The Biggest Brand Content Marketing Hits on Social Media in July 2015

After taking a look at the biggest brand publishers on social media in July, we wanted to bring you an update on the top 10 pieces of individual brand content on social in July too. So, here it is.
To collate these rankings of most engaged content pieces, we use the database behind our Spike platform, monitoring social engagements across Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and Pinterest, across brand URLs in the month of July. Read a supporting blog on our methodology used here.
There are some impressive brands and pieces of content in this ranking, lead by SomeEcards – a now familiar name in our overall brand rankings – and its viral content piece featuring a poem left in a London bar. Congratulations to SomeCards for creating a piece of content which resonated so deeply with audiences online and which accounted for nearly 25% of the total engagement measured across all 10 of these brand content pieces.

The Top 10 Brand Content Hits in July

Here are the the full results.

We can reveal a podium of SomeEcards in 1st place, Microsoft in 2nd and Lightinthebox.com at 3rd, with the brands’ content pieces, and their URLs, listed in the table below. More on Microsoft later, which achieved something in our July rankings that no other brand did.

Brands from Which Sectors had These Content Successes?

Before we get deeper into individual content pieces, let’s get a macro view of which sectors contributed brands to our rankings. As the chart below shows, over half of the 10 brands with these content successes come from the electronics and tech industry.

After this two come from the fashion industry and one each from E-stationery (we’ve created a Web 2.0 category here!), gaming and retail. If we break electronics and tech into sub-categories, we would see the importance of software, gaming and photography here too.
Beyond sectors, and looking at geographies, we were interested to see Lightinthebox.com from France feature in the rankings. Their product page was the only page not to have English as the default, source language, offering a translation option.

Hat Tip to Microsoft

Within the rankings generally, one stand out data point is that Microsoft appears four times – with URLs for a range of different content types. No other brand achieved more than one ranking.
Nice work from Microsoft here, generating large engagement across one campaign page and three product related pages. Microsoft’s four content URLs collected nearly 33% of the total engagement recorded across all 10 of these brand content pieces.
Whilst looking at Microsoft’s content pieces we also noticed that its 2nd and 9th positions were achieved with the same campaign – with engagement split across one URL tagged with UTM parameters and one normal URL. The tagged URL features the following string ‘?OCID=UYW_SOC_TW_PAID_UYWCLE’, suggesting, we’d guess, a paid social campaign on Twitter.

What Types of Content are Generating This Social Engagement?

Another interesting trend to note is which content types appear in our top 10, with the chart below showing a fair mix, but most heavily populated with product pages – 5/10 were pure product pages and 1/10 was carrying a product range.

Whilst the podium spots – achieved by SomeEcards, Microsoft and Lightinthebox.com – were for news and story content, a corporate and social responsibility campaign and one product page, the remaining brands are achieving most of their engagement at important product pages. This shouldn’t be hugely surprising – these are commercial entities selling product, not content as the biggest publishers in our other social rankings do.
The product pages include attractive executions, such as Coach’s Wild Beast product range, GoPro’s Hero4 camera page and Converse’s Chuck II product page. If you click the down arrow on Converse’s page, the featured trainer even explodes to reveal product insights – very cool indeed.
Watching for non-product content, we were surprised to see none of RedBull’s content pieces make it into these rankings, given RedBull’s strong performance as one of the biggest brands on social media in July.
Coach’s Wild Beast range

GoPro’s Hero4 page

Converse’s Chuck II page

Illuminating the Content on the Podium

We’ve already noted Lightinthebox.com’s content piece above, but SomeEcards’ story about a poem written in a London bar and Microsoft’s CSR campaign are interesting to observe.
SomeEcards’ content piece, featuring this tweet, is a piece of brand publishing par excellence. It captures an interesting story, with a curious twist, that clearly resonated deeply with a range of audiences online. There’s something very human about this story, which the philosophical of our blog readers might say captures a part of the human condition. As an E-stationer – similar to PaperlessPost – marketers would judge SomeEcards’ content to be an awareness and lead generating tool, bringing prospects back to its website, to then create and buy e-cards. On that basis, this content piece is a great marketing success, also involving content created by a member of the crowd. Full view of this content hit below.

As for Microsoft’s CSR campaign, this promotion has been running for some time – already finding nine worthy community heroes, in a range of locations. Whilst being a CSR campaign from a profit driven company, it’s tasteful, beautifully executed on-site and integrates social nicely too. A strong piece of digital marketing all round. Again, a view via screenshot below.

We hope you enjoyed our first rankings of top brand content hits on social in July, which going forward we’ll bring you monthly. If your brand is missing and you think it should feature in our rankings, get in touch and let us know. We strive for full coverage of the sectors we produce rankings for, but occasionally we miss something.

Where Does the Data Come From?

Our Spike data base, which powers our Spike dashboard and is used by content gurus and marketers around the world to find the most engaging content themes for their audience, as soon as they emerge. It’s also great for media monitoring, highlighting the conversations that really matter about your brand, as they take off.
Think real-time content marketing is just a dream? Not any more. Take a free trial of Spike to find out more and exploit content opportunities before your competitors.

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