A benchmark and content analysis of how snack brands performed in 2015 on Facebook, Twitter, Google+, YouTube, and Instagram. Brands analyzed are Oreo, Starburst, Skittles, Reese’s, Snickers, Butterfinger, and Twix.

1. Report Period: January 1 - December 31, 2015
2015 in Review: A
Social Media
Benchmark & Content
Summary for the Snack
Food Industry
A benchmark and content analysis of how
snack brands performed in 2015 on
Facebook, Twitter, Google+, YouTube,
and Instagram. Brands analyzed are
Oreo, Starburst, Skittles, Reese’s,
Snickers, Butterfinger, and Twix.

2. Summary
In this report we look at the fan counts, posting habits, engagement levels, and content themes of the
top snack food brands in the US for 2015. We’ll analyze 7 category leaders: Oreo, Skittles, Starburst,
Reese’s, Snickers, Butterfinger, and Twix
Highlights
❖ The largest network account among all these brands is Oreo’s Facebook account: 41.7 million
fans. The smallest Facebook page is Butterfinger, at 1.9 million.
❖ Instagram accounts on average gained over 300% in fan growth, industry-wide.
❖ Average fan growth across all industries dropped over 5%, by comparison (drop was driven
primarily by Facebook and it’s highly-reported “Like Purge” (more on that in 2 slides).
❖ Twitter is the leading network for posting volume, with 63% of the year’s total posts across all
networks
Report Period: 2015

3. How fans are distributed across the social networks
The largest network is
Oreo’s Facebook
account. No other
network even comes
close their fan count.

4. How fan growth is distributed across the social networks
The big growth story for
2015 is Instagram, with
average growth rates
topping 300%.
Facebook lost an average
of over 6% for the year.
This drop is due to
Facebook’s decision to
purge voluntarily
deactivated and
memorialized pages from
business pages. You can
read more about it here.
We will take a closer look
at what’s happening on
the next slide.

5. Facebook Fan Purge
You can see from our two
sample trending charts
that fan counts took a
sharp downturn in March
following the fan purge.
None of the brands were
able to recover to their fan
counts before the purge.
In fact, based on the
average drop of 7.5% in
March for these two
brands, combined with
their April - December
average monthly growth
rate, it will take these
brands 15 months to
make up the purged fans.
Trending

6. How fans are engaging across the social networks
The majority of average
engagement happened on
Facebook and Instagram
for 2015. Both networks
combined for over 80% of
the average public
engagement generated by
these brands.

7. Posting volume by network by brand
Twitter is clearly the
favored network for
posting, with 63% of
public posts averaged
across all networks.
Facebook is only 27% by
comparison.
Despite the high posting
volume on Twitter, that
network only received 6%
of the average
engagement for 2015.

8. Top data points on Facebook
Most brands appear to be
promoting their Facebook
posts.
Starburst appears to be
heavily promoting their
posts, however they are
not posting as much
relative to the other
brands. It’s likely they’re
posting more but are
using targeted posts,
which aren’t visible
publicly.
One particular note of
interest: Butterfinger only
posted 38 times in 2015,
but managed to garner
three of the top five posts
for the year.

9. Top terms on Facebook
The top terms chart gives
a snapshot of the most
used or engaging posting
topics for the entire year
of 2015. Hashtags and
URL’s here reveal
campaign themes among
the brands.
Note that these are terms
used at least 10 times
throughout the entire year
by any of these brands.

10. Top Posts on Facebook
The top posts for 2015
are all photos.
Three of the top posts
also appear to be
promoted.
Despite only posting 38
times in 2015, Butterfinger
has three of the top five
posts for the year. Even
more notable, only one of
the posts appears to be
promoted.

11. Be notified when reports like this are
available from Zuum: Subscribe
For more information about Zuum’s capabilities and
pricing, please contact sales@zuumsocial.com
ZuumSocial.com
Subscribe
© 2016 Zuum