Sign of the Times: Consumers Engage with Posts Providing Cybersecurity Tips, News, Products

In light of an increase in cyberattacks and to honor Cybersecurity Awareness Month this month, we asked data partner Shareablee to track consumer engagement with cybersecurity terms on several social media platforms.

Within the timeframe of 8/23/21 to 9/22/21 there were 1.3 million consumer actions across Facebook, Instagram and Twitter with posts that included the words cybersecurity, cyber security and digital security, according to Shareablee data provided to us exclusively.

Actions, or consumer engagement, are the sum of likes and shares of posts and comments about them.

While the majority of cyber content was posted on Twitter (62 percent) and Facebook (35 percent), Instagram posts had the most consumer engagement (50 percent), according to Shareablee analyst Madison Busick.

News and Promos
September saw a number of peaks in engagement for the year, Busick notes.

In addition, the posts’ most prominent themes were wide ranging. They included

teaching people how to enhance their accounts agains cyberattacks
promoting products or college programs related to cybersecurity; and
news about cybersecurity, including recent hacks or breaches and government policy to combat cybersecurity threats.

These trends were clearly noted in some of the content with the most engagement. For example, British media company UNILAD saw the most actions in the time period, with 103.7K consumer actions on its top post, which is a repurposed TikTok video of an “ex-hacker teach[ing] cybersecurity” and sharing “travel safety tips [to] help you improve your cybersecurity.”

For organizations and brands, Indiana University and IBM saw the most consumer engagement on their (very different) content.