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Instagram?s March Madness engagements ignite while Facebook?s fizzle: report

In the latest sign that marketers are diversifying social media investments, new research shows that brands such as KFC and Lexus drove significant engagements on Instagram during March Madness despite not being official sponsors, according to Origami Logic. 

Instagram saw its share of total engagements increase 11 times to 30.9 percent, driven in part by how non-sponsors looked beyond Facebook and Twitter to engage fans. At the same time, Facebook?s share dropped from 84.8 percent to 44.3 percent. 

?The results highlight the importance for marketers to keep on testing and experimenting in social media,? said Kohki Yamaguchi, head of product at Origami Logic. ?Newer social platforms such as Instagram and Snapchat are natively mobile and have great potential to engage consumers on the go during live events. 

?Where consumers can be reached and what content they like will continue to change rapidly, so sticking to tried-and-true strategies will leave a lot on the table,? he said. 

Instagram ignites
Brands typically ramp up their outreach to sports fans during the National Collegiate Athletic Association?s annual basketball tournament, known as March Madness. 

Social media has been a big focus for several years because this is where fans are spending a lot of time discussing the games and keeping up on the latest developments. 

While Facebook and Twitter are a big focus of these efforts, marketers are increasingly exploring a number of other options that are increasingly popular. In 2015, there was a flurry of activity on Snapchat around March Madness (see story). 


In 2016, Instagram is also gaining steam, particularly with brands that are not tournament sponsors. 

KFC racked up 33,000 engagements and Lexus 20,000 on Instagram alone while pulling in 99,000 and 32,000 overall. Overall, 44.5 percent of consumer engagements for non-sponsors came from Instagram, but only 8.2 percent for sponsors.

Different approaches
Other March Madness winners in terms of social engagement include Reese?s, which posted a photo on Facebook that has acquired more than 230,000 engagements to date. Capital One has 19,000 engagements and is relying heavily on Twitter.

Origami Logic found that sponsor and non-sponsor brands are adopting different activation strategies around March Madness. 

A core strategy for sponsors is to post their commercials on YouTube and Facebook. Non-sponsors, who do not have commercials to post, are trying other strategies. 


Origami Logic?s research found that 15 out of 19 sponsors posted March Madness related videos on YouTube this year, compared with only two out of 36 non-sponsors doing the same. 

However, non-sponsor brands are successfully leveraging alternative platforms to drive activation. 

Sponsors are also increasingly diversifying their social investments and not putting all of focus on the big ones. 

?The activation strategies for sponsors and non-sponsors were very different,? Mr. Yamaguchi said. ?By and large, sponsors adopted a tried-and-true strategy of posting commercials and related videos on YouTube and Facebook while using Twitter for real-time activation. 

?However, non-sponsors, lacking the production budget and video assets, had to get creative in order be successful. Some non-sponsor brands such as KFC and Lexus were able to successfully leverage alternative platforms such as Instagram to engage their consumers,? he said. 

New opportunities
Twitter?s share of total engagement increased two times to 24.3 percent, reflecting how new products such as Promoted Moments are keeping advertisers interested in Twitter?s potential around live events.

The significant gains made by Instagram during March Madness underscore how it is currently an efficient platform for organic engagement and how the launch of ads is providing advertisers with a way to extend their reach into the platform?s highly engaged user base. 

?Marketers need to be on the lookout for potential opportunities across all platforms,? Mr. Yamaguchi said. ?Activating on major platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube is important, but alternative platforms like Instagram can provide a significant boost to the overall campaign performance for little incremental effort. 

?Mobile consumers only have one app open at a given time, and it's crucial to be activating in the right channel in order to rise above the noise,? he said.