Good quality content that is visually appealing, highly entertaining and lust-worthy is driving strong engagement numbers on Facebook.
The Australian Facebook pages of Jaguar, Lexus and Audi are achieving high engagement rates, well ahead of mainstream rival brands Toyota, Holden and Ford.
Findings from Social Status research revealed the average engagement rate for luxury car brands on Facebook was was 0.37% - well ahead of the average for mainstream brands at 0.08%.
Social Status indexed 73,000 interactions on content from the top five selling luxury brands and 25,000 interactions on content from the top five selling mainstream brands in July.
The research reveals that luxury brands have four times the engagement of mainstream brands, despite on average having smaller communities.
Of the top five selling luxury brands, Jaguar was the top performing brand with a 0.82% engagement rate while Mazda was the least engaging of the top five selling mainstream brands on Facebook with a 0.02% engagement rate. This is despite Mazda having more than double the page likes with 109,000 likes compared to Jaguar’s 57,000 page likes.
The findings also demonstrate the power of targeted content. Luxury brands are selling prestige, style and quality, this means the content tends to be single minded and better targeted to the audience.
Whereas mainstream brands are trying to engage a larger, more varied audience, which makes it harder to connect with people.
Consumers are more likely to engage with highly aspirational content on Facebook as it links to ideas of status and wealth and therefore reflects positively on them.
By its nature luxury content tends to be of higher quality, also it is more likely to be promoted well with paid support to further engage people with the brand.
There is a combination of factors as to why Luxury brands are outperforming mainstream brands particularly elements such as using a paid strategy and crafting the right content for the right audience. However, it’s not that the mainstream brands are doing anything wrong, but by their very name, their content needs to have broad appeal and invariably their posts venture into familiar mainstream territory such as Wednesday hump day, looking forward to the weekend and other expected areas.
Overall marketers need to consider more how the content is going to engage the audience. One of the best things a marketer can do is bring a rotation strategy to their social content. Specifically, that means to rotate the media types you use (video, photos, albums, links, text) - don't just get stuck using the same media type over and over again.
Additionally, rotate your themes. As with media types, don't just post about one or two topics, try to most about many. By doing this, you'll continually learn what posts work and don't work. Over time you'll be able to fine-tune your strategy to favour the media types and themes, and obviously the content, that best resonate with your audience.
Social Status
CEO
Tim Hill
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