Understanding successful content is important when analyzing the industry and your competitors. However, there are many ways to define success. Most of the time in PostAcumen, we define success by looking at PostAcumen Scores. Today, we’re excited to show off a new metric: Lifetime.
How long is content living in the news feed?
With Post Lifetimes, you’re now able to answer that question. Marketers can also see when competitors have overlapped each other’s content in the news feed. This is vital for understanding the “Page Noise” in your fans’ news feeds. Page Noise is when pages have posts that are still “alive” in the news feed. We define a post being dead as “when the growth in engagement is less than 10% of the largest growth of engagement between snapshots.” The higher the Page Noise in the news feed, the more difficult it is for your brand’s message to succeed.
With the example above, you can see that all four brands (Coca-Cola, Pepsi, Red Bull, and Starbucks) in general overlapped on March 27th. Zooming in (see below) to look at only March 27th, we can see that Red Bull’s post did not actually overlap with the others.
From the screen above, we can also see that Pepsi had the best engagement of the four. We can tell this by examining the height of the triangle. The length of the triangle represents the lifetime of the post. Pepsi’s post was both highly engaging and had a long lifetime.
What About Paid Media?
Sometimes brands will apply paid media to a particular post that will keep a post in news feeds longer than it’s organic lifetime. What’s incredible about monitoring post lifetimes is that we can often spot posts with paid media.
In the example in the above, you can see that Hyundai had incredibly long Post Lifetimes on Jan 29th and 30th. Scrolling down, we’re able to look at those two posts:
These two posts most likely had Paid Media behind them to result in such lengthy Post Lifetimes. Based on the topics discussed for these posts, it would seem that they didn’t drive this much engagement and lifetimes simply from the content of the posts. Based on the metrics acquired, all indicators seem to suggest significant Paid Media was used here.
The Future
We’re excited to see how our users use Post Lifetimes and what we’re able learn in competitive analysis. We’ll be making further improvements leveraging the abilities of Post Lifetimes in the future. Let us know your thoughts or how you’re using Post Lifetimes in the comments!
