October 27, 2015
Person/for PhillyVoice
A digital marketing agency listed Oreo as one of the best brands at getting people to share its content on social media.
What do Pokemon, Oreo and Jaguar luxury cars all have in common?
They all excel at social media.
To be more exact, the companies behind these brands excel at making them "contagious" on Facebook and Twitter, according to a study from Boston-based marketing firm DigitasLBi.
The agency created a "contagious index" to monitor which brands succeed most at getting users to share content.
On Facebook, the Top 10 Most Contagious Brands list included Qatar Airways, Starbucks, Simply Orange Juice and BMW. On Twitter, the winning brands included Oreo, Pokemon, Ralph Lauren, Jaguar cars and Taco Bell. (Read the full lists here.)
Why focus on shares, as opposed to likes or hearts or emojis or any of the other thousand ways that people can interact with social media?
"Sharing content is personal and a uniquely ‘social’ action that is a powerful indicator of what’s resonated with an individual in a meaningful way," explained Jill Sherman, senior vice president of social strategy at the company.
She noted that sharing is different than commenting or "liking" content because "not just in the way it impacts perceptions among personal networks, but in the way it impacts algorithms."
While DigitasLBi is touting its contagious index as a marketing tool, the No. 1 most contagious brand on Facebook doesn't belong to a big company with a huge marketing budget.
In fact, it doesn't belong to a company at all, and many people wouldn't consider it a brand.
The group at the top of the list was "Humans of New York," an enormously popular Facebook page belonging to a photographer who highlights the personal stories of his subjects.
Perhaps that means that the best way to inspire people to share something is not a carefully crafted branding strategy but instead some honest stories from the heart.
Read the full study from DigitasLBi here.
