Media firms are excelling at social: Reach grows by 236%

Getting any engagement from social media is a tough game, with only 1 percent of messages having any kind of real impact.

But, according to a new study released by SocialFlow, media and entertainment companies are doing better than ever with their social media marketing.

The study — which takes its findings from over eight million organic posts — shows that the average reach per post for media companies publishing to Facebook increased 67 percent from March 2014 through March 2015.

“It’s clear that media companies are producing more, and better, content than most marketers,” Jim Anderson, CEO at SocialFlow, told me. “Just look at your own News Feed and you will probably see that.”

In that same period, total reach for media companies grew by 236 percent, and SocialFlow saw a jump in engagement too. Across the year, average engagement per post on Facebook for media companies was up 44 percent.

Media and entertainment companies, it seems, are not only embracing Facebook, they are excelling at it.

“The top-performing 10 percent of posts on social media drive about 80 percent of the total reach,” Anderson said. “And nine out of 10 of those top-performing posts come from media and entertainment companies.”

Media companies that use Twitter saw a more moderate increase in engagement over the year — just 3 percent — but that is in the face of a much higher volume of tweets from media publishers: up 98 percent on last year. Increased engagement of any kind in a space that has twice as much noise is still an impressive gain.

But there could be more to those findings that meets the eye.

“Good content deserves to be seen again,” Anderson said. “Too much content is competing for a fixed amount of consumer attention, and the reality is that most people don’t see your posts the first time.”

How are companies dealing with this issue? Content recycling.

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While publishing similar tweets at various times per day is a fairly common practice, SocialFlow’s study details the results of recycling posts on Facebook, and the results are interesting.

Content that is posted twice gains 1.7 times the reach and 1.5 times the engagement than a single post. And posting the same content three times increases that to 2.1 times reach and 1.7 times engagement respectively.

“Television networks learned many decades ago the value of reruns,” Anderson said. “Savvy social media managers are starting to embrace the recycling of content as well.”

But the report errs on the side of caution.

Recycling posts can be seen as “spammy,” and marketers need to be aware of the effect that a poor reuse strategy can have on Facebook’s EdgeRank algorithm — the “secret sauce” that determines whether your content will be seen in people’s feeds or not.

“Facebook’s EdgeRank doesn’t punish recycled posts, it punishes bad posts,” Anderson said. “You can double your reach by taking a high-quality post and publishing it three times.”

The study — the second in SocialFlow’s series on Organic Publishing to Social Networks — is available now.