Report: UK brands on Facebook are stepping up their game

The United Kingdom has around 39 million active social media users. This means that two-thirds of the UK’s population can potentially be reached through social media marketing.

Knowing this, it’s no surprise that UK brands have had to step up their game on social media. Now let’s have a look at how they use it.

Considering the rising importance of social networks and financial investments being made in it, we decided to take a closer look at the social media performance of the top 20 UK brands, according to Kantar Millward Brown.

Our ‘UK Brand Report 2018’ provides an overview of how these brands have utilized Facebook to increase awareness of their products and what tactics they have used to engage with their audience. Read on to learn a little about our findings or click below to head to the full report and see the whole story.

About the data set 

Seeing the results of a report is obviously the most interesting part, but we also think having an understanding of the data set is equally important. We focused on Facebook this time around because the amount of data available for the whole year of 2018 – that means out data set ranges from January 1st to December 31st, 2018.

Before we forget, here are the top 20 brands we looked at:

The main focus of the analysis is on four different categories:

• Facebook fans
• Posts on Facebook
• Interactions
• Customer care

For each category, we looked at multiple metrics that shine some light on the performance of the brands.

Media companies in the UK get more interactions

Our UK report shows that ITV and the BBC are the two most active brands on Facebook. Unsurprisingly, they also achieved the highest amount of interactions overall. What's interesting to note is that both are media companies that post news and stories daily that users are already well-known for engaging with through social media channels, especially Facebook.

Key findings for UK brands on Facebook

Big brands bring some big insights for performance on the world's biggest social network. Take BBC, for example, who posted a staggering 3,600 videos on Facebook in 2018. That’s more than all the other 19 brands we looked at combined. This correlates to findings in our 2018 Facebook Study, where we found that video posts get 65% more engagement than photo posts. Well played, BBC and ITV!

Meanwhile other companies like Sainsbury’s, Three UK and EE not only get a lot of user questions on Facebook — over 5000 per year — but also achieved over 85% overall response rate to those queries from their users and consumers. We'd say that's more than a little impressive!

Companies that care about their customers and take the time to address them can go a long way building their reputation, both on and off social media. Excellent customer service online builds brand loyalty and even lead to higher revenues in the end.

Interested in more? Read the whole report!

It was too much to put all in one blog post so we did our best and put together a whole social media study. The findings are of particular interest to digital marketers who want to learn from of the biggest and best in the UK and take insights for their own social media strategy. Just click the image below to read the whole report now.

Questions? Leave us a comment below or find us on Facebook and Twitter.

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