How Promotion Affects Engagement for Malaysian Insurance Brands

Insurance agents make a living out of their gift of the gab. I wanted to see if their social media accounts were anything like that, and how much engagement they get.

I added AIA, Allianz, AXA AFFIN, Great Eastern Life, Prudential and Zurich in Analyze. The report generator was kind enough to give me a detailed analysis of what the top Insurance Brands in Malaysia were up to on Facebook during the month of July 2016.

Here’s a quick run-through:

1. AIA Malaysia has the most Fans while Prudential Malaysia had the highest growth. Prudential also had the most number of conversations, or People Talking about This, as a percentage of their Fans.
2. Allianz Malaysia had the most Brand Posts while Prudential Malaysia had the least
3. Prudential Malaysia engaged best with its Fans
4. Prudential Malaysia received the most Likes, Comments and Shares,

From this, it looks like Prudential is the most engaging brand in this group, let’s explore why:

Volume of Posts

Prudential had the least number of Posts among the brands in this group.

Could it be that keeping the number of Posts down gets you better engagement? We know already that the spray and pray approach doesn’t work. But how can brands be sure that the few Posts they put out reach the audience whose attention you want. Before jumping to any conclusions based on just the number of Posts, let’s consider the engagement that these brands get on Social Media.

Engagement

The chart below shows the engagement that each of these brands get on Facebook. (The Unmetric Engagement Score is a score out of 1,000 of the engagement that a brand receives on social media. Here, it takes into account the Likes, Comments and Shares a Post receives as well as the number of people likely to see the Post.)

When brands get high levels of engagement, with a very few number of Posts, it hints at some degree of Promotion. As brands continue to mourn the death of organic reach, the best strategy before them (other than posting more cat photos) is to put some money behind Posts. This will ensure that a certain number of people definitely get to see their Posts.

Promotion

Check out what portion of each brand’s content is Promoted.

Prudential Malaysia promoted the most, with 13 of 15 Posts having money behind them. Zurich and Great Eastern Life aren’t promoting any of their content.

Take a look at the chart below to see the amount of engagement that a brand’s Organic and Promoted Posts are bringing in.

Both AIA and Prudential got a perfect engagement score on all of their Promoted Posts. AXA Affin’s Promoted Posts too are doing really well. Great Eastern Life, who did not promote any of their Posts, got a score of slightly over 300. This is the most engagement that any of the brands in this group get on their organic content. It is pretty safe to assume that this is the level of engagement that any brand in this sector will receive on an all Organic strategy. This makes a case strongly in favor of promoting at least some portion of your content.

If you want more proof, see the surge in engagement that each of these brands gained from their Promoted Posts –

AXA Affin is getting a bump of over 2000% in engagement by promoting just a fifth of their content.

Before we conclude that Promotion is all there is to a solid social media strategy, take a look at the content that these brands are putting out.

Most Engaging Content:

AIA

AIA directly addresses the health-conscious. This is a great strategy, given how diet and fitness crazy everybody is.

Prudential

I had a bit of trouble picking which Post I would include here, because all of their content scored very high on engagement. This is just one in a series with the hashtag ‘PRUdictionary’ where they define Insurance terms to their Fans. By putting a spin on in-your-face advertisements and making it more like a learning experience, they ensure that their Fans listen.

Another strong point in their social media strategy is that they speak directly to the different aspirations of their Fans. They have Posts that target the young travellers, new parents, those who are searching for the perfect retirement plan etc. This works out when you have a diverse audience who have different pain-points.

Allianz

Most of Allianz top performing content was around the Junior Football Camp that Allianz was associated with. Leveraging sponsorships and other associations with huge sporting events is always something that works out in favor of brands. Especially when your kids are part of it.

You might think that figuring out your social media strategy is a lot of work. But based on this report, the key is obviously targeting your content. This means paying attention to what your audience want to hear and making sure that your solutions reach them.

If that sounds too complicated, sign up for Analyze. You’ll find answers to all your social media analytics doubts there.