Brands Still Failing To Get The Most From Social Media

An interesting study has revealed that despite the broad range of tools Facebook provides to business owners to make their pages engaging and attractive to consumers, the majority of brands still fail to reap the benefits of this type of communication channel.

The research, conducted by Recommend.ly, found that 70.1% of brands did not make even one post on their Facebook page in October. As many as 63.9% of the 5.7 million pages examined had provided no cover photo, while a staggering 83.4% had not taken part in any conversation. The results contradict the widespread concept of a successful social media presence, which suggests that brands need to update their pages as frequently as possible if they want to stay engaged with their fans.

When looking at the different categories, community pages seem to be the least active organisations on Facebook, with 79.3% of them not posting a single update in October, followed by company pages (73.5%) and pages maintained by celebrities (72.6%).

Businesses proving to be active on Facebook are those that have chosen a specific category name such as ‘spa’ or ‘restaurant’, as opposed to brands that have selected the generic ‘local business’ as a company description.

When it comes to consumers’ preferences, it turns out they find visual content much more appealing than non-visual content, with photos and videos generating between 65% and 350% higher engagement than non-visual inputs. Currently, visual content accounts for 50% to 60% of Facebook pages, which could be due to the arrival of the Timeline layout, which had a significant impact on the content mix.