3 Brands Whose Facebook Influencer Marketing Efforts Stood Out this Summer

The consumer marketers who led this summer’s influencer marketing campaigns on Facebook faced an uphill battle. Not only did they have to adapt to Facebook’s algorithm changes, which affected the placement of their brand posts on followers’ feeds, but many had to prepare for an unusually high number of events. Beyond planning social activities around the 4th of July and Labor Day, many of the world’s top brands also had to contend with the Summer Olympic Games through August. With these challenges in mind, we set out to do an end-of-summer analysis on which brands stood out in their ability to attract some of the largest, most engaged, and most influential Facebook audiences this summer. To answer this question, we looked at the Facebook influencer marketing activities across more than a dozen of the world’s top consumer brands, whose products are particularly popular during the summer months. While many showed some areas of strength, a few stood out in their ability to attract communities of followers on Facebook, and actively engage audiences of influential followers in ways that raised brand awareness.

Nike beat Olympic sponsors in share of voice

For the month of August, we compared the share of voice for five official Olympic sponsors (Coke, McDonalds, Samsung, Visa and P&G), and Nike, which was not an official sponsor but still received a number of product placements though athletes wearing the brand’s apparel. Interestingly, Nike commanded a much larger share of voice on Facebook for the month of August when compared to the other five brands. While Nike had 25 million Facebook fans, during the month of August it had more than 16x that number of people talking about its brand, at nearly 407 million. To put this in perspective, Nike captured about as much of the share of voice as the five Olympic sponsors combined. Not bad for a company that didn’t spend the money on an official Olympic sponsorship.

Coca-Cola dominates Facebook fans, and most influential top fans

When it came to attracting large numbers of influential Facebook fans this summer, Coca-Cola blew away the competition. The company is not only ending the summer with very close to 100 million Facebook fans, but it also boasts some of the most influential followers. In analyzing just how influential Coca-Cola’s followers are, we looked at the total number engagements driven by peoples’ comments on the company’s brand posts. In the month of August alone, we found that the shares, likes and comments on Coke’s brand posts drove nearly 7,000 additional engagements. This was higher than McDonalds, Samsung, Nike, Visa, and P&G — five other companies who were vying for attention during the summer months.

Independence Day had blockbuster results in getting people to talk about them

In a summer filled with mixed blockbuster reviews, one movie stood out for its ability to engage Facebook influencers was Independence Day: Resurgence. Every one comment posted about Independence Day resulted in 32 engagements on average on Facebook.

To put this in perspective, we compared Independence Day’s influence to nine other big-name brands who make efforts to generate interest in the week leading up to the 4th of July. As you can see in the chart below, Independence Day had a larger number of people talking about its brand in the week leading up to the 4th compared to any of the other brands we tracked.

For the brands who stood out in their Facebook influencer marketing efforts this summer, it wasn’t the quantity of fans they had that mattered as much as the efforts they put in place to encourage conversation amongst their most influential followers. Nike, Coca-Cola and Independence Day all succeeded in creating compelling content that drove discussion.

Now, let’s see if they can keep the momentum going into the holiday season.

All brand analyses completed using Mavrck’s Fan Grader from June 2016 — September 2016.

Originally published at Automated Influencer Marketing Platform & Activation Engine | Mavrck.