We pit pumpkin against apple to see how publishers can research seasonal trends for max engagement.
It’s autumn, in case you weren’t aware from the mass quantities of interestingly-branded pumpkin items. Despite this, we still seem to shamelessly love pumpkin spice, and laud its coming into season every year.
Pumpkin has become a recurring engagement champion for Starbucks each fall.
Seasonal trends often prove well for both brands and publishers who create related content. This is mind, we decided to look at how you can research and hack seasonal trends on social, with pumpkin and apple under our microscope. The data comes from NewsWhip Analytics.
From the beginning of June through September, pumpkin-focused food content (web) drove more total and average Facebook engagement than apple-focused food content.
This is also interesting, because there was significantly less pumpkin content than apple content. Despite this, the total Facebook engagement on pumpkin content was nearly triple that of apple content.
Let’s look at how this played out day to day. As we approached fall, the amount of “pumpkin” and “apple” web content ramped way up.
To see if a trend is still hot, we can look back at historical data. How did the pumpkin obsession do last year? Were people more or less crazy about their pumpkin spice lattes?
Surprisingly, the only way this trend seems to be going is up. Pumpkin content only had 400 more articles this year compared to last year. But apple related content is hot this year, with 2,401 articles compared to 2015’s 1,694.
While the amount of content is now favoring apple (with pumpkin quickly closing the gap), we see pumpkin food content is still driving significantly more Facebook engagement.
Drilling into the pumpkin content, we see quite a few of the top articles were related to brands preparing for autumn with their own seasonal treats. Publishers and brands alike can see heightened engagement by joining in on a popular trend.
Looking at Facebook posts specifically, there was a sharp increase for “pumpkin” posts from brand related pages. We can refocus our search to just look at brand pages on Facebook to see how brands were creating pumpkin content in the form of links, photos, videos, and more.
The wave of content takes off as early as mid-June, building to a crescendo in September as brands began really pushing the “pumpkin” envelope.
In terms of the engagement on these posts, we can see the highest peaks in engagement around the end of summer and start of fall. At the start of a new season, people are eager to jump in on these recurring trends.
In total, brand pages that posted pumpkin related content, saw over 1.68 million Facebook engagements (likes, reactions, shares, comments) for 765 pieces of content posted between June 1st and October 1st. That’s a lot of pumpkin pie.
While food and beverage brands top the list of pages driving “pumpkin” likes, several non-food brands benefit from the trend as well, including Michaels and iHeartRadio, as well as brands like Chapstick, Spencer’s, Jo-Ann Fabric Craft Stores, and Bath and Bodyworks further down.
Clearly, if you play your cards right, there’s a sizable engagement boost from using seasonal trends in your content where relevant, whether you’re a brand or publisher.
Jumping back to Food and Wine, which saw the most engaging article in our web content analysis, we can compare their engagement on the piece to their average engagement over the same timeframe.
From June through September, they posted 1,404 pieces of content, with an average of 1,392 Facebook engagements per post. The top pumpkin article drove over 111,000 Facebook engagements in comparison.
[fb_pe url=”https://www.facebook.com/foodandwine/posts/10153769968007026″ bottom=”30″]
The above article had a snappy headline, tying in the pumpkin trend by revealing a twist on the popular treat.
Transform Your Pumpkins Into Magic Content Carriages
Once you know how your trends will perform, you can start doing digging on how to best activate on them. What are the freshest stories this season? How are people creating content around the trend on their personal blog, Facebook, Instagram, and more?
Now that you know if a trend will work, you can craft your own content and campaign with reasonable confidence of its success.
