Analytics and audiences: creating shareable content for social media

The importance of platform specific content is fundamental as competing content saturates our social media feeds.

Steve Wheen, Managing Director at The Distillery, said: “We focus our clients on creating platform-specific content and start educating them.”

Adapting your creative output based on how the numbers work can kill creativity according to Eline Van Der Velden, Managing Director UK at Makers Channel.

Effective engagement

Ultimately, engaging audiences for longer with compelling content is key to successful video sharing on social media platforms and creating content that drives engagement for longer can be established by using analytics.

Alex Connock, Director of Particle6Productions, said: “The number of seconds in that you put the title is incredibly important.

”If you put the title in the first frame on Facebook you get a much better pick up; put the brand in the first frame and you don’t”.

Audience engagement can be monitored by platform analytics and the content success measured by the viewers’ comments, likes and shares; this creates a resource for content creators.There is a chaos theory where we are “dealing with random mathematics that is never truly predicable,” Connock told audience members at BVE.

Velden argued there is a happy medium; to use the analytics of a series post-production has value in establishing audience trends and engagement. However, factoring in the analytics could have implications for creative production because you’d never take risks.

Are content creators losing editorial creativity with the drive of data analytics and computer generated algorithms? 

“We found this bizarre fact that after 23 seconds a lot of people drop off. And the same thing was true at one minute 10 seconds. You need to manipulate your content, put the best bits when your audience might drop off. This is an environment where you trust the numbers but then you also have to ignore them and go with the creativity,” Connock said.

Facebook algorithms are changing, with analytics proving that longer form video content is becoming an opportunity for content creators.

This was true for the success of Velden’s social street experiment videoes which were created based on analytics proving they did very well online.

Velden found the views on YouTube to be “shockingly low” in comparison to Facebook.

“I would love YouTube to be my platform but unfortunately for my content it won’t give me the same traction” - Eline Van Der Velden

Wheen discussed the difficulty of gaining traction with live videos on YouTube because audiences expect a higher quality of content “whereas on Facebook we have had some great successes because Facebook plays to it with their algorithm and users are okay viewing less polished videos.” 

The creative possibilities of technology are facilitating great creativity from professionals within the industry as well as audiences responding to the technology being produced.

“This generation is so lucky to have a license and capability to make content and publish it globally for free that no other generation has ever had,” said Connock.

”It has never been the case before that anybody could make a piece of content and make it go global for free. You have a phone in your pocket to shoot it on, and edit it on, and distribute it on and reach and audience globally. And that’s an amazing opportunity so go and have fun.”