The old adage that old media is dead or dying is completely false thanks in large part, ironically, to its phenomenal success on social media.
SocialFlow’s Vice President of Strategy Stephanie Fossan analyzed 18 million posts from its major media clients in 2016 and looked at how they performed relative to years past.
First, media companies are dominating almost every social media metric — marketers and brands aren’t even in the same ballpark. To help put it in perspective, the 18 million posts I mentioned (a subset of all SocialFlow powered content) reached more than 600 million unique users. That’s almost twice the population of the United States, and, they generated more than 1 trillion social impressions.
Media companies have a huge advantage over marketers in terms of quality and quantity of content, which translates to outsized reach and distribution on social platforms.
While media companies are winning on the aforementioned fronts, they are still leaving a lot of money on the table by not focusing enough on the revenue. Tools like SocialFlow’s AttentionStream sponsored editorial product help media companies to monetize organic content at no extra production cost by allowing advertisers to directly sponsor top performing content on any social media platform.
Media companies can also benefit from taking advantage of giant gifts in the form of holidays. Marketers and content providers used to back off publishing on the holidays because people routinely disappeared for painful family gatherings. Now, we’re never without our smartphones and often relish them as a distraction. There’s also a lot less competition for eyeballs. SocialFlow found the absolute best time of the year to create and, or, publish content — three days before or after a major holiday.
Reach per post is down year over year, partly due to increased competition for a finite number of eyeballs as well as algorithm changes. However, reach for handles published by SocialFlow is up 4% over the past 2 years.
“Video killed the radio star,” according to the 80s pop song, but social media has given video a massive boost. SocialFlow saw in increase in video posts of 164% from over a year ago. There’s a good reason for that: While video made up just 5% of total posts through SocialFlow, video received a 32% reach.
Put another way, video on Facebook gets 6.4 times the reach of non-video posts.
The success of video also means new and lucrative revenue streams. Read the full whitepaper for more insights, trends and analysis that will help publishers continue their social success in 2017.
Mark White is the director of media strategy and communications at SocialFlow. He has 20 year of experience as a TV news producer in both business and general news, including stints at CNN, Reuters TV, Bloomberg, HLN and Fox. Mark helps startups with traditional and social media strategy and online distribution.