Arguably 2017 was the year of social video, particularly for U.S. B2C brands, as data provided exclusively to PR News by Shareablee demonstrates. It was also a year where brands operating in the fledgling social media ecosystem began to show some maturity.
With 2017 finished, we asked Shareablee to compile data on the B2C brands that had the most consumer engagement with its posts across Facebook, Twitter & Instagram during 2017. [The most engaged B2B brands for 11 months of 2017 were featured in our previous edition on December 19, 2017.]
Across the entire B2C category, brands garnered more than 9 billion consumer actions during the year, up about 5% from 2016. This happened despite posting 13% fewer pieces of content, says Shareablee’s Ron Lee. The brands also increased their audience count by 15%, to 8.1 billion followers across the platforms.
As you might have guessed, B2C brands’ biggest growth came from consumer engagement with video content. Consumer actions, comments, likes, shares, retweets, jumped 40%, generating 1.3 billion actions. While the brands were more efficienct overall, the growth in consumer engagement with video posts was boosted through a 38% jump in video content posted, Lee notes.
It’s fitting for online fashion purveyor FashionNova to be the most-engaged brand. In 2016 it posted just 1 video that drew some 2,000 actions, Lee says. Last year, it posted 173 videos, generating more than 1.5 million engagements and 2 million views. In all FashionNova generated 360 million actions, up 28%, besting Victoria’s Secret, with 352 million actions, and Kylie Jenner’s Kyle Cosmetics (340 million actions). Kylie also was on the video bandwagon, boasting growth of 53% in consumer engagement with videos. Other notables: Red Bull had posted an impressive 84% growth in consumer engagement and a 150% growth in engagement with video content; Gucci experienced the most year-over-year growth in engagement of the top 15, up 93% vs. 2016, despite posting just 6% more content. That sort of efficiency is a sign of the maturity we mentioned above.
