Dairy Brands on Social Media

Learn the Best Strategies for User Engagement, Post Promotion, & Benchmarking

We analyzed 10 brands that do exceedingly well on Facebook from the FMCG dairy category by fan count, interactions, and growth. For a month, we tagged all of their posts by content category. This report is the result of that unique analysis.

The pages vary in size, but certain tactics are popular across the board. Learn what the best of the best do to create great social media results.

Total Fans

The top 10 dairy brands we picked have a distinct strategies to win over fans and keep engaging them - they provide value, a shot of good mood, or something generally interesting to the audience. These brands post a lot - 30 times per month, which is twice the average of global FMCG food brands, and they have about twice as many interactions as the benchmark. Creating interesting content for your audience, like recipes leading to your website or congratulations for a special event or holiday can create exactly the kind of relationships that will drive business results.

In this report:

• Post Distribution: What Gets Posted and What Works
• Paid Strategy: Branded Content Can Get Good Organic Reach Too
• The Top 10 Benchmark

Post Distribution: What Gets Posted and What Works

For the top 10 brands in FCMG dairy, the most popular type of post was a brand link. This was anything leading the user back to the brand’s website. It’s a good strategy - as long as the company’s website is designed to make the consumer remember the brand better next time they are facing a purchasing decision.

Dairy post category distribution

Often, the brand link was a recipe with the link to website or blog of the company where the full recipe was published

The second most popular post was a “fan interaction” - a post directly inviting user participation, like asking a question or asking the audience to share the piece of content.

The third most used post was a category we tagged as special events. The brands we looked at congratulated their fans on basically anything somehow relevant to their brand or industry: Earth day, national caramel day, cooking events, food festivals, etc. There was even a “make up your own holiday” day, which Greek Gods Yogurt proclaimed to be National Yogurt Appreciation Day.

Kerrygold decided to celebrate National Grilled Cheese Day instead:

This interesting post from Laughing Cow got over 44,000 interactions:

When we look at the post-type distribution in Socialbakers Analytics for our top 10 compared to the average FMCG Food page, we can see that our top 10 tend to post a lot more links:

Distribtuion of Page Post Types

They also do a lot better on interactions:

Number of interactions

TL;DR

These top-performing brands invite their fanbases to engage with their content through posting direct questions and congratulating them with any event or special day that could be relevant. To truly excel, create content that’s a mix of brand promotion and something interesting for your fanbase, like a recipe using your dairy product.

Paid Strategy: Branded Content Can Get Good Organic Reach Too

For the top 10 brands in FCMG dairy, the most popular type of post was a brand link. This was anything leading the user back to the brand’s website. It’s a good strategy - as long as the company’s website is designed to make the consumer remember the brand better next time they are facing a purchasing decision.

While interesting things like funny, special events, or fan interaction posts get good reach on their own, branded content typically needs promoting. These top 10 brands from the dairy industry do a good job of integrating their branded content with interest content like teaser links to recipes on the website to get better organic reach for their branded content too.

Most promoted post types

Most of these dairy brands had efficient promoting strategies. Stonyfield did well on promoting the right content, as they got a lot of interactions on fewer promoted posts.

TL;DR

Creating good organic reach for your branded content by interconnecting it with interesting content like recipes frees up budget to promote other posts, like brand video ads or recipes from food bloggers. Although these posts won’t directly link to your website, they will still create a community feeling within your Facebook fanbase, which means better interactions, better reach for your page, and if done well, a lasting, passionate fanbase. Know which content to boost and how much. Find out what your competition is promoting and whether your own promotion strategies are smart with Socialbakers Promoted Post Detection!

The Top 10 Benchmark

Don’t ever measure your performance in isolation - the numbers just won’t be actionable. When you compare to a competitor, an industry benchmark, or one of the best brands in the industry, you can evaluate both performance metrics and tactics to see what works best, what doesn’t, what to change, and where to improve.

These top brands know what they’re doing. For the dairy industry, links to recipes, whether on their own website or to food blogs, is the content that creates strong communities. Posts inviting direct user participation and congratulations on special events are also very popular. However, interesting and funny posts get the bulk of interactions.

Monitor the below metrics to evaluate your own social media performance. The numbers represent the average for the metric for the top 10 brands in this report, for one month. This is your benchmark for the most important KPIs:

To find out how your own brand measures up to these standards, try a free trial of Socialbakers Analytics! You can compare your brand to up to 10 brands, custom labels, or pre-set benchmarks.

You can create a benchmark for the best brands in a category like we have here, or you can compare your page to the industry average, which is pre-set right in the solution.

Main take-aways

• Integrate branded content with something of interest to the reader, like a recipe. Invite user participation directly and congratulate your readers on special events.
• Successful execution of the first point means you free up budget to promote really cool content that you know will do well with your community.
• Measure against industry and competitors: competitive analysis is key to finding out the best strategy for your industry.