Shares of BuzzFeed videos are nose-diving but one surprising metric is growing - and it could change how brands buy sponsored content
- BuzzFeed is known for racking up millions of video views through social platforms but has recently begun fixating on social chatter within the comments of posts to gauge the success of its content.
- According to new research, the number of "shares" of BuzzFeed's videos has decreased 19% over the past year while the number of posts tagged with @ symbols in comments grew 10%.
- Edwin Wong, SVP of research and insights at BuzzFeed, said the publisher's pitch to marketers is switching from focusing on reach to "relevancy and intimacy."
Facebook's algorithm continues to get trickier for publishers to navigate, but BuzzFeed has always been an innovator in that area.
The digital publisher continues to launch new Facebook brands and Watch programs for the platform, but as social distribution changes, it's making an interesting shift in analyzing how successful its posts are. Instead of fixating on the number of people who click the "share" button on a video or post, BuzzFeed is increasingly zeroing in on "at mentions," which tracks readers who tag a friend or family member in a comment.
According to new research from BuzzFeed, the number of shares on its content has decreased 19% over the past year. In other words, people aren't publicly sharing BuzzFeed posts to their social media accounts as often as they were a couple years ago. At the same time, Facebook's newsfeed continues to get stuffed with posts that prioritize content from friends over posts from brands and publishers.
That could be a major problem for BuzzFeed, which is focused on distributing media to a bunch of platforms with the goal of getting people to share content in their own newsfeeds.
"We were looking at a piece of work and over the last so and so months, we've seen less shares - obviously we got nervous," said Edwin Wong, BuzzFeed's SVP of research and insights.
But BuzzFeed said the drop-off in clicks of the "share" button doesn't necessarily mean that its content is viewed less.
Instead, the way that people share has changed, and they're sharing posts by tagging - or @ing someone, in social media parlance - account names in comments. More than 90% of BuzzFeed videos have at least one "at mention" in the comments, Wong said. And BuzzFeed's "at mention" rate has increased 10% over the last year.
Part of the reason for the change is because a few years ago, people shared Facebook videos because they were a new media format. BuzzFeed's food juggernaut Tasty, for example, pioneered "hands and pans" videos.
"You're seeing less of that but you're seeing more 'at' shares," Wong said. "When we started to see what was behind it, you saw almost like an evolution of that language ... I no longer need this piece of content to make me look cool, now I need it to connect with my friends."
BuzzFeed is flipping its pitch to marketers
For years, BuzzFeed and other digital publishers chased huge audiences on social media to grow, pitching advertisers on reach and the ability to target consumers across multiple platforms.
With the move to analyzing "at mentions" though, BuzzFeed's beginning to sell marketers smaller, engaged audiences.
"Reach is always going to be important because of efficiency and whatnot," Wong said. "But reach is so easy to achieve these days - we can get it from an ad network."
"The ability to drive a conversation and to have that conversation I think becomes even more important and makes the content so much more valuable to actually break through the clutter."
Still, advertisers want to reach big audiences
The challenge is that advertisers like scale and knowing that they're able to reach a wide swath of consumers through digital ads.
That's why BuzzFeed's giant network of brands plays a role in targeting engagement-based content to specific groups, Wong said.
"When marketers ask us, 'Help us understand what are some of the triggers to what will go viral,' we believe that the 'at' mention is a good correlation piece to help us understand that virality - it basically shows that the content has become a conversation," he said.
"We think that marketers need to start to think about this in a different way because it's not just [about] the targeted demo."
People love to pass around nostalgic, feel-good stuff
According to Buzzfeed's research, there are a few types of content that people are most likely to share:
- 31% of people said that they typically shared content related to "rewind, nostalgic or memories."
- Another 31% of people share pet and animal content.
- 29% of people share entertainment-focused content.
- 28% of people share food and cooking content.
All of those categories jive well with the content that BuzzFeed regularly cranks out.
Here's a chart that breaks out mention rates by the type of BuzzFeed video:
According to BuzzFeed's findings, 49% of people said that the last time that they shared, commented, or tagged content was for the purpose of "culture or building a community." 42% of people said that they shared something because it was funny, and 22% shared to spur people to take an action.
And once a person is tagged in a post, chances are they'll immediately react to the content. The average reader is 87% more likely to read or watch content from a post that was either shared or tagged to them, per BuzzFeed's findings.
"Having done this work for almost a decade, people used to say, 'I share things because I want to make people laugh,'" Wong said. "And today, the top reason is all around culture building, community."
