Social media expert Mark Higginson dives into the data behind Coca-Cola Journey and discovers some hard truths.
In my last post I talked about Coca-Cola Content 2020. Their strategy is very inspiring and there are lots of things to learn from it as marketers.
However, after seeing Coca-Cola Content 2020 video we all ask ourselves if Coca-Cola is already getting results. To answer this question Mark Higginson, a social media manager at the University of Brighton, analyzed Coca-Cola posts on Facebook, Linkedin, and Twitter to see if people were actually engaging and responding to their posts.
According Higginson, Coca-Cola content on these social platforms got a small number of shares and comments. The number of shares for Facebook was 238, LinkedIn was103, and Twitter got only 42 shares. And, the average number of comments per post was 8. In addition, some of the posts did not have any comment at all.
Seeing these numbers is very surprising because we all expect to see large numbers from a company as Coca-Cola that has directed its marketing strategy around good content that leads to incontrollable engagement and shareability.
Besides only using social media to spread content, Coca-Cola has reinvented their website now called Coca-Cola Journey, which has become an electronic magazine. And they have also developed a blog called Unbottled. When navigating these two websites you’ll find an incredible amount of content, including recipes, articles about people, business, social responsibility and many others.
Nonetheless, if Coca-Cola is not getting an impressive number of shares and comments on social media, why are they still in this mission? According to Ashely Brown, group director of digital communications and social media for Coca-Cola at the time of the article, Coca-Cola is not only looking for likes, shares and comments to measure the success of Content 2020 strategy. They are looking beyond it.
As Brown said “We do track social shares very closely. But for a publisher, social reads are a far more valuable metric than social shares (though they are, of course related). Publishers also track their natural search performance, unique visits, bounce rate, and, most importantly, time spent on page.”
Coca-Cola is very serious about their content strategy and has become a true publisher. However, even after going through their social media and websites we cannot draw a precise conclusion that Coca-Cola is achieving their objective of content marketing strategy.
Remembering that content marketing strategy is attracting and engaging targeted audience in order to drive profitable consumer action.
Furthermore, it is very hard to measure the success of their strategy because the only numbers we have available are social media likes, shares, and comments.
However, Coca-Cola may be getting results such as:
1) Increase in website traffic
2) Increase in engagement with targeted audience (according to their measurements)
3) Generating more leads
4) Increase in sales
5) Increase in brand awareness
6) Establishing themselves as thoughtful leader
In sum, Coca-Cola is a global company that has decided to invest a lot in content marketing. Therefore, this is the only sign we have to ensure that their strategy is working so far.
