Welcome to Part 2 of this 4-Part series on online analysis of Brand South Africa.
In Part 1 I addressed the question just how connected is the Nation Brand with topics of “national importance”?
In this blog, I ask:
How is Brand South Africa’s social media performance compared to another African giant – Brand Kenya?
Let’s do it.
Table of Contents
Performance on Twitter: Brand South Africa vs Brand Kenya
At the time of publishing this post, Brand South Africa and Brand Kenya have 148,837 and 113,353 Twitter followers respectively.
Many brands put value on the size of followers.
While this metric has a place, it needs to be measured together with other key metrics for efficacy, including Tweet Volumes, Reach, Impressions, Tweet Mentions and Engagement.
I selected only the highlighted metrics for the review.
This is for cross-social network comparative purposes, and to avoid being too technical.
Union Metrics is my preferred online tool for Twitter analytics.
Thus, it was used accordingly.
Below is a graph measuring overall tweet volumes for the last month to 24 March 2019 for the two Nation Brands:
The finding is that there was no discernible difference in overall tweet volumes between the two Nation Brands for the period under review.
I then took a closer look at the tweets that the Nation Brands published on their Twitter accounts, and also the tweet mentions by other Twitterers.
The results show that Brand Kenya tweeted less but was mentioned more.
Note that mentions are an indication of a stronger online brand
Comparative Performance on Facebook
Next, I conducted comparative analysis for Facebook.
I prefer using Social Bakers for this social network.
It is worth noting that graphs that I am about to share are not exactly the same as found in the Twitter section.
This is because Union Metrics and Social Bakers analyse data differently, even for the same social network, mainly due to their proprietary algorithms.
As at the 18th of March 2019, Brand South Africa and Brand Kenya had 165,000 and 88,400 Facebook fans respectively.
Here is a graph of Facebook page posts, broken down by the types of content that was published by each Nation Brand:
Brand South Africa posted more than triple the number of posts during the period under review, equalling 47 (Brand Kenya published 17).
A decent brand volume activity, measured by frequency of published posts, is necessary for growing online strength.
Interactions (alternatively called engagement) that were generated on the Nation Brand’s pages are as follows:
Brand South Africa and Brand Kenya received 3,610 and 334 interactions respectively. Great news for the former, except…
Thanks to the Social Bakers tool, interactions resulting from promoted posts can be isolated.
This is important for determining organic versus amplified online brand strength.
Here are the results:
As the pie charts above show, 9 in 10 interactions for Brand South Africa came from promoted posts.
If I exclude the interactions from promoted posts in order to compare apples with apples, Brand Kenya earned more organic interactions for its published content.
This is a sign of more engaging content.
Preliminary findings
Based on comparative analysis that I conducted in this post;
- Brand South Africa has a larger social media community and publishes content more frequently;
- But, Brand Kenya is getting a more tweet mentions; and
- The East African Nation Brand is getting higher number of interactions per Facebook post.
