UK Insurance company social media benchmarks 2019
Editions Financial’s strategy team has crunched 12 months’ worth of data from more than 100 social media accounts to find out which UK Insurance brands are performing on social media.
We found that there’s a huge range in the social performance and visibility between brands.
Unlike other financial services sectors where insurgent fintech brands have challenged long-established firms on social media, UK insurance remains dominated by a handful of large well-known names.
We looked at 40 active Facebook pages representing UK insurance providers.
We found the typical insurance brand grew its audience by 5% in the past 12 months, with a median audience of 18,966 followers. Brands that earned more than 3,011 engagements and 20,000 video views on the platform in the last year overperformed compared with their peers.
These median figures hide some significant disparities between the largest and smallest pages.
Global insurer Allianz gained more than five million interactions on Facebook, largely from one video, suggesting that the firm paid to promote it. The video focused on the story of a Spanish engineering student that won a #explorewithus prize to a German space programme.
And in fact, it is competition posts that dominate as the most engaging from the sector on Facebook.
Pru Life challenged followers to share their self-improvement stories as part of its #weDOchallenge, and earned more than 134,000 engagements in the process.
Other brands to generate big engagement numbers with competitions include Co-op Insurance, Legal and General and Admiral.
We looked at the results for 36 different UK insurance brands.
We found the typical insurance brand has 6,164 followers and tweets 265 times per year, earning 1,322 engagements.
But despite all this activity, the median growth rate for UK insurance brands was 0%. Not all failed to grow, indicating that real effort and strategy is required to build an audience on this platform.
AIG earned the top spot on Twitter, with a tweet promoting the firm’s support for international relief charity Rise Against Hunger.
The AA earned more than 2,000 engagements with a single tweet celebrating Road Hero Steve, who delivers urgent medical supplies by motorbike.
Meanwhile, another car insurer, Adrian Flux, is also celebrating a hero. This time it’s Margaret, who is featured on the firm’s “forever cars” blog for keeping her 1985 Ford Capri in near-perfect condition. The feature is part of an engaging content marketing play, that clearly resonates with its target market.
Fewer insurance brands are active on this platform. Of the 13 UK insurers that we studied for this analysis, we found that the typical firm posts only about once per week on the platform – 57 times per year.
The median number of followers was 1,335, while firms typically earned 2,989 engagements and 2,698 video views over the past 12 months. As with Twitter, the median growth rate was 0% for the sector, but some firms were seeing success building an audience on the platform.
AXA is among the standout UK insurance brands on Instagram, where the firm has leveraged its sponsorship of Liverpool Football Club to great effect.
Other notable high-performing posts include Pru Life’s repost of a photo from a young female mountaineer to show that: “Adulting doesn’t have to mean trading your passions just so you can be responsible.”
And we couldn’t pass up the opportunity to highlight the More Th>n animal blues band. This advert was the firm’s top-performing post of the year.
YouTube
As with Instagram, fewer UK insurers maintain an active presence on YouTube, despite it being the second-largest site in the world.
We analysed 13 UK insurers on the platform and found that two brands in particular had used it, most probably as part of a paid campaign, to generate millions of video views.
The median numbers for the sector as a whole came in lower. A typical UK insurance firm saw videos posted in the past 12 months generate 15,751 video views. They posted nearly two video clips per month – 22 over the year. While brands with more than 1,783 followers are overperforming on the audience metric.
Hiscox generated the most views over the past 12 months with a campaign focused on promoting its business insurance products.
The short video lengths associated with this campaign, and the high number of views, 11,051,988 in total, suggest a paid campaign.
The AA enlisted the cast of Red Dwarf for a TV advert that also performed well on YouTube, earning 1,000 thumbs-ups from viewers.
And AXA also deserves an honourable mention for its series of mini-documentaries looking at how innovation and design can “create the best possible future”.
Here’s its “future of driving” documentary, which has earned more than 5,000 views on its own.
WANT TO FIND OUT MORE ABOUT HOW YOUR BRAND PERFORMS?
Editions Financial is a financial services content marketing specialist with a global footprint. We actively monitor hundreds of financial sector social media accounts and work with some of the world’s biggest finance brands.
We can help you gain a deeper understanding of your customer and prospect needs, or maximise the value of your existing research, insight and reports to develop a compelling content strategy.
