YOUPIX 2019 and the State of Social in Latin America

One of the great strengths of social is that it cuts across global borders but there remain some strong content trends that set individual markets apart.

Brazil accounted for 40% of the total published video activity in Latin America last year and this year it accounts for 45%. At the same time video content is also growing. These are exciting numbers that outperform other markets like the United States for example and an appetite for content we’ll be keeping a close eye on.

In the first eight months of this year, Brazilian brands published 481,000 new videos posted to social networks (Facebook, Instagram and Twitter), which is an increase of 14% over the same period last year. That metric draws on 2,255 brands that performed actions on videos on social networks which resulted in 1 billion actions across platforms.

This 14% increase in video content generated a 30% increase in engagement which means the Brazillian audience is still hungry for more video and more content.

The power of digital influencers is almost equally powerful, in the same period, influencers published 51,000 videos and generated nearly as much stock, 939 million actions. It means the posts made by influencers have a much higher performance rate, generating significantly more engagement per piece of content.

Overall, Brazilian internet users spent 47.6 billion hours on social networks between June 2018 and July 2019 according to Comscore data.

Facebook has recorded the most videos posted this year (51%) in this market however Instagram has a larger engagement rate. The IG platform accounted for only 16% of videos posted in Brazil, but accounted for 63% of interactions, compared to the 31% of interactions on Facebook.

Instagram video content was the fastest growing among the three social networks in this period in Brazil, posting an increase of 170% and driven largely by increased branded content. We haven't even included IG stories here, this relates to only newsfeed video posts and doesn't capture where some significant action is happening.

These numbers sparked some pertinent questions about driving value from this content at both the speaking events I attended.

It starts with properly evaluating branded content partners. For this stage, I recommend assessing them again 3 key metrics: efficiency, virality (quality) and scale. None in isolation paints the full picture, but together they prove how likely an influencer is to move the needle.

Finally, check their consistency and velocity. Velocity speaks to whether someone is trending up or down when considering a partnership, you want to be paying for the future and not the past. Consistency speaks to creators who may have a large catchment of followers but only one successful piece of content. An example is Chewbacca Mum who made a fantastic viral video that had great performance in 2016 but hasn’t replicated that success with a different piece of content.

PHOTO: Facebook (https://www.facebook.com/candaceSpayne/videos/10209653193067040/)

After you’ve chosen a partner and run a campaign, showing an advertiser you have given them what they paid for in terms of engagement such as 1 million views is easier than proving impact and ROI. Did you reach the right people, change how they feel about your brand and change behaviour so they bought a product of switched brands?

How to measure ROI - or advertising effectiveness - remains the top question I get at any event.

Seeing brand lift through a survey solution is one of my favourite approaches. It looks at the people activated by the branded video and invites them to answer a questionnaire about their experience. In one Shareablee project with a big retailer in the US, they had a specific question about millennial Mums perceiving their food as fresher, in which case the survey makes a granular insight like that possible. Where people use Shareablee’s brand lift solution most is for cross platform learnings because one-by-one reports don’t highlighted their performance in relationship to everyone else. Another way to measure impact is around social behaviour, ie from the 100,000 people that engaged with the campaign what changed in their behaviour? The example from a pharmaceutical company I shared with the Comscore workshop, recorded a 4 x lift on those behaviours.

Then there is the aim of tying content to purchase and a change in sales. One Shareablee client has a shopper card and we compared the purchasing behaviour of those people specifically before and after a video campaign. It’s an approach that can also be applied to customer lists. In this example there was a 17% increase in household spend when they partnered with some local TV networks in the US.

There is enormous opportunity in Latin American for creators and branded content partnerships right now. Their challenge is vetting partners properly to ensure they have the right expectations and are clear on what they will get in return beyond clicks and impressions. What’s very clear is that they have an enthusiastic audience which is still hungry for more content, particularly in Brazil. I look forward to seeing how they unlock that opportunity in the months ahead.