Are You Obeying the 80/20 Rule? 

Great social media managers know it’s not about selling all the time. They give followers a reason to be interested – then follow up with content that drives a desired action from their audience. This is your classic 80/20 rule. It states that 80% of your social media posts should inform and entertain your audience, while only 20% should educate or directly promote your business. 

Does 80/20 Actually Work? 

Using Nichefire’s CompetiSmart AI, we dove into the banking industry, a hyper-competitive space, to see what mix of content performs the best. Here’s what we found. 

Entertainment Posts 

“Entertaining” content appeals to audiences without the intent to sell or educate. Posts about sports updates, fun facts, and contests can be entertaining. This type of content gives the audience a reasonbanking social media posts to follow you and engage without being turned off by a sales pitch.

Educational Posts 

“Educational” content has the intent to be informative for a specific topic and drive traffic the audience to a website to learn more – without explicitly selling. They are an effective way to build trust and appreciation – once you have the audience’s attention. Banks will often use educational content to provide valuable information surrounding a product or service – this implicitly builds awareness. However, this content is not a sales pitch.

Keep These Percentages in Mind

Banks who deploy this combo perform better on average and it’s excellent for lead capture opportunities on websites. If you’re building an audience, your social media team should share entertaining content for 1-2 months to help build an engaged following – they should make up about 40% of your total feed. Then decrease these posts to around 20% of the total feed and increase the amount of educational content. This may cause a drop off in engagement, but is likely to drive more traffic to a linked page.

Here’s a Real World Example 

CompetiSmart™ identified a top performer on social media… Citizens Bank. They’ve created an impactful idea: Be more engaging. To do this, they targeted recent high school graduates with posts aboutcitizens bank social media student loans. The campaign encouraged recent high school graduates to share photos of themselves in their college choice apparel. One of the future college students would receive a $1,000 Amazon gift card. Not only was the timing good, but the type and structure of the campaign were relevant to the target audience. 

The bank connected itself to the highly emotional (and financially sensitive) moment in these students’ lives. This kind of “we get you” moment can have lasting benefits for the bank. A $1,000 also resonates with students who are taking out tens of thousands of dollars to pay for school. This high-impact, low-cost campaign was a great success. The campaign began in April and continued into May, but continued to see high engagement on Student Loans posts into June.

Nichefire Understands Your Industry 

Nichefire is built to understand how your industry operates and how to position your brand on social media. With the power of AI, Nichefire analyzes millions of conversations, advertisements and content from thousands of companies in banking, insurance and healthcare. Allowing you to act instantly with better competitive analysis. Discover how Nichefire can help. 

 

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