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Shift in Average User Engagement Trends | Instagram

  • 2 June 2023
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jeffrey.kingman
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This question came up in a client call today: does it seem that most consumers today passively consume brand content versus engage with content? Meaning, his thesis was most consumers today don’t expend the energy to interact (like, heart, comment, share, send) with brand content on Instagram like they were a year or more ago.

 

My “feel” without having data or research is that most consumers will interact with a brand’s content but the relevancy bar for making an interaction is higher today than it used to be. Does anyone have research data on this?

 

Thanks and have a great weekend.

JJK 

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Best answer by mike.blight 9 June 2023, 03:14

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Jeffrey Kingman

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mike.blight
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This question came up in a client call today: does it seem that most consumers today passively consume brand content versus engage with content? Meaning, his thesis was most consumers today don’t expend the energy to interact (like, heart, comment, share, send) with brand content on Instagram like they were a year or more ago.

My “feel” without having data or research is that most consumers will interact with a brand’s content but the relevancy bar for making an interaction is higher today than it used to be. Does anyone have research data on this?

 

@jeffrey.kingman — Such a good topic! I’ve been researching social media for a decade (and do it at Sprout)!

There are lots of ways to think about this:

  • The research. The research out there would suggest the vast majority of consumers are “lurkers,” or non-interactants of your social content. Doesn’t mean they’re not seeing it but it does mean it can be somewhat harder to track.
  • The power of impressions. So how we do track the non-interactants? Well, they’re still seeing the content— sometimes more than once. That’s where impressions come in. Now if you really want to go down the rabbit hole, you can check out historical data to see the ratio of impressions-to-engagements in a year-over-year format.
  • Google on behavioral trends. Not a perfect fit but Google put out some research about changing consumer behaviors post-pandemic. 

To my knowledge, we don’t have a definitive answer in the literature.

Anecdotally, I read  this article by Forbes on the rise of short-form content. Maybe there’s a behavioral study on the horizon for us!

Mike Blight (he/him/his) - Senior Market Research & Insights Manager
jeffrey.kingman
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@mike.blight Thanks for the insights. Another way to look at it is through customer journey mapping. The answer there really has to come from gentle dialogue during the sales process, with discovery questions like “how did you hear about us”, and “what was compelling in the Instagram posts that you kept seeing”, and “how many times did you see our brand in social media before reaching out?”. Granular data for sure, and a pain in the a** for the sales team, but soo necessary for always optimizing the marketing and sales processes. Thanks again. JJK

Jeffrey Kingman
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gentle dialogue during the sales process, with discovery questions like “how did you hear about us”, and “what was compelling in the Instagram posts that you kept seeing”, and “how many times did you see our brand in social media before reaching out?”. Granular data for sure, and a pain in the a** for the sales team, but soo necessary for always optimizing the marketing and sales processes

 

@jeffrey.kingman I’d buy an ebook from you to learn about how you’re navigating those conversations during the sales cycle. Definitely a pain but the insights gained are tremendous. 

Mike Blight (he/him/his) - Senior Market Research & Insights Manager
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With META’s shift away from measuring impressions and focusing on reach how do that change our former KPI of impressions? Right now we are seeing 0 impressions in our reporting because our paid impressions are greater than what the API is reporting to sprout.  All of a sudden I have no impressions I can track and so all of my numbers for tracking are off.

jeffrey.kingman
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@lisa.sobel can you explain where you see META moving away from measuring impressions? I am not seeing that, either in publicly available news, nor on Meta’s website or in SproutSocial updates. Also, all Meta accounts I have access too, either in Meta or through Sprout, are still counting Impressions. Could it be a profile connection issue? ** Note, I’m not with Sprout. Just a User.

Jeffrey Kingman
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@jeffrey.kingman since our pages were switched over to the new pages expereince the data we are getting for Instagram has had issues.  In contacting Sprout this is what I was told:

When investigating this situation, the team was able to confirm the values the platform is receiving via Instagram's Graph API are total impressions. They have clarified that the platform calculates organic impressions by taking the total impressions and subtracting the paid impressions, thus the platform considers the resulting amount as organic impressions. 
 
The issue they have identified in this situation is that the paid impression count that the platform is getting is greater than the total impression count. Please note the Paid Impressions metric is gathered from the data under the Facebook & Instagram Paid Performance Report that indicates more impressions than what’s listed which is what‘s leading to this scenario. Moreover, in these scenarios, the platform would round up the organic impressions to zero since a negative impression would not make sense.
 
Furthermore, the team was able to locate a similar issue that was raised with Meta's team regarding the data they are sharing via their API with third-party apps, such as Sprout. I would like to share this bug ticket so you can monitor any updates the Meta team shares: https://developers.facebook.com/support/bugs/620606073324332/
 
Unfortunately, considering this issue is being caused by the data that Instagram is sharing with the platform, the team is not able to resolve this issue at this time because it is waiting for the native network to address the issues regarding the data shared. We do apologize for any inconvenience this may cause!
 
Due to the complexity of the issue and the external updates required by the native network that will resolve this, our engineers have also let us know that this may be a long-term fix.
 
We appreciate you bringing this issue to our attention, and for your understanding as our team works with Meta's team and waits for them to address the issues with their API before being able to resolve its implications within the platform.

 

Our paid advertising on Instagram didn’t change 3 weeks ago, but our page was finally converted to the new pages expereince. So I can only conclude that this is what is causing the issue. Moreever, when I go into Business Suite Manager to view our data in platform, all I see is reach and not impressions.

We’ve steadily watched our metrics decline on Instagram and this may end of being the end of the road for that platform for us.

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