Each quarter, The Dubs delves into the social media activity of the major players in a number of key industries. This month we’ve turned our focus back to the superannuation industry, looking at the change in social media activity between April and June this year. Our in-house research provides a measure of the presence each super fund has on social media, the engagement of their audiences, and ultimately the impact they have in the social space. Here we summarise a few of our key findings.
Top 10 – Sunsuper and AustralianSuper hold strong but HESTA most active overall
When comparing the aggregated social media reach and activity of the Top 10 Australian super funds, Sunsuper and AustralianSuper maintained their hold on the top 2 spots in this quarter’s report (1st April and 30th June 2017).
There were a few notable movements in rankings compared to the previous quarter, including the 4 place drop of QSuper to 7th position, HESTA’s 3 place jump to 3rd position and the 3 place rise of Cbus to 5th position.
As a collective, the top 10 super funds in this report weren’t hugely active on social media during this period, posting on average once per day. HESTA was the clear leader in terms of volume of posts, posting 325 times, which was double that of 2nd placed Sunsuper.
UniSuper keeps quiet on Facebook
Despite dropping 3 places in terms of their Facebook activity, SunSuper had the largest reach by far – close to double that of 2nd placed REST. Facebook also represented the social channel with the best reach for all the super funds in this report. The average Facebook following being 16,888 followers and the median following being 13,615.
In contrast, UniSuper don’t see the value in Facebook, posting zero times during the 3 month period, which is situation no-change from the previous quarter’s report. In the top spot, HESTA by comparison posted on average once every 2 days.
HESTA embraces X with gusto
While LinkedIn is the channel where you would expect super funds to focus their attention, X was the most used social channel, despite it only delivering an average reach of 2,125 followers.
Cbus and HESTA were two late bloomers when it comes to X, having joined the channel in 2014 and 2016. Where the difference lies is that Cbus posted zero times during the current period, whereas HESTA has embraced the channel, posting on average 3 times per day and 3 times more than the 2nd placed Sunsuper. And in a bizarre move, First State Super has restricted access to their X content and is the only super fund to do so.
While LinkedIn is the channel where you would expect super funds to focus their attention, X was the most used social channel.
LinkedIn underutilised across the board
Despite LinkedIn being the best social channel for reach for UniSuper, First State Super and HESTA, across the board the channel is underutilised, with super funds posting on average once every 4 days.
The average LinkedIn following for the funds in this report sits at at 5,372, with AustralianSuper being the only fund to have more than 10,000 LinkedIn followers. But for some, this appears to be changing. First State Super jumped 5 positions from 10th to 5th place for activity and HESTA and AustralianSuper both moved up 3 spots, while UniSuper, QSuper and Hostplus dropped 3 places.
Nothing but room for improvement on YouTube
The rise and value of video marketing is well known and well documented, yet none of the super funds in this report have more than 500 subscribers on YouTube and only 3 had more than 100 subscribers.
Taking advantage where others are not, AustralianSuper jumped 6 places to take the top spot for YouTube activity, posting 20 videos during the period of this report. Three of the super funds have made a move towards paid amplification of their posts, achieving more than 100,000 video views during the period of the report.
Research is what we do
Research is at the core of everything we do at The Dubs – from strategy, through to content creation, distribution, social sharing and our own digital processes.
As well as keeping us at the forefront of our own industry, we conduct research on the industries in which our clients operate – asset management, general insurance, health insurance, super funds, retail banking, life insurance, and more.
If you are interested in a custom report that benchmarks your organisation against your competitors, Contact us to find out more.
