, which are the health food brands you need to beat.

Wrapping It Up

We hope you enjoyed eating and drinking your way through these spectacular health food brands on social media as much as we did. Congrats to all the winners–we can’t wait to see what you get up to next year on Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, and TikTok.

Did we miss a health food brand you love? Want to share another industry we should rank on social? Don’t hesitate to reach out to us on Twitter.

Start analyzing your health food brand's social with a free Rival IQ trial.

Get my free trial

The post 2022 Top 100 Health Food Brands on Social Media appeared first on Rival IQ.

Current and prospective students are both users and trendsetters on social media platforms. It is where they connect with peers and all other players in their lives, from their preferred brands to their university of choice.

So how can higher education institutions most effectively meet college students where they are?  We have a few ideas.

In our research for the 2022 Higher Education Social Media Engagement Report, we did a deep dive into the top universities on social media. You can read through our analysis to see how your school ranked or get some inspiration for the upcoming school year.

For now, let’s focus on what the top colleges on Instagram are up to.

Guide to Instagram lingo:

• Engagement rate: Number of likes and comments
• Engagement Rate by Follower: The total number of likes and comments per follower as expressed in a percentage.
• Engagement Rate Lift: How many times better or worse a post performed compared to the average of other posts.

Learn more about common Instagram terms.

Top 8 Colleges and Universities on Instagram

Overall, higher education is dominating the game when it comes to Instagram. To put things into perspective, consider the following engagement figures from our 2022 Higher Education Social Media Engagement Report.

• The median engagement rate for all Instagram users is .067%
• Instagram users in the top 25% have a 1.39% median engagement rate
• Schools and universities have the highest Instagram engagement rate across all industries at 2.99%

Higher education knows a thing or two about connecting with its audience. Let’s take a look at the winners for the best colleges and universities on Instagram and see what these top college Instagram accounts are doing, what the data tells us, and how this information can help you improve your Instagram content.

1. James Madison University

What’s working: Celebrating wins and stunning school campus shots

Engagement rate by follower: 7.59%

Followers as of 5/31/2022: 76.3K

The #1 spot for top college Instagram accounts goes to James Madison University. The Harrisburg research school did an excellent job on Instagram this year and even saw a 43.4% increase in total engagement between June 2021 and May 2022.

So, what do the most successful posts on their Instagram page have in common? Sports, sunsets, and more sports.

Looking at the content with the highest engagement rates, we see that four of the top five feature one of their athletic teams. These posts generated an impressive 62.5K likes and comments. From stirring up school spirit for the softball team’s journey to the Women’s College World Series to celebrating the men’s basketball team’s home win, JMU’s Instagram feed posts found online success alongside their athletes.

In addition to athletic victories, Duke students and staff members love a good shot of their school campus set against a vivid pink, blue, and orange backdrop. One sunset post saw their average engagement rate nearly triple, contributing to our theory that eye-catching campus shots are a top-performing trend.

2. Texas A&M University

What’s working: Keeping things family-friendly

Engagement rate: 5.07%

Followers: 332K

Fans of all followings love being featured on public platforms. Nowhere is this more evident than in one Texas A&M Instagram post that earned them 301K likes and comments and a 96.9% engagement rate by follower.

The post captures a moment during a football game between Texas A&M and Auburn, in which the Jumbotron pans to an Aggie merch-clad mom and baby duo. Mom holds up her binky-toting baby for the camera, and the crowd goes wild. The clip was later turned into a 14-second Instagram Reel and paired with The Lion King’s famous “Circle of Life.”

Fans commented under the post with messages like “mama raising a king….. love it” and “Understood the assignment.” Other comments focused on the university’s win over Auburn.

This post was undoubtedly a stand-out moment for Texas A&M and tells us that universities should never miss an opportunity to post about their big wins and cute kids. (Bonus points if you add a touch of 90s nostalgia.)

3. University of Iowa

What’s working: Prioritizing inclusivity and community engagement

Engagement rate: 4.63%

Followers: 104K

Family-friendly content continues to be one of the best ideas for Instagram engagement.

At every home game since 2017, University of Iowa players and game attendees have participated in the Hawkeye Wave. The tradition takes place at the end of the first quarter when the crowd takes a moment to wave to the pediatric patients and others watching from neighboring UI Stead Family Children’s Hospital. The team has also started asking that week’s kid captain to choose a new song to go along with the Hawkeye Wave.

The tradition seems to be at the heart of UI athletics, both on the field and online. In a post featuring a picture and video of the Hawkeye Wave, Instagram users responded with 15.9K likes and comments. That’s 3.76x more engagement than their average post.

The caption read: “The best tradition in sports returns. ” and generated nearly as much engagement from their online audience as the post celebrating their win over hometown rival Iowa State. In other words, it was a pretty big deal.

4. North Carolina State University

What’s working: CTAs and campus pets

Engagement rate: 4.82%

Followers: 117K

NC State might rank 4th for university accounts on Instagram, but they take the cake for the cutest mascot on the app. Tuffy III is a direct descendent of the original mascot, Tuffy I, and frequents North Carolina State University‘s campus and sports arenas.

Whether celebrating his first birthday or #NationalDogDay, online supporters can’t get enough of this kind of content. Tuffy is such a hit that he appears in all four of the university’s top feed posts for total engagement and engagement rate by follower.

The university’s most successful post features Tuffy III smiling for the camera on the Carter-Finley Stadium field and brought in 3.6x more likes and comments than their average post.

The moral of this story is simple: Animals are a huge hit on social media. More specifically, pets. If you’ve got any of those running around on campus, don’t forget to snap a shot.

Another important element of North Carolina State’s top-performing Instagram posts is their captions. Each caption post comes with a direct instruction to followers, such as “Double tap to wish the goodest boy a happy 1st birthday” and “Double tap if you’re obsessed with Tuffy III. ”

By now, we’ve all heard social media experts preach the importance of using a Call to Action (CTAs.) They interrupt mindless scrolling and direct followers to the next desired step. This strategy seems to work for NC’s engagement and is easy for other college Instagram accounts to replicate.

5. Georgia Institute of Technology

What’s working: Giving creative control to students and celebrating real-life teaching moments

Engagement rate: 4.44%

Followers: 96.0K

Another fan-favorite tactic on Higher-Ed Instagram? Featuring pictures taken by students.

In January, Georgia Tech posted a current student’s photo to the college’s official Instagram account. The image captures an idyllic scene of winter flurries and a snow-covered campus.

The post saw a 14.5% engagement rate by follower, bringing in 13.4K likes and comments – 1k more than their #2 most popular post. The photographer and other Yellow Jackets marveled at the beautiful shot in the comments.

Another successful post, which brought in 12K likes and comments, documents the almost total lunar eclipse as it was visible above Georgia Tech’s Tech Tower. The caption noted how rare this occurrence was and that opportunity to take this picture would likely not come again for hundreds of years.

Instagram users flooded the comment section with excitement, wonder, and several celebratory messages written in all capital letters.

Considering the school is renowned for its engineering and science programs, it’s no surprise that one of its most popular Instagram posts features elements of both.

6. Northern Arizona University

What’s working: Opting for high-quality photos

Engagement rate: 4.40%

Followers: 65.6K

To document the transition from fall to winter at Northern Arizona University, the university posted a series of high-quality pictures capturing current students walking to class and other campus life shots. The photographer threw in some editing to emphasize the color contrast between the crunchy snow and orange, red, and yellow-dressed trees.

The photos prompted 15.8% of their 65.6K followers to interact with the post, leaving comments like “So pretty almost makes me cry” and tagging friends and family.

This was quite the stand-out moment for the university on Instagram, garnering 9.73K likes and comments and making us all yearn for frosty windows and hot chocolate.

7. University of Cincinnati

What’s working: Tapping into FOMO

Engagement rate: 4.46%

Followers: 68.4K

The University of Cincinnati is one of those schools that just really, really love their football team. The Bearcat team appears in all of the university’s top 10 posts on the app. They often use Instagram to show off impressive stadium shots, commemorate big wins, and even celebrate an on-field engagement.

With 14.1K likes and comments and a 23.9% engagement rate, their most successful post featured a video of the crowd getting ready for the 2021 homecoming game.

The video shows a sea of supporters in red, black, and white attire having fun and singing chants as the marching band plays. It is the quintessential college game-day scene.

The next most popular post is a mixed carousel of videos and photos showing the moment fans rushed the field after the AAC championship win. Game-goers sang “We are the champions” in unison, and supporters watched with FOMO from their couches.

The festivities continued online with a post that brought in 13.8K likes and comments gushing over the unforgettable college experience.

In these clips, we see festivities in which not everyone could be a participant. So by using videos rather than just static photos, UC makes its post more dynamic and brings the action closer to online supporters. This was a great way to increase engagement and stir virtual school spirit.

8. University of Pittsburgh

What’s working: Showing off campus gems

Engagement rate: 5.07%

Followers: 48.7K

University of Pittsburgh owes much of its Instagram success to the 42-story campus centerpiece: the Cathedral of Learning. Commonly referred to as “Cathy,” the skyscraper is the subject of four out of five of the college Instagram’s top performing posts, bringing in a total number of 25.33K likes and comments combined.

In one popular post, bright blue lights shoot off from the top of the building celebrating Pitt’s ACC Championship win. The post boasts a 16.7% follower engagement rate and had 7.34K likes and comments.

Another top-performing post, with 7.44K likes and comments, shows Cathy on full display in front of a pink and purple sunset.

Cathy, and all her notoriety, seems to be U of Pitt’s best bet for reaching its target audience. So if you’ve got something that makes your campus stand out, whether it’s a skyscraper, historic building, or some other notable feature, don’t be afraid to flaunt it.

Wrapping it up

Despite declining engagement across all social media platforms, Instagram continues to bring in more engagement than Facebook or Twitter.

So, when assessing your social media strategy for the school year, consider how you can use these top-performing college Instagram strategies to improve your Instagram content and better connect with followers.

The post Best College Instagram Accounts in 2022 and What We Can Learn From Them appeared first on Rival IQ.

Higher education institutions have the lofty task of sharing relevant content with many target audiences through social media, from alumni and parents to employees and donors. But current and prospective students will always be the main audience. And given that nearly half of all tweets come from users aged 16-24, it makes sense why schools should continue to make Twitter a top priority in their social strategy in 2022.

The top colleges and universities on Twitter have proven that a variety of content types, consistent branding, and plenty of school pride are just a few elements that go into a strong Twitter presence.

If you’re looking to refresh your university’s Twitter strategy for the new school year, take note of what the top colleges and universities are doing to stand out and drive engagement on the platform.

Top 10 Colleges and Universities on Twitter

We’re always impressed by higher education institutions on social media as they often outperform many industries across all platforms. And this year’s top performers on Twitter are no less impressive.

Here are the top 10 colleges and universities on Twitter in 2022:

• Texas Southern University
• Prairie View A&M University
• Virginia Commonwealth University
• BYU
• Alabama A&M University 
• Ohio University
• University of Tennessee, Knoxville 
• The University of Iowa
• James Madison University
• Grambling State University

Let’s look at strategies from some of the top performers.

Engagement rate for colleges and universities on Twitter

According to our 2022 Higher Education Social Media Benchmark Report, the median engagement rate for universities on Twitter is 0.096%. When it comes to posting frequency, schools tweeted about 8.8 times per week, a little more than once per day.

• Median Engagement Rate for Higher Education Institutions: 0.096%
• Median Posting Frequency for Higher Education Institutions: 8.8 times per week

Engaging Examples from the Top Universities on Twitter

Now that we have a benchmark rate to compare, let’s dive into a few examples from some of the top colleges to identify what they’re doing to generate engagement rates above the rest.

Texas Southern University: Making room for reactive content

Coming in at the top of our list is Texas Southern University (TSU). One of the country’s largest historically Black colleges and universities (HBCUs), TSU outperformed its fellow educational institutions on Twitter this year thanks to a couple of star-studded posts.

Scrolling through the university’s tweets, it’s clear that TSU aims to show off the achievements of its students and staff in an effort to showcase why prospective students should consider attending. And one of the biggest recruitment tools TSU had on its side this year? Getting to claim a major celebrity as one of its own.

Megan Thee Stallion graduated from TSU back in December 2021 and a tweet sharing the news was the school’s top-performing post on Twitter.

TSU’s average engagement rate on Twitter is 1.29%, but this tweet earned a whopping 477% engagement rate which was an engagement rate lift of over 2K — or about 2,000 times better than the average tweet for TSU or any of the top ten school’s on this list.

Having a celebrity graduate from your school is obviously something to shout from the rooftops, but TSU shared the news in a very organic way. The school posted a quick snap from the ceremony and even included branded hashtags like #TSUProud and #tsugrad21 to maintain the overall graduation theme, just as it would with any other student.

As if Megan Thee Stallion donning a TSU cap and gown wasn’t momentous enough, TSU had another Hollywood moment this year that helped propel the school into notable Twitter engagement levels yet again.

Drake named a song after the school (the song is literally called “TSU”) and the university shared this GIF of the rapper to acknowledge the moment.

Simply put, TSU caught the attention of multiple high-profile people and the school’s social team took full advantage.

While you can’t predict whether or not your school will make headlines or be name-dropped by a celebrity, TSU makes the case for actively keeping tabs on current events and conversations and adjusting the social strategy as needed.

At its roots, Twitter is a reactive platform. Even if you’re proactive and plan most of your school’s content ahead of time, leave room for unplanned moments and be prepared to create relevant tweets on the fly.

Alabama A&M University: Staying active and engaged

Another top-performing school on Twitter is Alabama A&M University.

AAMU’s Twitter feed is a hub for all things university-related, from campus updates to athletic game announcements to notable achievements from both current and former students.

Plus, the main account frequently retweets content from other AAMU-run accounts or tweets from people who mention the school — even if the school isn’t directly tagged, which is some impressive social listening and monitoring in action. It’s clear that the school uses a mix of content types to reach a variety of relevant audiences through this channel.

What’s also notable about this top university on Twitter is how frequently it tweets.

AAMU tweets about 20 times per week, which is well above the average of eight times per week from the other schools we analyzed.

With an average engagement rate of 0.52%, AAMU’s posting frequency could factor into that impressive rate. Posting often can increase the opportunities for the school to reach more people, engage with other accounts, and consistently get in front of current and potential students.

What’s more, one of AAMU’s top-performing tweets stood out in the feed for being a little different from the school’s usual updates and announcements.

While campus glamour shots are a popular content type for schools and universities, it’s not typically a go-to for AAMU. But this snowy campus photo resulted in one of its best-performing tweets with an engagement rate of 8.89%. This post was different from the usual school updates and retweets in AAMU’s feed, but the experiment certainly paid off.

There are many lessons to learn from AAMU’s Twitter strategy. From experimenting with an increased posting frequency to trying out content that differs from the usual, AAMU makes the case for actively putting effort into one of its most engaging channels.

Ohio University: Leaning into school pride

For colleges with a big sports culture, take notes from Ohio University’s Twitter strategy.

Athletics, namely football, is a big part of the school culture at Ohio University and that pride is evident throughout the school’s tweets.

In fact, Ohio University’s most engaging tweet this year is football related. The tweet earned a 5.88% engagement rate which is 26x higher than the school’s average engagement rate of 0.22%.

This stand-out tweet is a reference to Joe Burrow, a pro football player with ties to Ohio who played in the 2022 Super Bowl for the Bengals. Although Burrow only briefly played for the school, the Ohio University community is clearly proud of its connection to the player, as evident by the engagement on this simple yet effective tweet.

Ohio University’s other top tweets are also a reference to Burrow playing in the Super Bowl and generated high engagement rates for the school this year.

The takeaway? School pride is a very real thing among current and former students alike, not to mention sports fans, parents, and even locals. For schools that have a big fan base around the sports teams, don’t be afraid to lean into that culture if that’s what your followers engage with.

It’s also a good idea to experiment with different post types to keep your feed fresh and see what resonates most with your audience. For instance, the first example from Ohio University is a status update with no photo, video, or link to go with it — and it performed better than the second example which included an image.

University of Tennessee, Knoxville: Experimenting with post types

Another school that performs above the rest on Twitter is the University of Tennessee, Knoxville.

UT Knoxville keeps its feed full of resourceful content that touts the achievements of its students and staff while also piquing the interest of future students, parents, and even donors, making this channel both a resource and recruitment tool for the school.

It’s also worth noting that UT Knoxville has the most followers out of all of the top-ranking schools on Twitter, so it’s clear that it has a dedicated fan base that wants to keep up with the school’s latest content and updates.

When it comes to content distribution, UT Knoxville primarily uses links to share updates and promote its community, as shown in the red box below. However, the post type that generates the highest engagement among schools and universities on Twitter is a GIF, as outlined in the blue box.

So, what happened when UT Knoxville steered away from its most-used post type and experimented with a GIF?

This GIF tweet earned a spot in the school’s top-performing posts with a 1.66% engagement rate, which is 10x greater than the school’s average rate of 0.16%.

Every school’s social strategy is different, and the best strategy is the one that consistently works for you. While links aren’t the most engaging post type on Twitter overall, UT Knoxville makes them work for its Twitter strategy. But this top-performing tweet is also proof that it can be worth experimenting with different post types, especially ones that have proven to work with the competition.

University of Iowa: Embracing school traditions

The University of Iowa is no stranger to being a top performer on social media as it has consistently dominated our higher education benchmark reports in years past. And this year, the university has stood out as a top school on Twitter.

Similar to Ohio University and other D1 schools, the University of Iowa has a strong football culture and relies on that fan pride when executing its Twitter strategy. The school’s most engaging tweets for the year are all football-related, as shown in our analysis below.

With an average engagement rate of 0.16%, one of its highest-performing posts is a video that received an engagement rate of 2.86% and garnered over 60K video views.

The video showcases a fairly new and inspiring school tradition in which everyone in the stadium (including the players from both teams) turns to wave at the nearby children’s hospital for one minute.

The heartwarming act is a tradition that resonates with many — football fans or not — because it humanizes the game, encourages participation from everyone, and brings an entire community together.

If you want to follow the University of Iowa’s lead, lean into traditions — especially ones that a wide audience can participate in. Most universities have traditions that are near and dear to everyone’s hearts, and Twitter is the place to amplify those traditions each year. Showcasing these moments conjures up feelings of school pride for current and former students and supporters alike.

Plus, just like the consistency of a tradition itself, consistently creating content around timely traditions gives followers something to look forward to each year.

Wrapping it Up

Twitter continues to be a go-to platform for schools to share campus updates, notable events, and student achievements while communicating with a variety of audiences.

These schools set the bar high for universities on Twitter, but by taking note of what they’re doing to achieve high engagement rates on Twitter, you’ll have plenty of inspiration for how to create a winning Twitter strategy for the school year ahead.

The post Top 10 Colleges and Universities on Twitter in 2022 appeared first on Rival IQ.

He’s laughing again. I glance up to see my husband lounging on the couch, phone in hand, chuckling to himself as he scrolls, scrolls, and scrolls some more. This has become somewhat of a nightly ritual at the end of each day, catching up on his favorite Twitter accounts and sorting through pages of humorous threads and replies. While he almost certainly runs across informative, educational, or thought-provoking tweets, I rarely hear about them. However, he’s always eager to share the funny ones with me.

He’s far from alone. As society’s content expectations continue to evolve, people are turning to social media for comedic relief, and the demand for quirky, off-the-wall humor is on the rise. Many brands in the fast food industry are embracing good old-fashioned roasting to stay relevant, and top of mind among consumers, particularly the typically hard to impress Gen Z. Originally reserved for improvisational comedians, fast food restaurants are now roasting competitors and consumers in the form of quick-witted comebacks and sassy responses, and no one does it better than the self-proclaimed “First Lady of Fast Food,” Wendy herself.

Check out Wendy’s recent sizzling tweets on Twitter’s Best of National Roast Day 2022 list and see how the brand interacts fearlessly on social.

Wendy Is The First Lady of Fast Food

Don’t let the sweet pigtails and innocent smile fool you. Wendy’s is the queen of comebacks and absolutely savage when it comes to roasting competitors and consumers alike on Twitter. With more than 6,500 restaurants globally, The Wendy’s Company is the world’s third-largest quick-service hamburger company, with a market cap of $4.5B and over 3.8 million Twitter followers. Over the last few years, the brand has perfected the act of serving fun-loving snarky tweets, but this hasn’t always been the case.

Circa 2017, Wendy’s realized its play-it-safe corporate social media strategy was for the birds. The strenuous approval process wasn’t conducive to cultivating an organic, engaged base of loyal followers, so they eliminated bureaucratic reviews for their Twitter account. After empowering their social team, Wendy’s has surged ahead as one of the most effective brands online. Their commitment to tone and individuality makes the brand an authentic trailblazer, transforming the Twitter account from a one-way communication machine into a battleground of the wits. This is a point of pride, as illustrated in their Twitter bio: “We like our tweets the same way we like to make our hamburgers: better than anyone expects from a fast food joint.”

She’s Consistent, Creative and Refreshingly Funny

While humorous, sassy engagement may not be for every company, it’s hard to deny that roasting has become an effective focal point of Wendy’s social media reputation.

For one, the fact that Wendy’s created an entire messaging ecosystem around “beef,” or creating and responding to conflict head on, is masterful. One theory is that the term “beefing” originated in the old west among sheep farmers who were competing for grazing land with cattle farmers. The sheep farmers used the term with each other to refer to a conflict, which was what they had with the cattle farmers, or “beef” farmers. For a hamburger company, the term applies not only to their product but the way they’ve chosen to communicate. It’s funny, it makes sense… it just works.

Secondly, the sheer creativity required to leverage so much mileage out of this message is quite impressive. In 2018, following their banner breakout year of roasting everyone from McDonald’s to Burger King and beyond, Wendy’s went the extra mile and released an EP entitled “We Beefin’.” The 10-minute compilation, featuring tracks like “Twitter Fingers” and “Rest in Grease,” was immediately available on popular streaming platforms like Spotify.

This kind of exemplary true-to-brand communication and content creation is admirable. Every company should strive for this kind of commitment and consistency in order to grow and keep a loyal following online. Two years later, Wendy’s remains true to her roots, issuing sick responses left and right that keep people on their toes (and keep spectators laughing).

She Doesn’t Let Other Brands Push Her Around

Wendy’s is particularly skilled at monitoring mentions and the competitive landscape, joining the conversation when she sees fit (which is often). Sometimes that’s unprompted, and other times it’s when another brand intentionally starts something as part of their campaign to launch their new Spicy Ghost Pepper Donut, Dunkin’ fired social media shots at multiple fast food restaurants. While other brands simply ignored the mild attack, Wendy’s couldn’t help but burn back.

Ouch.

What followed was a sad attempt by Dunkin’ to “outtweet” the First Lady, which obviously failed. Wendy’s is just superior when it comes to issuing sassy comebacks, and things almost always backfire when another brand attempts to prove otherwise.

Another food fight recently broke out when McDonald’s released their version of spicy chicken nuggets, a well-known staple on Wendy’s menu. When a Twitter user inquired about her thoughts on the news, Wendy’s social media team took the opportunity to roast not one but two industry competitors at the same time.

By maintaining their quick-witted reputation, Wendy’s continues to remain on top: on top of the brand’s Twitter game and top of mind among consumers. This is especially important for a restaurant when just one brand mention is enough to put a mouth-watering craving in motion for a hungry follower.

She Gives Customers Want They Want, Even If It’s a Sizzling Personal Roast

Wendy’s social media team operates Twitter like a true two-way communication platform, prioritizing customer interaction above all else. That’s especially important given this is what people have come to expect in our fast-moving, instant gratification world. As one might expect, people regularly take to social media to air grievances about a poor customer service interaction or product experience. Unhappy customers are looking for immediate resolution, and social media is a quick way to get the brand’s attention in a public forum.

While Wendy’s is known for her sassy tone, she knows when to be serious too. By swiftly addressing customer service complaints and questions with action-oriented responses, including commitments to get in touch with specific franchises to make things right, Wendy’s nips problems in the bud. This way, the brand can move on, focusing on entertaining and connecting with audiences instead of dwelling in the daily drama.

That said, followers also purposefully reach out just to get a famed tongue-in-cheek response from the brand. Wendy’s has developed a reputation for issuing short, snappy comebacks that customers crave almost as much as their menu. There’s a certain thrill that comes along with writing back and forth with an influencer, celebrity, or brand account. It seems unlikely that they will respond unless they have to, so when they do, it is exhilarating and delightful. In these cases, Wendy’s social media team is not afraid to dish it out.

To be sure, the fast food industry is a unique sandbox to play in. The brands have consistent products and reliable service, so they can afford to take some risks in how they use social media. While some industries like convenience stores have adopted a similar tone and approach, Wendy’s snarky social media strategy isn’t one size fits all (so copycat with caution: we’re looking at you, Dunkin’). No matter if your brand can pull it off or not, it’s a fun case study to see how acting outside the box can pay dividends if executed just right.

This post was originally published in 2021 and has since been updated.

The post What You Can Learn from Wendy’s Social Media Strategy  appeared first on Rival IQ.

We surveyed our favorite wine, beer, gin, tequila, bourbon, and hard seltzer brands to analyze all the top alcohol social media campaigns on Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter. Read on for top alcohol social media trends, alcohol brands killing it on all three channels, and the definitive rankings of all your favorite alcohol brands on social media.

Shake up your favorite cocktail, and let’s get reading!

Cheers! See the full Alcohol rankings.

Grab your report here

Overall Top Alcohol Brands on Social

Cheers to Yuengling for grabbing the gold this year for alcohol brands on social media! Russian River Brewing and Blue Chair Bay Rum rounded out the winners’ podium with second and third-place finishes respectively. Whiskey distilleries Michter’s Whiskeys, Eagle Rare, and Buffalo Trace and breweries Cape May Brewery, Shiner Beers, and Austin Beerworks rounded out the top 10, while Truly Hard Seltzer outperformed every other hard seltzer brand that’s come on the market in the last few years. Meanwhile, gin, tequila, and wine lovers everywhere might be scratching their heads and drowning their sorrows. Congrats to all the winners!

Without further ado, let’s get into the top alcohol social media campaign trends of the year.

Alcohol Social Media Campaign Trend: Contests and Giveaways

It’s a truth universally accepted on social media that everyone likes free stuff, so the fact that giveaways were seen in many of the most engaging posts of the year on every major channel is no surprise. (Spoilers: this is true for nearly every industry.) For the price of a little free product or swag, brands can expect serious engagement on giveaway posts as fans follow directions for the chance to win. Many brands further amplify impressions by encouraging fans to check back on the original post to see if they’ve won.

Southwest craft brewery Four Peaks saw nearly 16,000 engagements with an Instagram giveaway featuring basketball tickets. This post’s 49% engagement rate was the second-highest Instagram engagement rate of the year for alcohol brands, reminding us that asking fans for a little heavy lifting to enter a contest is completely feasible as long as the prize matches the effort. It’s worth noting that many other alcohol brands saw great success with giveaway posts that were much less grand than Four Peaks’, so you don’t necessarily need an expensive prize to win big engagement.

When you have 50 pairs of custom branded jorts (jean shorts) to give away and just 1,000 Facebook followers, all of whom seem to get your humor, you get a dynamite Facebook post with a stellar engagement rate. Mike’s Hard Seltzer went, well, hard on this giveaway, with a slick music video and presumably a lot of boosting on Facebook to score this many engagements with a small follower count. Many brands go all-in on one enticing prize package when doing a giveaway, but 50 pairs of jorts meant the brand could engage with followers with replies dozens of times more than just announcing one winner. Not all brands can afford an expensive commercial like Mike’s, but there’s definitely something to learn with the brand’s approach to giveaways.

Alcohol Social Media Campaign Trend: Product releases

With much of 2021 spent at home in lockdown, alcohol brands capitalized on our attention (and increased interest in drinking) with loads of new flavors and products for us to spend money on. While brands like Buffalo Trace and Eagle Rare have social media feeds that reflect their obsessive commitment to an unchanging recipe, breweries and hard seltzer makers were all about the new.

Seltzer brands like High Noon, Truly Hard Seltzer, and Vizzy Hard Seltzer released oodles of new flavors and ways to drink this year from tropical to popsicle and way, way beyond. This Instagram campaign from High Noon hyped up fans by inviting them to guess the brand’s latest flavor release and grabbed the brand a 16% engagement rate. Even though hard seltzer’s popularity seems to be waning, it really had a moment in 2021, and distilleries tried to capitalize on that popularity by releasing a new flavor seemingly every day of the week. There’s something to be said for shiny new things, especially in the age of COVID lockdowns and increased consumer spending.

Bourbon distillery Basil Hayden’s took a new product release a step further by pairing it with a giveaway of a gorgeous custom oak bar, and fans turned out for a chance to express their excitement for a new product while vying for free stuff. The campaign was one of the distillery’s most engaging of the year with an 8.14% engagement rate on Instagram. Pairing tried-and-true social media strategies like giveaways with new releases is a great way to grab attention on every major social channel, so don’t be afraid to take a page out of Basil Hayden’s social campaign playbook.

Alcohol Social Media Campaign Trend: Community Connections

Consumers’ thirst for authentic and thoughtful communication from brands have never been higher, and many top alcohol brands came through by favoring heartfelt messages over slick commercials. It can feel easy for brands to fall back on marketing assets or market-tested slogans, but some of the most engaging social media campaigns of the year for alcohol brands were nothing more than a thoughtful message to fans.

Stone & Wood Brewing Company announced their acquisition by global beverage company Lion on social media with honesty, care, and emotion in a thoughtful letter to fans. Followers immediately jumped in the comments to congratulate their favorite brewery on their next chapter to the tune of a 6.94% engagement rate, which blows the 0.28% median Facebook engagement rate for alcohol brands out of the water. The brewery further amplified engagement on the post by responding to many fans to thank them for their support and answer questions.

Many of Austin Beerworks’ top posts on social this year had nothing to do with their tasty beer, and this Instagram post is no exception. The brewery jumped to help Texas residents during the big freeze of February 2021, and this sweet post checking in and saying thanks grabbed tons of engagement from fans to the tune of a 3.52% engagement rate. Followers jumped into the comments to express gratitude right back to the brewery for being so community-minded, and out-of-state followers promised to order up some of the brewery’s offerings in support. Social media can be a scary place sometimes, but brands like Austin Beerworks remind us that there’s plenty of room for good on social too.

Featured alcohol brand: Yuengling

Pennsylvania brewery Yuengling shows us you don’t have to be the best on any one channel to be a top alcohol brand on social media. Yuengling ranked 5th on Instagram, 2nd on Facebook, and 10th on Twitter while still grabbing the overall gold, reminding us that it’s important for brands to invest as fully as possible in creative social content that engages followers, rather than putting all eggs in one basket.

Yuengling saw about 2x the median alcohol engagement rate on Instagram and Facebook while lagging a little on Twitter, and posted about twice as frequently as the median alcohol brand on all three channels.

Did you know #NationalBeerCanAppreciationDay was a thing? Yuengling did, and this Instagram carousel campaign celebrating this niche holiday scored a whopping 9.44% engagement rate and was the brewery’s post with the highest engagement rate of the year. We’ve seen again and again that carousel posts boost engagement by serving the photos within to your followers until they’ve swiped through or engaged with the post. That engagement boost meant Yuengling had six chances (one for each photo in the carousel) to invite their photos to partake in a little nostalgia. The brewery’s success here demonstrates it’s generally a good idea to group photos together on Instagram if you can rather than posting individually.

When you post on Facebook and see nearly 10,000 reactions with just 10 angries , you know you’re doing something right on social. Yuengling’s beers are famously available only on the East Coast, and followers were stoked to learn Yuengling is now available in Texas. Comments ranged from tears of joy to bootleg offers to other geos begging Yuengling to continue to expand its footprint. This Facebook video post was Yuengling’s most engaging post of the year with a stellar 5.08% engagement rate and thousands of shares, and many of the brewery’s top posts on other channels also had to do with the Lone Star State.

Sometimes, social media strategy is complex, pre-planned, and expensive. Other times, social media strategy is as simple as asking followers to retweet if they prefer your beer in bottles and favorite if they prefer it canned. Yuengling saw a lot of success with this small request of followers and simple graphics, with several of their top tweets asking followers to vote in the form of a tweet engagement. This tweet was Yuengling’s fourth-most engaging tweet of the year with a 1% engagement rate, which is about 5x the Twitter median for alcohol brands. Fans even took it upon themselves to reply to the tweet with further clarification about their opinions for Yuengling containers, which helped further amplify the tweet’s reach.

Top Alcohol Brands on Instagram

From Tequila Avion to Empress Gin to Russian River Brewing and beyond, the alcohol champs on Instagram this year represent an even split between the various types of alcohol. Brands like Yuengling and Blue Chair Bay Rum saw top scores on Instagram alongside strong finishes on other channels, while brands like Aviation American Gin and winery Ruinart clearly focused on Instagram at the expense of engagement elsewhere.

Top alcohol brands on Instagram enticed followers and likes with gorgeous product images, exciting new releases, and plenty of giveaways to boost follower counts and engagement numbers. The average alcohol brand on Instagram saw a median engagement rate of 1.26% and posted about 3 times per week, or about every other day.

Featured alcohol brand: Truly Hard Seltzer

For a brand that didn’t exist five years ago, Truly Hard Seltzer is punching way above its weight on social, especially compared to brands like Shiner Beers (founded in 1909) and Buffalo Trace (founded in 1787). Okay, so there wasn’t social media in the 1700s–Truly has still had less time to amass a following and engagement. The seltzer brand ranked 5th overall, with notable 4th place finishes on Instagram and grabbing the bronze on Twitter.

Truly rocked a 2.21% engagement rate, which is nearly twice the average of alcohol brands we surveyed here. The seltzer brand also posts slightly more frequently than the average alcohol brand on Instagram at about four posts per week, which helps boost their engagement rate and totals.

Giveaways are a tried and true recipe for social engagement across many industries, but Truly saw some of the biggest engagement numbers of any alcohol brand we surveyed. This giveaway campaign featured an easy ask for followers with a big payoff in boozy products and swag. Followers turned out in droves to the tune of an 18.9% engagement rate and nearly 20,000 engagements, suggesting that seltzer-infused gummy bears are everything the world has been waiting for. This giveaway post grabbed Truly’s highest engagement rate of the year and serves as a good reminder that giveaways are a popular strategy for good reason.

Being a new(ish) alcohol brand has its perks, including the ability to innovate endlessly on your flavors to ramp up excitement among followers and customers. Many of Truly’s top Instagram posts feature wacky new flavors and offerings like these boozy ice pops, and followers eat (and drink) them up, in this case to the tune of a killer 12.4% engagement rate. Pairing this new product with a jazzy GIF and a quick request for followers to share where they’re buying this limited release led to tons of excited comments and followers tagging their friends, which further amplified this post’s online reach.

Truly’s vibe on social is technicolor, and many of the brand’s top posts feature their colorful cans on even more colorful backgrounds. This bright GIF features cans of Truly exploding with fruit in celebration of a new flavor and rocked a 7.20% engagement rate, which is about 6x the alcohol median. Truly never struggles to catch followers’ eyes on social, but this video is a particularly good example of content that stands out in a news feed.

Truly gets extra points for post type diversity on Instagram: while many alcohol brands tend to favor photo posts for ease, Truly’s top ten Instagram posts are a mix of photos, carousels, and videos.

See how your alcohol brand measures up with the full rankings.

Grab your report here

Top Alcohol Brands on Facebook

This year’s top alcohol brands on Facebook were a little all over the place in that many of the highest performers on Facebook didn’t do so hot on other channels. First-place winery and winner Nieto Senetiner grabbed the gold on Facebook but were near the bottom of the barrel on Instagram and Twitter, which was also true for Founders Brewing and winery Masi Agicola. Yuengling, Buffalo Trace, and Michter’s Whiskey performed better across the board, with top finishes on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter. The median alcohol brand Facebook engagement rate was 0.28%, and alcohol brands posted about 3x/week on average.

Featured alcohol brand: Buffalo Trace

Bourbon brand Buffalo Trace ranked fifth on Facebook this year thanks to some seriously successful social strategy and isn’t doing too shabby on Instagram and Twitter as well with sub-top-20 finishes on both. The distillery saw a 0.3% average engagement rate this year, which is just a little higher than the industry average seen in this report.

So why did Buffalo Trace rank so high on this channel? Hint: it rhymes with ghosting piquancy . Buffalo Trace posted about 8x/week on Facebook, or about twice as often as their average competitor. Posting consistently helped the distillery create more opportunities for their followers to engage and meant their engagement totals were sky high compared to the average alcohol brand on social this year.

Does this mean your alcohol brand’s social media strategy for 2022 should be “post more at all costs”? No way. Posting more frequently gives you a competitive advantage on social only if you’re posting high-quality content. If you want to figure out how often to post on social media for your industry, we’ve got you covered.

Let’s look at a few examples of high-engagement Facebook alcohol campaigns from Buffalo Trace.

Buffalo Trace is all about giving the people what they want, as long as what they want is bourbon. The distillery saw a lot of success on social this year with mouthwatering close-ups of their signature offering. This UGC shot of the distillery’s bourbon paired with a simple question about increasing the bottle size led fans to clamor for more bourbon per bottle in the comments, alongside many an accolade for the brand. This campaign was the brand’s most engaging Facebook post of the year with nearly 4,000 engagements and an engagement rate of 1.36%, or nearly 5x the median engagement rate for alcohol brands.

None of the distillery’s top posts on Facebook featured so much as a face, let alone multiple people enjoying their bourbon, so it’s clear that Buffalo Trace knows their followers engage best with their product standing alone. Buffalo Trace’s success with this simple post is a good reminder for everyone that content doesn’t need to be expensive, fancy, or over-produced to succeed on social.

Many of Buffalo Trace’s top Facebook posts featured bourbon’s best friend: meat. From recipes to UGC to cocktails, Buffalo Trace encouraged fans to take their bourbon beyond a glass on the rocks. This top-performing alcohol campaign featuring a fan photo of their barbecue setup is a prime example of UGC at its finest: reposting this fan’s Buffalo Trace and beef led other fans to take to the comments with their own photos of grilling while drinking, which further multiplied Buffalo Trace’s stash of fan photos to repost on social.

Buffalo Trace was not above the #humblebrag on Facebook with an emphasis on the brag, with many of the brand’s top posts featuring exciting wins from around the world. This campaign shared a big win for the distillery at the 2020 International Spirits Challenge, and fans showed up to raise a glass and share their congratulations. (Of course, it doesn’t take much of an excuse for Buffalo Trace fans to pour a glass of the good stuff.) With more than 2,000 engagements and an engagement rate more than double the industry median, Buffalo Trace has a lot to celebrate with this post.

Top Alcohol Brands on Twitter

Congrats to Austin Beerworks on a first-place finish on Twitter this year, and grabbing 10th in the overall rankings. Other top 10 overall finishers like Truly Hard Seltzer, Blue Chair Bay Rum, and distillery Eagle Rare scored top marks on Twitter, while breweries Krombacher and SA Breweries scored great on Twitter but bombed on other channels. Alcohol brands tweeted 6x/week on average, which is a little less than a tweet a day, and saw a median engagement rate of 0.21%.

Featured alcohol brand: Austin Beerworks

Austin Beerworks cleaned up on Twitter this year with a first-place finish, killer engagement rate and total numbers, and the most engaging tweet in the entire industry by engagement rate. This Texas brewery averaged a 0.85% engagement rate on Twitter, which is more than 4x the alcohol industry average.

While many alcohol brands succeeded on social this year by posting photos of their delicious boozy offerings or funny memes, Austin Beerworks’ success can be attributed to something different: genuine connection to their community. From offers to help during the big Texas freeze of February 2021 to progressive hiring practices, the brewery wasn’t afraid to put community over profit in their actions and their tweets.

The tweet above is the aforementioned most engaging tweet of the year in the alcohol industry by engagement rate with a whopping 64% engagement rate by follower. This generous offer to supply free drinking water to neighbors in need during a raging winter storm in Texas resonated with followers and beer fans without so much as a photo to grab attention. Austin Beerworks’ heartfelt tweet is a reminder to us all that sometimes the best marketing is standing by your values even when times are tough (or cold).

Austin Beerworks’ second most engaging tweet of the year grabbed a whopping 19.7% engagement rate taking a stand against the myth that low-wage jobs are difficult to fill because of laziness. It would’ve been easy for the brewery to decide not to wade into the divisive issue of unemployment, but this tweet and the brewery’s thoughtful discourse in the replies makes it clear that Austin Beerworks stands up for what they believe in (and that their social media person has carte blanche). The brewery was able to add followers this year instead of losing them despite finding success on social with topics that wouldn’t be considered “safe” or “approved” by many alcohol brands.

Speaking of divisive tweets, Austin Beerworks announced it would keep its indoor masking policy in place even after the governor of Texas lifted mask guidance statewide in March 2021. One might think that the 3.77% engagement rate on this tweet came from furious Texans begging the brewery to comply with the governor’s guidance, but it was quite the opposite: fans turned out in droves to commend Austin Beerworks for keeping its staff and customers safe, and more than a few replied to say they planned to become new customers based on this policy. Austin Beerworks shows us again and again that sticking with closely-held values is both the right and the engaging thing to do.

Live Alcohol Social Media Benchmarks

Comparing your alcohol brand’s social performance has never been easier. Browse our Live Alcohol Brand Social Media Benchmarks for a real-time look at top alcohol posts, engagement rates, high-performing hashtags, and tons more. You can even add these benchmarks directly into your Rival IQ account for always-on monitoring of these top brands.

Need even more competitive analytics? Go head-to-head with a free report on Facebook, Instagram, or Twitter to see how you stack up against your top competition. See what makes your competitors tick with key insights and actionable advice you can start using now to come out on top.

If you’re thirsty for even more stats, start a free 14-day trial with Rival IQ.

Methodology

We surveyed 180 alcohol brands between January 1, 2021 and September 30, 2021 on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter. We included a selection of alcohol brands from our 2021 Social Media Industry Benchmark Report and others labels from our team. Using this data and a weighted formula, we generated an overall engagement ranking for each alcohol brand and used it to rank the top 100 alcohol brands on social. The top-ranked brands have high engagement rates with average or better audience size and posting volumes. We reviewed a mix of boosted and organic posts.

We define engagement as measurable interaction on social media posts, including likes, comments, favorites, retweets, shares, and reactions. Engagement rate is defined as the total engagement divided by audience size.

Due to Instagram API limitations, we’re able to pull accurate Instagram engagement numbers only for verified and/or Instagram business accounts.

Why Alcohol Brands Should Benchmark on Social Media

Why benchmark instead of just measuring how your brand’s individual performance changes over time? Because social success is relative. Benchmarking means figuring out what’s working (and what isn’t) in your industry and measuring your success against that.

It’s crucial to go beyond likes and favorites because audience size is hugely important: 100 likes is great engagement for a brewery, winery, or distillery with 1,000 followers but is a drop in the bucket to an alcohol brand with 100,000 followers. Engagement rate helps us take audience size into account to see who’s really reaching the highest percentage of their fans and followers with their social posts, which are the alcohol brands you need to beat.

Wrapping It Up

We hope you enjoyed reading about our favorite alcohol brands and trends on social media this year, and we also hope it didn’t drive you to drink if your brand wasn’t among the winners.

Special shout-out to the Rival team who willingly took shots of Fernet-Branca–your #FernetFaces did not disappoint.

Did we miss an alcohol brand you love? Don’t hesitate to reach out to us on Twitter.

Start analyzing your alcohol brand’s social with a free Rival IQ trial.

Get my free trial

The post Top Alcohol Brands on Social Media appeared first on Rival IQ.

We just couldn’t get enough nerdy social media stats in our annual 2021 Social Media Industry Benchmark Report, so we rolled up our sleeves and pushed our glasses up our noses to really geek out.

What to expect

Let’s set some expectations so readers of our usual content don’t run away screaming:

• Cursing abounds: It was a f*cking weird year, and we will swear like sailors when explaining what happened because some of it is, well, f*cking weird.
• Language matters: Throughout this report, we refer to the June and July 2020 time period as the Murder of George Floyd by white police officer Derek Chauvin instead of a more mild “Black Lives Matter” or “June protests” on purpose. We believe it’s important to attribute any negative social media impact to the despicable actions of police officers working within a white supremacist system instead of to everyone, and especially Black, Indigenous, and People of Color leaders, who bravely protested these actions. We sincerely hope this language is not triggering to the BIPOC community but if we made the wrong language choice, we would be honored if you expended the emotional labor to tell us about it on Twitter.
• We’re going granular: Each year in our benchmark report, we share the median values for engagement rates and posts per week, in both cross-industry and per-industry forms. Evaluating these benchmarks across the year helps us understand how these numbers are evolving over time and illustrates the impact of national and world events on the metrics, but in this report we’re going to break things down by quarter and even major event so you can see the impacts of a tumultuous year.

Let’s take a look at these numbers channel-by-channel to gain that understanding.

Instagram engagement in 2020

It’s no secret to social media marketers that Instagram has been the reigning engagement power player for brands for years now. That means it’s more important than ever to be fully versed on how the ups and downs of a big year like 2020 can affect social media engagement.

In this section, we’ll break things down across the year, spotlight what the top brands are doing right on Instagram, and roll out brand-new IGTV benchmarks to help you compare your performance to other brands and industries.

Instagram Benchmarks Over Time

Instagram consistently has the highest engagement rates of the three we study in this report. For the calendar 2020 year, we reported that Instagram had an average engagement rate per post of 0.98%, down from the previous year’s value of 1.22%. The median brand also published slightly fewer posts, down from 4.3 posts per week in 2019 to 4.1 posts per week in 2020.

Above, we see the quarter-by-quarter time series for each of our metrics for the entirety of 2020 and Q1 2021.

Starting with the top graph, you’ll note that engagement rates started above 1% in Q1-2020 but declined consistently starting in Q2-2020. Comparing engagement rates for Q1-2020 vs Q1-2021, engagement rates are down 23%.

Instagram posting volume was more consistent: the average brand posted about 4.15 times per week during 2020, with only small deviations from quarter to quarter.

Of course, examining these numbers at a quarterly level gives us a broad perspective on the trends of these metrics. To get a better sense of how the calendar, COVID, and other key events during the year affected engagement and posting volume, let’s look at the weekly values as well.

In the chart above, we examine the same metrics for each week from January 2020 through March 2021. For the posts per week, we’ve switched to showing the mean (in place of the median) to give a better sense of small shifts in the total amount of content posted during the week. As you’d expect, the general trends follow the same shape that we saw in our quarterly data. However, there are a number of notable deviations including the COVID lockdown and the murder of George Floyd.

Instagram Engagement Rate Trends by Industry

In the following two charts, we’ll examine the evolution of Instagram engagement rates and posting volumes for each industry in our benchmark report using weekly data since January 2020.

In the graph above, we’re looking at the change in median engagement rates (by follower) from the beginning of 2020 through Q1-2021 for each industry in our report. This normalized view enables us to see how various industries performed throughout the year relative to one another.

Here are some key takeaways:

• Alcohol and Home Decor brands maintained flat engagement throughout much of the early pandemic, only to start tailing off in late summer, at which point they maintained their engagement rates into 2021.
• Sports Teams saw big engagement rate dips early in the lockdown and didn’t regain ground until July 2020 as some sporting events started to return to some play.
• Hotel and Resort brands saw big jumps in engagement rates as the lockdown began and travel around the world ground to a halt. By fall, their engagement rates returned to Q1-2020 levels and remained there for most of the year.

IGTV Benchmarks

Breaking news: 2020 wasn’t a total wash thanks to Instagram finally adding IGTV analytics to its API, making it infinitely easier for brands to study their IGTV performance. We took a look at how IGTV preview posts compared to other post types on Instagram as well as IGTV performance by industry so you can benchmark your success using this elusive (for some) digital medium.

Now for some bad news: IGTV preview posts are the least used media type and they earn the lowest engagement rate of all the post types we studied for 2020. The median engagement rate was 0.54% and the median brand published just 8 (8!) IGTV preview posts all year. Photos and carousels saw about double the engagement rate of IGTV preview posts, while in-feed video posts performed about 15% better than the median IGTV preview post.

Does that mean your brand shouldn’t bother with IGTV, or should stop experimenting with it? F*ck no. With Instagram leaning into longer-form content, video posts of any kind (like IGTV, Reels, and in-feed video posts) are an important part of the Instagram story (no pun intended), and are likely to become even more important moving forward.

This IGTV post from beauty brand The Lip Bar is a great example of how brands can successfully dip their toes into IGTV with minimal effort and epic engagement. This Black-owned beauty brand grabbed 11th place overall in our Top 100 Beauty Brands on Social Media report in 2021. In this IGTV post, founder Melissa Butler invited followers into her home while she put on her makeup for a candid chat about aging and ageism. The post was extremely successful, pulling in more than 88,000 views and a 6.65% engagement rate, which is more than 13x the IGTV preview post median engagement rate.

The Lip Bar’s post is just six minutes long and manages to be both casual and intimate. This IGTV post serves as a good reminder that brands don’t need flashy, highly-produced videos to succeed on IGTV. Some good lighting, a simple shooting setup (like an iPhone and a place to prop it), and an interesting topic or message are all you need to get started with IGTV.

Now, let’s take a look at IGTV performance broken down by each of the 14 industries we survey every year in our Social Media Industry Benchmark Report. Since the absolute engagement rate numbers are pretty small as you saw above, we measured IGTV performance compared to photo performance for each industry and displayed that number as a ratio on the x-axis of the graph above (i.e. Tech & Software’s IGTV preview posts received 45% of the engagement rate as their photo posts).

Hotels & Resorts, Higher Ed, and Health & Beauty were the most successful industries using IGTV last year, with the average IGTV post earning about 55% of the engagement versus the average photo post. It’s easy to make a case for why these industries see the most relative success with IGTV posts: a hotel room tour or a makeup tutorial (like we saw above) are prime candidates for engaging video.

This IGTV post from the Hale Koa Hotel in Hawaii featuring a quick garden tour with a focus on the native Ti Leaf plant grabbed thousands of views and a 4.75% engagement rate with its simple mix of a beautiful backdrop, an engaging presenter, and a hint of FOMO for anyone outside of Hawaii watching who wasn’t able to take the vacation of their dreams during the pandemic.

Middle-of-the-road industries like Sports Teams and Financial Services had a little more trouble engaging viewers with the IGTV format when compared to photos, with IGTV posts seeing less than 50% the engagement oomph of a photo post. Alcohol and Retail brands struggled the most, seeing IGTV posts earn on average just 36% the engagement of a photo post.

These struggles aren’t too surprising: Alcohol fans on Instagram are likely more primed for a photo post featuring a new release or a recipe than, say, a bar tour, while Sports Team fans might be looking more for a quick score update than a full game recap on Instagram.

So many of the social media innovations we’ve seen in the last few years, from TikTok to Facebook and Instagram Stories to Reels and beyond, have signaled an investment in short-form video content from these channels. The moral of the story is that just because brands aren’t seeing epic engagement from IGTV now doesn’t mean they shouldn’t be investing in that post type, and short-form video content in general.

Bucking the Instagram Trend: Southern Methodist University

Let’s talk about a university with a f*cking amazing story of engagement and retention amidst the challenges of 2020. Southern Methodist University managed to increase its total engagement by 7x from pre-COVID levels to 2021 thanks to a strategic mix of campus glamour shots, COVID updates for parents and students, and a whole bunch of successful carousels.

The secret to this university’s Instagram success? When SMU nearly tripled posting from 1.2 to 3.3 between 2020 to 2021, the university also increased Instagram engagement totals from 9.7K in Q1-2020 to 75K in Q1-2021. This success is a big deal and something for other universities to aspire to. These results speak for themselves: SMU generated more engagement by posting more each week and posting more consistently.

Reminder: Posting at least 3-4 times per week keeps followers engaged (and more frequently is often even better). Posting consistently week-to-week will produce more consistent reach and engagement. Of course, we recommend against posting low-quality content just for the sake of posting: high-quality and resonant content should be the priority for anyone posting on social media regardless of reach or industry.

SMU is far from the only organization we studied that’s finding success with elevated posting frequency, so it’s worth getting into what worked well for the university.

SMU’s first instance of increased posting resulting in increased engagement totals came at a really logical time in 2020: spring, when students, parents, and alumni were starved for information about what was happening on campus as a result of COVID-19. This informational Instagram post had the third-highest engagement rate and fourth-highest engagement total of 2020 for SMU thanks to nothing more than a campus glamour shot and some much-needed information for followers.

During this time, SMU increased its posts per week from 1.2 to 2.3 (and up to a whopping 9 posts per week in April/May 2020), which correlates with an increase in total engagement from 6.6K to 15K during this period. Engaging posts in this period included COVID-19 information, graduation posts, and lots and lots of reminders of the magic of the SMU Mustang lifestyle on and off campus.

This post and the rest of its cohort comprised the first indicator that SMU was making some magic by increasing its posting volume. SMU repeated these successful results with a back-to-school bump in August. (And again in mid-December, and again in early February 2021. You get the gist.)

Facebook engagement in 2020

Facebook is the channel we love to hate, but it’s still an important tool in the toolbox for the vast majority of social media marketers. Brace yourselves–the news isn’t great about what’s happening to social media engagement on this channel, but this is definitely a channel still worth paying attention to.

Facebook Benchmarks Over Time

Moving to the second channel in our analysis, we’ll examine Facebook in more detail. For the calendar 2020 year, our Industry Benchmark Report showed that brands earned an average engagement rate per post of 0.08%, slightly down from the previous year’s value of 0.09%. Like Instagram, brands also published slightly fewer Facebook posts in 2020, down from 5.8 posts per week to 5.5 in 2021.

As we saw for Instagram, the median engagement rate per post dropped each quarter of 2020, starting at 0.086% for Q1 and ending the year with 0.062% for Q4. That downward trend has continued into Q1-2021, with the median engagement rate hitting 0.057%. Comparing Q1-2021 vs Q1-2020, we see a 34% drop in the median engagement rate.

The average posting volume for the year was about 5.5 posts per week, and as you can see in the second graph above, that value was mostly in line with quarterly values. In Q3-2020, we did see a decline in posting volume to 5.3 posts per week, though that number rebounded to 5.8 posts per week in Q4. We saw this same posting volume pattern for Instagram, too, with a Q3 decline follower by a Q4 increase.

Before we continue, let’s address a note about our analysis for the curious reader. You may be looking at the graph above and wondering why most of the quarters have a median engagement rate that is below the full-year median of 0.08%. Don’t be alarmed, it’s not a mistake! Rather, it’s a result of using a smaller time period (a quarter instead of a year) to compute the average engagement rate for each brand.

Let’s take a look at how that works.

Examining the graph above, we’ve shown all the posts for 2020 from an example brand in the study, and you’ll see they earn 25% of their entire year’s engagement from just 10% of their posts. Meanwhile, they earn just 1% of their overall engagement from the bottom 10% of their posts. This skew in the data tends to produce a typical week (or month) whose average engagement rate is less than the average for the year. Said more simply, having a handful of really successful posts each year won’t change your engagement rates for an average week, but that set of killer posts will absolutely raise your total engagement (and therefore your average engagement rate) for the year.

As a result, when you compute the median engagement rate across brands, you’ll see lower values when grouping by time periods that are shorter than the full year—since they’re shorter, they’re less likely to have the high-valued outliers that drive the yearlong average upward.

Moving back to our Facebook trend data, let’s look at the weekly trends.

In the graphs above, we expand our view into the Facebook trends by looking at our engagement rate and posts per week data week-by-week. Please note, we’ve switched the posts-per-week metric to use the mean to give you a better sense of the subtle shifts in the total amount of content brands were producing. Like with our Instagram weekly data, you’ll note deviations around lockdown, the murder of George Floyd, and the 2020 holiday season.

Facebook Engagement Rate Trends by Industry

In the following two charts, we’ll examine the evolution of Facebook engagement rates and posting volumes for each industry in our benchmark report using weekly data since January 2020.

In the graph above, we’re looking at the change in median Facebook engagement rates (by follower) from the beginning of 2020 through Q1-2021 for each industry in our report. Like with the Instagram version, this normalized view enables us to see how various industries performed throughout the year relative to one another.

Here are some key takeaways:

• Sports Teams, while taking a big dip early during the pandemic, returned to pre-pandemic engagement rates by fall 2020.
• Influencers actually grew their engagement rates during the year, only to return to their beginning of the year numbers by fall. They’ve started 20201 strong with engagement rates well above their Q1-2020 levels.
• As we saw with Instagram, Alcohol and Home Decor brands stayed relatively constant through the early lockdown and only started to see engagement rate declines in fall 2020.
• Tech and Software brands declined steadily throughout the year and continued that decline into 2021.

Bucking the Facebook Trend: Seattle Storm

Of all the things the Seattle Storm (our hometown women’s basketball heroes) should be proud of in 2020, more than doubling their total engagement from 2020 and 2021 should be at the top of the list. (Never mind that WNBA championship win.) It would be easy to attribute all of the team’s success on social to playing well on the court, but there’s more to it than that. Let’s get into it.

First off, here’s a quick competitive context rundown so you’re aware of why this team in particular is worth paying attention to. The Seattle Storm was the 14th most engaging sports team of 2020 on Facebook in our Social Media Industry Benchmark report. The team averaged about 2x the sports teams engagement rate median last year and posted about 1.5x as frequently as the average sports team, suggesting that the Storm consistently has their social dialed in.

Okay, let’s get the elephant-sized trophy out of the way first: the Storm’s most engaging Facebook post of the year about being the 2020 WNBA champions rocked a whopping 20.3% engagement rate. Do all sports teams need to be the best g*ddamned team in the league to succeed on social? No. Does it help? Sure.

Many of the team’s most engaging posts of the year were from fall 2020 when they were scorching all the other teams in the WNBA, so it would be easy to correlate their success on social exclusively to their success on the court. As you can see in the graph below, the Storm steadily increased their Facebook posting at the start of the WNBA season starting around mid-July, and really ramped things up during the lead-up to the finals in October.

The mid-August posting volume increase kept the engagement rate pretty flat but started to ramp up the team’s total engagement, which served to prime followers for an increase in content and engagement later in the season.

The giant increases in posting volume, total engagement, and engagement rate were definitely the Storm’s bread and butter on social last year. As we’ve pointed out, it’s logical that a championship-winning team would a) post more frequently and b) receive more engagement on social when sharing their success with followers. But what’s truly interesting about the Storm is that they were using this time of increased attention to share non-basketball posts on Facebook as well, from Seattle Storm starter Sue Bird’s engagement to Seattle soccer legend Megan Rapinoe and even a congratulatory post to President Biden and Vice-President Harris after the 2020 election.

These posts could be viewed as risky for some teams by featuring LGBTQIA+ and political themes, but at this point in the season, the Storm knew their social was untouchable. This post about the Bird/Rapinoe engagement rocked a 5.54% engagement rate and was the team’s fifth-most engaging post of 2020.

These non-championship posts during the Storm’s victory lap also help tell the story that increasing your posting at a time when your followers are paying attention contributes to increased engagement, even if you’re not posting directly about whatever it is your followers came to your Facebook Page for.

The team’s steady increase in posting and engagement during the season was a big contributor to the Storm’s more than doubling their total engagement between Q1-2020 and Q1-2021.

Twitter engagement in 2020

Twitter has its benefits (the chance for brands to connect 1:1 with followers) and drawbacks (trolls), but hey, at least the character count limit prevents you from writing 5,000-word opuses like this one. But any marketer should be paying attention to the declines in both engagement rate and tweet frequency over time on this channel.

Benchmarks Over Time

For the calendar year 2020, our Industry Benchmark Report showed that brands earned an average engagement rate per tweet of 0.045%, in line with the previous year. The median brand published about 4.4 posts per week, down from 5.4 in 2019.
Looking at the top graph above, we see that the median engagement rate per follower started off the year at 0.054% for Q1 and trended down slightly through 2020, ending with Q4 at 0.043%. Despite a slight decline through 2020, the median Twitter engagement rate increased slightly in Q1-2021 to 0.046%. That value, though higher than Q4, is still down 15% when compared to Q1-2020.

In the second graph, we see that although tweet volumes were relatively flat throughout the year, the same pattern of a Q3 decline followed by a Q4 increase occurred on Twitter just as on Facebook and Instagram.

Moving on, let’s have a look at the weekly trend data for Twitter.

Here we’ve switched the posts-per-week metric to use the mean to give you a better sense of the subtle shifts in the total amount of content brands were producing. Like with our weekly data from Instagram and Facebook, you’ll note the same deviations around the COVID lockdown, the murder of George Floyd, and the 2020 holiday season.

Twitter Engagement Rate Trends by Industry

In the following two charts, we’ll examine the evolution of Twitter engagement rates and posting volumes for each industry in our benchmark report using weekly data since January 2020.

Please note that these charts represent the percent change in each week from the first week of 2020. This enables us to compare the relative changes across industries regardless of their overall performance.

In the graph above, we’re looking at the change in median Twitter engagement rates (by follower) from the beginning of 2020 through Q1-2021 for each industry in our report. This normalized view enables us to compare how various industries performed throughout the year.

Here are some key takeaways:

• Unlike on Facebook and Instagram, we see that a number of industries saw elevated engagement rates for several weeks at the beginning of lockdown including Alcohol, Home Decor, Media, Hotels, Higher Ed, Retail, Financial Services, and even Tech & Software.
• Engagement rates for Media brands stayed elevated for almost the entirety of 2020, only returning to early 2020 levels in Q1-2021.
• Most industries are seeing Q1-2021 engagement rates in line with those from Q1-2020 except for Retail, Higher Ed, Financial Services, and Food & Beverage.

Bucking the Twitter Trend: United State of Women

The nonprofit organization The United State of Women (USOW) has worked tirelessly since its genesis during the Obama administration to advance its goal of gender equality for all via workshops, conferences, policy changes, and more. This dynamic organization is extremely active and engaging on Twitter, and has only grown more successful on this channel over the last 12 months, with a 76% increase in engagement total between Q1-2020 and Q1-2021.

USOW often uses Twitter to connect with followers about current events that are likely to affect women and gender equality: the Roe vs. Wade anniversary, the death of Ruth Bader Ginsberg, and of course the 2020 election. Simple tweets like this one about Kamala Harris’ mother on the day of her VP win garnered a lot of engagement for the organization by making it easy for followers to celebrate the outcome of the election via a women-focused lens. This tweet rocked a 3.43% engagement rate, which was the second-highest engagement rate USOW saw all year.

Election-focused tweets were clearly a big engagement driver in Q4-2020 as shown on this graph, but tweets during this time period are far from the only explanation for USOW’s consistent growth between 2020 and 2021. USOW stepped up for its followers by increasing its tweeting during Q2-2020 and just kept on climbing after that.

The organization increased its tweeting volume by 50% from Q1-2020 to Q1-2021 and saw a big increase in total engagement of 75%, suggesting that once again, more is more. USOW worked hard in an election year to keep women front and center in the nation’s Twitter feeds, and found a lot of success with those efforts with increased engagement.

Speaking of increased engagement, is all engagement good? This tweet about the 47th anniversary of abortion ruling Roe vs. Wade was USOW’s tweet with the highest engagement rate of 2020 thanks in large part to pro-life dissenters and trolls.

Should USOW stop posting about controversial topics like abortion to try to decrease negative sentiment on the organization’s Twitter profile? No. (Editor’s note: f*ck no.) An organization formed to amplify the voices of women and gender nonconforming people is clearly prepared to break a few eggs to whip up the gender equality omelette, and that preparation pays off in tweets like these. Swift community moderation by USOW removed the worst of the replies, which helps mitigate the negative effects of taking on a topic that invites divisive opinions.

The nonprofit industry was able to maintain its social media engagement rates during tumultuous 2020 by serving as community gathering points and sources of knowledge about what was going on in the very uncertain world, while many other industries like Food & Beverage and Retail just weren’t able to meaningfully connect with followers in the same way. USOW shined on Twitter by keeping their tweet content timely and mission-focused and by increasing tweet volume in a sort of snowball success effect.

Key Events

We can’t say it enough: 2020 was a f*cking weird year. Let’s break down the impacts of key events like the US COVID lockdown, the murder of George Floyd, and a few other notable events.

In the graph above, we’ve combined all three channels of our weekly trend data for engagement rates and posts per week to give a more complete picture of behavior-driven trends occurring for brands’ social media during 2020. We’ve normalized each graph to demonstrate the relative changes between the channels during the year.

In the following sections, we’ll zoom into two major world events in 2020.

Early COVID Lockdown

By early March, many cities around the United States were entering lockdown, and by mid-March, the lockdown was in full effect (note: we wrote about this period extensively last year if you want to see even more).

On all three social channels, we saw elevated engagement rates on all three channels starting the week of March 15th. Facebook and Twitter both jumped about 20% from the prior week, while Instagram moved only about 5%. These elevated engagement rates persisted for several weeks before starting their return to pre-lockdown levels by the week of April 19th.

On Twitter and Instagram, we saw decreases in the average number of posts published in the week of March 15th when compared to the previous weeks, with Twitter down 7% and Instagram down 8.5% from March 1st. The average number of Facebook posts from brands actually increased slightly during this period, with post volumes up 1.5% in the week of March 15th.

Engagement rates often increase when posting decreases, because there are fewer posts to interact with but roughly the same number of followers, which means it’s more likely for a follower to interact with one of your brand’s posts in their feed. (If you aren’t tired of hearing it by now, decreasing your posting frequency to inflate your engagement rate isn’t exactly a recommended practice. Better than you should increase the quality and frequency of your posts to give your followers more of what they’ve already indicated they want.

Another explanation for the increased engagement rate is that people were feeling uncertain and downright starved for information about what to expect from their schools, employers, and community organizations. This hunger for info (and a captive audience glued to their phones) led to big engagement hikes for industries like Higher Ed, Nonprofits, and Media because they could provide such valuable information during the early weeks of the US COVID lockdown, while COVID-susceptible industries like Food & Beverage and Hotels & Resorts took a nosedive.

The Murder of George Floyd

The second notable 2020 event in this piece that led to deviations in both posting and engagement is the murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis on May 25th, 2020. We condemn the actions of white police officer Derek Chauvin and the other white police officers involved.

In the graphs above, we examine the change in engagement rates and posting volumes during the weeks that followed the murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis. In the week following the death of George Floyd, brands and organizations backed off posting on social media across all channels, with average post volumes down 15% to 20%. Engagement rates spiked during the week of May 31st, with brands shifting messaging to focus on messages of solidarity with BLM protests, racial equity, and general support for Black Americans.

Brands slowly returned to posting starting during the week of June 7th but didn’t return in earnest until the week of June 14th. Across all three channels, posting volumes on social media were lower for the remainder of the summer when compared with May.

At this time of uncertainty and outrage, nonprofits and other organizations working towards justice and equality were in a unique position to deliver updates while convening communities locally and around the country. Organizations like the NAACP remained at the top of minds and social media feeds by providing valuable and timely information for those paying attention to such a pivotal moment in the quest for equal rights.

This tweet from the NAACP demanding justice for George Floyd just days after his death earned a 12% engagement rate on Twitter and more than 12,000 retweets. This tweet exploded with more than 2x the engagement total and rate as the NAACP’s next most engaging tweet of 2020, suggesting that followers were more than ready to engage with the content and were hungry for more information.

Civil rights organizations were far from the only ones posting on social media during this tumultuous time. Brands and organizations in every industry we study took to social to express support for their communities, like this simple Instagram post from Old Dominion University. This post grabbed attention for the university, to the tune of a 21.3% engagement rate. While nonprofits and community organizations were focused on disseminating information and, in many cases, convening their communities, posts like these were much more about acknowledgment and solidarity.

Anyone doing meaningful work to fight racism knows that intention is worthless without action, which is why #BlackOutTuesday was a flop for so many brands. After two Black women in the music industry called for a day of disruption and protest using the #BlackOutTuesday hashtag, brands and individuals flocked to Instagram to post black boxes and the #BlackOutTuesday and #BlackLivesMatter hashtags. The problem? These posts quickly began to drown out the real community organizing that the #BlackLivesMatter hashtag was being used for in favor of performative and ultimately pointless action by a white majority. While many brands saw engagement spikes from users who perceived that this was the “right” thing to do, the tables turned when followers called for more authentic and relevant action beyond a quick social media post. #BlackOutTuesday served up an important lesson for many brands, companies, and marketing departments about how to (and how not to) engage in anti-racism work.

Wrapping it up

F*cking 2020. We hope this blog post helps explain some of the success stories (and dive bombs) from this tough year, and gives you some hope and inspo for the latter half of 2021. It was a tough, weird year, and only time will tell if some of the engagement declines we noted are related to the f*ckload of drama 2020 contained, or if they point to a larger shift in social media engagement.

Did we miss an industry, or not dive into a question you’re dying to learn more about? Drop us a line on Twitter.

The post What the f*ck happened to social media engagement in 2020? appeared first on Rival IQ.

We’re all adjusting to life during this pandemic, whether it’s marketing during a time when people are buying less, working from home, or homeschooling, and we know that one of the most powerful tools available to us is data. We’re committing to updating this piece regularly to help you understand exactly what’s happening to social media engagement rates for coronavirus.

Coronavirus and social media update, June 4

Let’s check in on social media engagement rates after three full months of coronavirus’ influence in the US.

• Engagement rates are the lowest they’ve been in 2020 on Instagram and Facebook, and nearly there on Twitter.
• The trend downward has been slow and steady since the end of March on all three channels.
• Posting frequency hit its high in February and dipped to its lowest in mid-March when coronavirus really picked up steam in the US. Post frequency has rebounded slightly but is hovering around 2020 medians on all three channels.

What can brands do to increase social media engagement rates during coronavirus?

Despite these declining engagement rates, many brands are finding ways to engage thoughtfully with their followers during coronavirus. Let’s highlight some of that success.

Suncoast Credit Union is putting its money where its mouth is by pledging monetary support to their community. This tangible show of support excited followers on Instagram with more than 6x the average engagement rate for Financial Services brands. We’ve seen pledges like this perform well across a variety of industries, suggesting followers are eager to support action from brands.

Higher Ed has managed to keep engagement rates above other industries thanks to thoughtful posts (and students, parents, and alumni hungry for information from their college and universities). This simple Instagram post and action by Catholic University galvanized their community with a show of support for frontline healthcare workers and scored a 10.8% engagement rate, which is more than 3x the current Higher Ed average.

Coronavirus engagement on social media by channel

Let’s break down how 14 top industries are performing on Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter.

Instagram

Instagram, like Facebook and Twitter, is experiencing its lowest engagement rates of 2020, and those rates have been falling steadily since the onset of coronavirus in the US at the beginning of Q2.

• With the exception of Higher Ed, all the industries featured above are experiencing some of their lowest engagement of the year on Instagram.
• Higher Ed is managing to maintain their engagement rates around their 2020 median, but it’ll be interesting to see what happens once school is out for the summer.

• Hotels & Resorts are one of the few industries that have been able to improve their Q2 engagement rates over their performance in Q1.
• It looks like Sports Teams’ engagement rates have finally bottomed out and are now on the rebound.
• Retail has been quite flat, with no spikes or dips with coronavirus’ influence.

Facebook

Facebook engagement rates have been on a bumpy decline since early March, though they clawed back a little at the beginning of May before dropping again at the end of the month.

• Alcohol has managed to hang onto above-average engagement rates despite a dip after their initial increase in April.
• Financial Services and Higher Ed, which both saw huge spikes during the onset of coronavirus in the US, are now seeing 2020 lows on Facebook.

• Hotels & Resorts and Influencers have seen epic highs and lows, but are returning to median 2020 engagement rates as we head into summer.
• Just like on Instagram, it looks like Sports Teams are coming back after reaching rock bottom on Facebook last month.

Twitter

Like Instagram and Facebook, Twitter’s engagement rates have been declining steadily for the entirety of Q2. Interestingly, posting frequency hasn’t bounced back the way it has on Facebook and Instagram.

• Financial Services and Higher Ed weren’t able to hang onto the engagement spike they experienced at the onset of the pandemic in the US.
• Health & Beauty brands are trending down recently on Twitter after some big spikes earlier in the year.

• Hotels & Resorts are seeing a big spike in engagement right now, and have managed to keep engagement rates much higher in Q2 than in Q1.
• Media and Tech & Software have had surprisingly flat engagement rates all year.

Conclusion (for now)

We hope this research gives you a better understanding of what your brand and industry can expect on social media during coronavirus while also demonstrating that what will happen next is anyone’s guess. We’ll keep bringing you the numbers and the analysis, and please don’t hesitate to reach out with questions or your own experiences on Twitter.

Coronavirus and social media update, May 7

Social media engagement rates during coronavirus continue to shift as brands and agencies respond to the pandemic. Let’s check in on the latest coronavirus social media engagement rate impacts.

• After last month’s bump in engagement rates, channels and industries are trending down again.
• Posting frequency is starting to rebound as brands adjust to the new normal, which helps explain a decrease in engagement rates.
• Higher Ed and Alcohol brands continue seeing increased engagement rates while Sports Teams and Food & Beverage struggle to turn their engagement rates around.

When we last checked in, brands were rebounding from the initial dip they took when coronavirus really picked up steam around the globe in early March. A decrease in posting frequency coupled with more intentional and resonant posts towards the end of March led to some of the highest engagement rates brands had seen all year across Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter.

As brands adjust to the “new normal” and get back to posting more frequently during the pandemic, it makes good sense that consumers may not be quite ready to engage on social in the same ways they did pre-coronavirus.

Now let’s break things down channel by channel. Even at its 2020 low, Instagram’s average engagement rate per post is 20x Twitter and Facebook’s lowest engagement rates of the year. We know that Instagram is a top-performing channel because it delivers content that’s attractive to consumers like photos and videos, while Facebook and Twitter trend more towards news and links. With that in mind, it’s not too surprising that Instagram is weathering the coronavirus storm with a little more resilience.

As for posting frequency, brands have been posting most steadily on Facebook throughout coronavirus, while decreasing posting on Twitter and Instagram as the pandemic picked up steam around the globe. More recently, we’re seeing brands increase posting frequencies on Facebook and Instagram to pre-March levels, which may not be the right call for every industry. On Twitter, posting volumes by brands are still about 17% lower than they were in January and February.

What can brands do to increase social media engagement rates during coronavirus?

Our advice remains the same: focus on the quality of your posts and delivering value to your followers. It can be tempting to fill up your queue with the same old product-focused posts, but crafting posts that resonate with your followers will help cut through the noise on social. During our recent Data-Driven Marketer webinar with Jay Baer, he recommends ensuring your content “angers, inspires, or makes people laugh. If it’s not doing one of those things, why are you posting it?”

Posts like this one from Nuun are a good example of brands tailoring their social media to the times and seeing positive results. This post about how their followers can help first responders stay hydrated performed 30% better than the average Food & Beverage Instagram post before coronavirus took hold. The post performed well with followers because it’s topical and empathetic instead of just blowing past coronavirus in hopes of selling a few more hydration tablets.

Brands that pay attention to the news and consumers’ needs continue to win the day in terms of social media engagement rates.

Coronavirus engagement on social media by channel

Let’s break down how 14 top industries are performing on Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter.

Instagram

As we saw above, Instagram is still winning the engagement game on social, but this channel is starting to see some of its lowest engagement rates of the year as coronavirus rages on.

• Alcohol has managed to take its increase in engagement rates and run with it as the pandemic continues.
• Food and Beverage brands have really taken a dive after an initial flurry of attention.
• Higher Ed has bounced around a lot, but is averaging much higher engagement in March and April than in January and February.

• Influencers and Nonprofits have seen a steady decline since the pandemic hit the States.
• Sports Teams continue to nosedive, but it’s worth mentioning that even their lowest engagement rates are still higher than every other industry except Higher Ed.

Facebook

Facebook engagement rates officially hit their 2020 low in late April with an average engagement rate per post across all industries of 0.053%.

• Like on Instagram, Alcohol brands have managed to build on increased engagement rates on Facebook.
• Financial Services and Higher Ed saw some of the most dramatic spikes of engagement in the middle of March but have returned to pre-pandemic engagement rates.

• Influencers and Nonprofits are managing to hold their own on Facebook.
• Sports Teams are really suffering on Facebook as well.

Twitter

Tweet frequency decreased much more dramatically than on Facebook or Instagram, so brands have a long way to go before restoring their frequency to pre-coronavirus levels.

• Fashion brands have seen a gradual increase in Twitter engagement since mid-March.
• Food and Beverage brands are seeing steadier success on Twitter than on Instagram and Facebook.
• Higher Ed saw an enormous spike in late March but is now leveling out closer to pre-pandemic engagement rates.

• Hotels & Resorts saw an epic spike in Twitter engagement in early March but are returning to their pre-pandemic engagement rates.
• Nonprofits saw a sharp dropoff in mid-March followed by an excellent rebound in early April, but restoring to their average 2020 engagement rates.

Coronavirus and social media update, April 13

Coronavirus was adversely impacting social media engagement rates at the beginning of March when we first ran the numbers.

To recap where we were a month ago:

• Engagement rates were down across all 14 major industries we surveyed
• Facebook and Instagram were hit especially hard while Twitter helped brands stay current and connected
• Industries like Higher Ed and Nonprofits stayed afloat while Fashion and Hotels & Resorts took a huge hit

Things have changed since our last update:

• Engagement rates are rising to some of the highest rates we’ve seen all year (for reasons you may not expect)
• Posting frequency is down across almost every industry
• Some industries like Alcohol and Hotels & Resorts are bouncing back, while Sports Teams continue to struggle

We’ll dive into why your brand or industry might be experiencing a lift in per-post performance and exactly what’s happening channel by channel for each of our top 14 industries.

Less posting leads to higher engagement rates

We looked at the social performance of over 2,000 companies between January and April 2020 on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter to see exactly how coronavirus was impacting social media engagement rates.

After an initial dip in early March, engagement rates have reached a 2020 high across all three channels in the last few weeks thanks to decreased posting frequency.

As posting frequency dips in the middle of March, engagement rates rise. Click for a full-resolution image.

In this graphic, we can see that social media engagement across all three channels was pretty flat for the first three months of 2020. Many brands experienced a sharp drop in engagement in the first two weeks of March, but rebounded to new heights in the latter half of the month. Time will tell if engagement rates will flatten back out or not.

As for posting frequency, median posts per week across all industries has been rock solid at 4 posts/week all year, but dipped a full 25% to 3 posts/week the week of March 15 and correlated with higher engagement rates.

Why does posting less often lead to higher engagement rates? The first reason is that posting less frequently means that the Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter algorithms are more likely to serve the same set of posts to its users. When a company posts less frequently, each post they create has a better chance of earning impressions and engagement, which in turn yields higher per-post performance.

This post from West Point was simple and inspirational and performed almost 30% better than the average Higher Ed Instagram post from 2019.

The second reason has to do with the quality of posts. When marketers focus their energy on a few great posts instead of many mediocre ones, fans and followers naturally engage more. This natural engagement increase encourages social channels to re-serve that content to other users, leading to higher engagement. As we’re all trying to figure out exactly what and how to market during this time of stress and uncertainty, marketers are putting more thought and authenticity into everything they post on social, which Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter are rewarding.

Does this trend mean you should always post less frequently? Not necessarily. Take this trend more as an encouragement to focus on the quality and relevance of everything you post on social media instead of a firm recommendation on the right posting frequency for your brand. Engagement rates are just one way to measure how you’re doing online. A high engagement rate is great, but ultimately what we’re all striving for is lots of engagement.

Jay Baer at Convince and Convert reminds us that now is a really good time to experiment with posting frequency, type, and timing. And we here at Rival IQ would tell you that the best time to post is the time when your followers are engaged and online.

Coronavirus engagement on social media by channel

Let’s jump into how coronavirus is affecting engagement rates on each of the three major channels.

Instagram

Instagram engagement rates were hit hard in the first two weeks of March, but some industries have bounced back.

• With drinking at home on the rise, Alcohol brands are seeing a slight increase in engagement on social.
• Food and Beverage brands are coming back a little.
• Higher Ed had a huge spike during the last two weeks but is returning back to normal.

• Hotels & Resorts are bouncing back after a big dip in early March.
• Influencers have seen consistently declining engagement rates since coronavirus started hitting hard in North America, and there’s no current sign of improvement.
• After an initial uptick while serving as a critical source for news and services in early March, Nonprofits have seen a dramatic decline in engagement rates.
• Sports Teams are getting hammered across all three channels as fans struggle to engage without any games to watch, follow, or read about.

Facebook

Facebook’s initial decline was similar to Instagram’s, but some industries are seeing higher engagement rates than ever.

• Just like on Instagram, Alcohol engagement rates are really spiking up on Facebook.
• Financial Services brands are seeing a huge spike as fans and financial institutions try to decipher the stock market.
• Higher Ed saw an even more dramatic increase on Facebook in the first two weeks of March, but are starting to flatten back out.

• Media brands are working hard to keep up with the extra demand for news and seeing above-average engagement rates as a result.
• Nonprofits and Sports Teams saw huge declines in the fight to stay relevant and top of mind to their followers on Facebook.

Twitter

Twitter’s initial engagement decline was half of Facebook’s and Instagram’s, suggesting that people are still turning to this channel for updates and to connect with their favorite brands.

• As on other channels, Financial Services brands are working hard to communicate with their followers, and their efforts really paid off in late March with high engagement.
• Higher Ed saw a massive spike two weeks ago on Twitter and is still performing way above their average the rest of the year.

• After an initial drop, Hotels & Resorts have almost doubled their peak 2020 engagement in the last two weeks on Twitter. With many brands and customers turning to Twitter for customer service, it’s no surprise that brands were able to engage with followers in need of travel advice or cancellations.
• Media’s engagement is on the rise despite posting 25% more often on Twitter.
• As on other channels, Sports Teams are seeing rock bottom engagement for 2020 on Twitter.

Coronavirus and social media update, March 13

Below is our initial analysis of the impact of coronavirus on social media engagement rates from March 13.

We’ve been receiving tons of questions from marketers about the impact of coronavirus on social media engagement rates, and wanted to present some data and actionable tips in this fast-changing crisis.

It’s difficult to know what to do as marketers (and humans) as coronavirus continues to spread around the world. Reviewing the data is always grounding and helps inform future strategy, so we teamed up with Jason Keath, CEO and lead analyst at Social Fresh and took a look at engagement rates for 14 industries to track social performance in Q1 of 2020.

Social media is a constantly moving target, especially during a global health crisis. We recently released our Social Media Industry Benchmark Report and wanted to share more about how the situation with coronavirus is impacting social media engagement for brands. This post is intended to provide additional context for brands and marketers so they know kind of impacts to engagement rates they can expect right now on social.

Key things you should know

We acknowledge that the situation is changing day-by-day, but here are our top takeaways and tips for marketers working hard to stay sensitive and relevant during this health crisis.

• Yes, engagement is down across the board. The news isn’t universally bad, though. Brands and industries that are able to connect thoughtfully with their followers are weathering the storm so far.
• Twitter’s engagement decline is half as bad as Facebook’s and Instagram’s. Why? People are turning to Twitter for news and updates because it feels more instant than algorithm-heavy Facebook and Instagram. Plus, it’s easier to connect 1:1 with brands and organizations to get vital information.
• Higher Ed is staying high, media is holding steady, nearly everyone else is down. These industries are working extra hard right now to deliver up-to-date information to large groups of followers and stakeholders, so it makes sense that they’re trending ahead of the curve for now.
• The best thing you can do is stay calm and be empathetic. This advice goes for both social and IRL. “Focus on positive ways your brand can create engagement or at a minimum stay top of mind. But don’t stretch beyond what is reasonable,” says Keath. Post thoughtful, relevant content whenever possible, and give your followers a chance to connect with you about their questions and concerns.

Channel performance by industry during coronavirus

Instagram

Instagram took the hardest hit overall, with a 14% drop in engagement rate by follower this week versus the previous three weeks. It makes good sense that this channel would be impacted most, since it’s not likely where people are going to get their news (Twitter) or connect with friends and family (Facebook). It’s worth noting that Instagram’s engagement rate declines have been sharp of late, suggesting this channel’s engagement will keep dropping more rapidly than Facebook and Twitter.

 In the sparkline graphs above, we can see that Alcohol, Financial Services, Food & Beverage, Health & Beauty, Higher Ed, and Home Decor have all taken dives on Instagram this month.

Ohio State University communicated thoughtfully and quickly with followers on Instagram about shifting to online classes.

It’s interesting to note that all of these industries except Health & Beauty actually saw an engagement spike right before coronavirus really started to trend in early March. This (temporary) upward spike is logical for industries like Food & Beverage and Higher Ed who are having to constantly communicate with followers about the current operating status of universities and restaurants.

Our second batch of industries on Instagram is seeing similar downward trending, with the exception of Media and Nonprofits, who haven’t experienced as much of a decline by staying relevant. Media brands are obviously working hard to communicate with their information-hungry followers. Nonprofits are on the front lines in working to deliver services to those affected by the virus and closures. These organizations are already starting to coordinate fundraising pleas to help bridge the gap, which is garnering attention from followers on social.

Hotels & Resorts, Sports Teams, and Tech & Software are seeing some of the sharpest Instagram falloffs of any of the industries we reviewed, but thankfully the news isn’t all bad for those industries on other channels.

The bottom line: Instagram isn’t the first place people are turning to for updates on the virus. With tourism, shopping, and dining out on the decline, many industries are seeing sharp declines in engagement on this channel. “Steer away from humor and focus on how you can help. Inform and support,” says Keath.

Facebook

Facebook’s declining average engagement rate in the last few weeks is neck-and-neck with Instagram’s at 13.5%. It’s worth noting that Facebook’s engagement rates are declining around 2x per week, so this channel’s engagement is definitely still in flux.

Fashion and Home Decor were seeing pretty flat engagement in 2020 until the week of March 8 when these industries started to decline more quickly.

Financial Services, Food & Beverage, and Health & Beauty saw nearly identical engagement spikes in late February and early March, and then followed the trend of other industries with a sharp decline in the last week.

Many alcohol brands are trying to be playful on social in this stressful time.

Alcohol’s performance brings a little levity to the chaos and heartbreak. Perhaps their sharp engagement increase a few weeks ago was from people needing a stiff drink due to election stress and the threat of coronavirus spreading. Alcohol’s average engagement rates have since restored to their industry average from last year, showing they’re a little ahead of the pack.

And Higher Ed is helping keep the all-industry Facebook average up with a return to their all-time high for 2020 in the last week. “Higher Education specifically is already seeing increased volatility in their engagement rate. This is a great example of what will work for brands to maintain engagement: utility. As schools delay and cancel classes, stakeholders have questions and are vocal,” says Keath. With so much communicating to do about school closures and classes moving online, colleges and universities are clearly finding success on Facebook.

Hotels & Resorts and Sports Teams saw some of the sharpest relative declines on Facebook. For example, Sports Teams enjoyed a lot of engagement earlier in the year thanks to lead-up to the Super Bowl and March Madness, but are seeing a precipitous drop beginning in early March as cancellations began. Hotels & Resorts saw their engagement drop by half as more and more travel advisories and bans began in early March.

Red Sox kept it simple with their season suspension announcement, which garnered strong attention from fans looking to stay in the loop.

Influencers, Media, Retail, and Tech & Software are all trending down as well. Nonprofits are fighting successfully for engagement on Facebook to offer services and community connection points.

Nonprofits are keeping their engagement rates up on Facebook because they’re able to deliver critical services and information to their families and communities.

The bottom line: While it may feel like there’s been a spike in Facebook activity as friends and family connect and seek out community news, brands aren’t finding a lot of success on this channel unless they have something valuable to add to the coronavirus conversation.

Twitter

Finally, some more upbeat social media news: Twitter engagement rates have declined by about half as much as Facebook and Instagram (down 7%). Why aren’t they feeling the burn as much? You’ve probably already guessed: people are turning to Twitter for critical information about how coronavirus is impacting their lives, from school and store closures to how they can get involved in their community via local nonprofits.

We noted that the engagement rate drop has been more gradual on Twitter than on Instagram and Facebook since mid-February. This gradual decline indicates that Twitter is more insulated against further engagement loss than Instagram and Facebook because of the ability to connect person to person.

In the graph above, we can see that Alcohol, Fashion, Financial Services, and Food & Beverage had some of their highest engagement of the year in late February but took a sharp downturn as coronavirus news really picked up in early March. Health & Beauty and Home Decor have been struggling for much of the year.

Higher Ed’s engagement rates are anomalous in that their highest overall engagement in 2020 has happened since coronavirus really picked up a few weeks ago. This increase makes sense as many students, parents, and alumni turn to Twitter for up-to-date news on school closures. It’s worth noting that Higher Ed consistently sees high engagement on Twitter, and the fact that these schools are continuing to see high engagement is bringing up the all-industry average on this channel. Without Higher Ed, it’s likely that Twitter’s overall engagement decline would be more dramatic.

The engagement rates on this graph trend more steadily downward with industries like Nonprofits, Retail, and Tech & Software. Sports Teams have seen a sharp decline but are bouncing back a little as fans turn to Twitter for news on game cancellations and season suspensions.

Influencers and Media are holding steady as people look to trusted sources for more information about what’s going on in the world.

Marriott stuck to the facts in their recent Twitter update about coronavirus.

It’s worth calling out that Hotels & Resorts’ dramatic engagement decline is very similar to their current Facebook performance, which underscores how hard-hit that industry is in this health crisis.

The bottom line: Every channel and nearly every industry has seen engagement drops across the board, but that decline is currently more gradual on Twitter than on Facebook and Instagram. If you have timely, relevant content to share on Twitter with your followers, you can continue to expect engagement (at least for now).

Tips for social media marketing during coronavirus

The best thing marketers can do is to keep calm and be as sensitive as possible when adding to the noise on social.

Here are a few of our favorite tips directly from Jason Keath’s recent article from Social Fresh.

1. Pick a Lane: Imagine the worst coronavirus news is sitting right next to your post on Twitter or Facebook. Does your messaging sound awkward?
2. Scale Back and Keep a List: Adjusting the volume and type of social media content you post is probably a good instinct right now. Give some additional care to the empathy and tone of your social content. Since there is less attention to go around, don’t be afraid to post less content. But don’t stop coming up with ideas. Keep a running list of those ideas for when things get back to normal.
3. Invest In Trust Content: Consider investing in long-form projects and campaigns. Trust Content is content that allows you to spend more time and more meaningful moments with your audience. It’s great for building trust in your brand. Which is a good place to spend time right now. Consider creating long-form articles, video series, podcasts, essays, entertainment, training content, and more.
4. Adjust Your Social Listening: While social media time-spent is likely going up around the globe, the way consumers spend that time and the types of conversations they have are different during a crisis. How are your customers, employees, and community talking about the crisis?

You can read the full article containing these and many more actionable tips on Social Fresh.

Methodology

We used Rival IQ to analyze engagement rates, posting frequency, post types, and hashtags on the top three social channels for brands: Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter. We included 14 industries in our analysis: Alcohol, Fashion, Financial Services, Food & Beverage, Health & Beauty, Higher Education, Home Decor, Hotels & Resorts, Influencers, Media, Nonprofits, Retail, Sports Teams, and Tech & Software.

We reviewed overall social engagement rates from 14 industries in Q1 of 2020. We specifically analyzed engagement rates week by week for the last four weeks from February 16 through March 8. To preserve data accuracy, we focused on engagement Sunday-Wednesday and excluded engagement from Thursdays, Fridays, and Saturdays in 2020 so we could include data from this current week (March 8-11).

We define engagement as measurable interaction on social media posts, including likes, comments, favorites, retweets, shares, replies, and reactions. Engagement rate is calculated based on all these interactions divided by total follower count.

Wrapping it up

It’s a confusing and scary time for brands and consumers alike right now, and there’s no one correct way to act on social. “The way consumers spend their time online over the next few months is going to be very unpredictable. Even if this means an increase in total time spent online, most brands will find it difficult to compete with breaking news, entertainment, and utility,” says Keath.

The best thing marketers can do is be as sensitive as possible to the current health crisis when creating any social media posts or strategy. We also encourage you to look to data and benchmarks to lend context to what’s happening on social around the globe instead of guessing.

Does the data in this post reflect your brand’s experience on social media in the last few weeks? We’d love to hear from you, so don’t hesitate to drop us a line on Twitter.

Jason Keath of Social Fresh, an annual social media conference, contributed to this post.

The post The Impact of Coronavirus on Social Media Engagement for Brands appeared first on Rival IQ.