Does asking for social media engagement still work?

Three years ago we found that on nearly every social metric, asking for engagement led to more engagement. Since then, however, algorithms have changed, users have changed, and strategy has changed. So does asking for engagement still work in 2016? Here’s what we found.

The Goods
To find our answer we looked at over 100,000 hotel and resort social media posts shared during the last 12 months. We separated the posts that made some direct request for engagement (e.g., “Share this post for a chance…”) and compared the engagement rates on those posts to posts that didn’t.

Asking for likes earned 1.3x as many likes, asking for comments saw 20x as many comments, and asking for shares led to 11x as many shares. Asking for retweets, however, did not lead to more retweets. If anything, there appears to be a slight dip in the retweet rate when retweets are requested.

What This Means
What’s most interesting about this is what happens when you compare this sample to that analysis we did in 2013. Since then, engagement for posts that DON’T ask for engagement has dropped about 15-20% on average. But the average engagement on posts that DO ask for engagement has grown by more than 10%.

This trend is exaggerated when we look just at Facebook comments and shares where engagement on normal posts dropped by 43% while engagement on posts that ask for comments or shares grew by 77%. Some marketers understandably don’t want to play this game, but the numbers look good for those that do.

Next Week, Another Insight
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