With the holidays coming, B2Cs are looking to interact with core audiences on social.
As such, we asked Shareablee to supply us with exclusive data about B2C brands during the period 9/27/2021-10/26/2021.
Not surprisingly, 86 percent of consumer engagement, or actions, with B2C posts is occurring on Instagram, though the number of posts is more evenly distributed (Instagram 31 percent, Facebook 43 percent and Twitter 26 percent).
Actions are the sum of likes, shares and comments.
A slight surprise: the number of posts year-over-year was down 8 percent, from 405K posts in 2020 to 372K in 2021, Shareablee analyst Madison Busick says.
Yet a far larger surprise was the considerable fall in actions, or consumer engagement, off 35 percent year-over year (YOY), from 560.3M in 2020 to 359.4M this year.
The unusual nature of 2020, when so many spent so much time at home engaging with social during COVID, could be the root of this disappointing YOY comparison. We’ll keep an eye on this metric and report back early in 2022 about the full holiday season.
One thing can be ruled out. Content this year and last was similar, including product launches, influencer partnerships, humor, pop culture references (Funko and Razer mentioned the Netflix hit “Squid Game,” for example), nods to Halloween, UGC and brands sharing positions on social issues.
Fashion and Beauty Reign
Given the season, it’s not surprising that five of the top 10 B2C pages (by engagement) come from fashion and beauty.
While retailer Fashion Nova had the most consumer actions across the 3 platforms, it also had the largest number of posts (1,518). It was not even close to the most efficient, though its average of 10K actions per post is admirable.
Most efficient was Kylie Cosmetics, with an average of nearly 54,000 actions per post. The brand’s post with the largest engagement was a Halloween tie to a product launch in collaboration with “Nightmare on Elm Street.” (The post, ironically, at press time, had 666K likes.) It shows Kylie Jenner covered in fake blood to promote her new collection.
“Influencer partnerships [lead] to big brand engagement returns for many brands, as the brands’ followers AND the influencers’ followers get involved,” Busick says.
For Jenner, those two seem intrinsically tied, as her post earned media coverage from Teen Vogue, Glamour, Seventeen Magazine, The Cut and more (albeit the associated photo shoot makes for some interesting watercooler talk).
Meanwhile, legacy beauty company Dior saw 500K more actions than Jenner’s brand; its most-liked piece of content was an Instagram post announcing global ambassador Anya Taylor-Joy, star of the Netflix series “The Queen’s Gambit” and the film “Last Night in Soho” (2021). The post had a not-too-shabby 418K likes at our press time.