Better engagement

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I’m about to make a case that you should remove your logo from your social content.

Every single post.

Hear me out.

Give me a chance to make a solid argument and worst case… you’ve only lost 5 minutes. Best case… your social content is going to get better engagement. I’d say that’s worth a gamble.

What’s this graph? Great question. Long answer.

Short summary: Images with logos/branding underperform on every measurable metric.

I won’t go into the details of every cell on the sheet, but I’ll hit the highlights. I’ve separated all posts from an account I manage into 3 categories: Promotional images (with branding), simple high-contrast (e.g. whit etext on black background) images (no branding), and highly designed images (no branding). In a previous post I made a case for under-designing images to stand out on the feed so I’m going to ignore the “designed” category for now.

If we take a look at the images that have a logo or reference the brand we see an average like count of 18,124, average comments are at 107 and the engagement rate is .76%%. Those are decent results when looked at individually, but are abysmal when you compare it to the simple images that don’t have branding. Average like count is over 32,000 and engagement rate is DOUBLE than that of the promotional images. The non-branded images perform about 15% better than the overall account average versus the 45% lower than average results for the images with branding.

If you’re still reading, I’m impressed. Numbers are boring, I totally wouldn’t have made it this far if I didn’t write it.

I included this portion because I want you to know that I’m not making this up. So many social media “experts” throw their opinions around, but I believe results speak louder claims.

So why do branded images perform poorly?

Every business under the sun has an Instagram account that posts about their newest products, their latest awards and all the reasons you should buy from them.

When you post content like that, it doesn’t stand out. It sounds like an infomercial so people keep scrolling. Even a tiny logo will get that content flagged as “promotional” in the minds of your followers.

To get results nobody else is getting, you have to post content that nobody else is posting.

2. It’s not sharable.

If someone wants to share your image to their timeline or stories, they don’t want your logo on it. It just looks tacky to share a quote with a giant logo in the middle (or even a small logo at the bottom corner).

I know someone is saying, “But how will we get recognition or credit if there’s no attribution?” At the risk of sounding too abrasive… Who cares? Think about it… someone shares your image (with no branding) to their stories. Their friend sees it, clicks on it, likes your grid and clicks the follow. How would your logo have helped in this scenario? The only purpose it would serve is decreasing the probability that it gets shared in the first place and then decreasing that probability that it gets clicked on by their followers. Ironically, the thing that is supposed to be getting you recognition is the very thing that’s hindering it.

Even if your post goes viral and you get zero credit, you content still added value to people. Whether it encouraged or inspired someone or just made them smile, that’s a win in and of itself. And if .01% of people that see the image click through to your profile and follow, that’s infinitely better than an image that doesn’t get shared because it doesn’t resonate.

The exception would be brands like Nike. A shirt without their logo is $9.99 and the same shirt with their logo runs $29.99. The same goes for their social content. They can brand the heck out of their Instagram grid and people will eat it up. Unfortunately, 99.99% of brands aren’t Nike. We’d all like to believe that our branding is vital and that we’re the exception to this rule, but like I said earlier… if you’re Nike’s social media guy, ignore me. If you’re not… give it a try.