Report Period: January 1 - December 31, 2015

2015 in Review: A Social Media Benchmark & Content Summary for the Snack Food IndustryA benchmark and content analysis of how snack brands performed in 2015 on Facebook, Twitter, Google+, YouTube, and Instagram. Brands analyzed are Oreo, Starburst, Skittles, Reese’s, Snickers, Butterfinger, and Twix.

SummaryIn this report we look at the fan counts, posting habits, engagement levels, and content themes of the top snack food brands in the US for 2015. We’ll analyze 7 category leaders: Oreo, Skittles, Starburst, Reese’s, Snickers, Butterfinger, and TwixHighlights

❖ The largest network account among all these brands is Oreo’s Facebook account: 41.7 million fans. The smallest Facebook page is Butterfinger, at 1.9 million.

❖ Instagram accounts on average gained over 300% in fan growth, industry-wide. ❖ Average fan growth across all industries dropped over 5%, by comparison (drop was

driven primarily by Facebook and it’s highly-reported “Like Purge” (more on that in 2 slides).

❖ Twitter is the leading network for posting volume, with 63% of the year’s total posts across all networks

Report Period: 2015

How fans are distributed across the social networksThe largest network is Oreo’s Facebook account. No other network even comes close their fan count.

How fan growth is distributed across the social networksThe big growth story for 2015 is Instagram, with average growth rates topping 300%.Facebook lost an average of over 6% for the year. This drop is due to Facebook’s decision to purge voluntarily deactivated and memorialized pages from business pages. You can read more about it here. We will take a closer look at what’s happening on the next slide.

Facebook Fan PurgeYou can see from our two sample trending charts that fan counts took a sharp downturn in March following the fan purge. None of the brands were able to recover to their fan counts before the purge. In fact, based on the average drop of 7.5% in March for these two brands, combined with their April - December average monthly growth rate, it will take these brands 15 months to make up the purged fans.

Trending

How fans are engaging across the social networksThe majority of average engagement happened on Facebook and Instagram for 2015. Both networks combined for over 80% of the average public engagement generated by these brands.

Posting volume by network by brandTwitter is clearly the favored network for posting, with 63% of public posts averaged across all networks. Facebook is only 27% by comparison.Despite the high posting volume on Twitter, that network only received 6% of the average engagement for 2015.

Top data points on FacebookMost brands appear to be promoting their Facebook posts.Starburst appears to be heavily promoting their posts, however they are not posting as much relative to the other brands. It’s likely they’re posting more but are using targeted posts, which aren’t visible publicly. One particular note of interest: Butterfinger only posted 38 times in 2015, but managed to garner three of the top five posts for the year.

Top terms on FacebookThe top terms chart gives a snapshot of the most used or engaging posting topics for the entire year of 2015. Hashtags and URL’s here reveal campaign themes among the brands.Note that these are terms used at least 10 times throughout the entire year by any of these brands.

Top Posts on FacebookThe top posts for 2015 are all photos.Three of the top posts also appear to be promoted. Despite only posting 38 times in 2015, Butterfinger has three of the top five posts for the year. Even more notable, only one of the posts appears to be promoted.

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