Love is in the air and some businesses are in their final efforts to be the gift you give your valentine. With marketing pushing around the big romantic day, we wanted to take a look at what influencers were doing to promote heart-bedazzled gifts. Beyond chocolate, many lovers are looking to get their partners into new lingerie this February. We asked our data team to gauge how interested social media users were in some top brands. We wanted to check Valentine’s Day engagement on social posts pertaining to the holiday.
Hypothesis
Like any good science experiment (and my teams assures me, data is a science) we started with a hypothesis. We posited that engagement on influencer posts about lingerie giants Victoria’s Secret and Adore Me would go up as people go searching for last minute gifts for their valentines.
Formula
How’d we check? Our data team wrote a function that will total the total engagements and impressions on posts about a certain entity (in this case influencer posts about Victoria’s Secret, Adore Me, and #lingerie) within a given timespan. The function returns an array of the total engagement, total impressions, and total posts. So we divide the engagments_rate by the total posts to get the average engagement per posts.
In technical terms, that looks like this:
def val(big, small, e_id)
posts = PostsIndex.filter(bool: {must:[{range:{timestamp: {gte: small, lte: big}}}, {match: {entity_ids: e_id}}]}).limit(5000)
engagement_rate = posts.aggs(sum_engagements_count:{ sum: {field: “engagements_count”}}).aggs()
impressions = posts.aggs(sum_impressions:{ sum: {field: “impressions”}}).aggs();
posts = posts.to_a.length()
results = [engagement_rate, impressions, posts]
The Results
The results weren’t as linear as you would imagine.
As you can see just as we hypothesized, engagements did go up in the weeks leading up to Valentine’s Day. In particular, AdoreMe had a stellar week running up to the holiday, by far eclipsing its peers (high five!). However, when you take a look at that final week before Valentine’s Day, things get a bit less linear.
Influencer posts about Victoria’s Secret and Adore me rose as the week went on, but overall there was some fatigue about generic #lingerie posts.
If you’re wondering about impressions, we checked those too.
Similar to engagements, impressions did steadily increase over the course of weeks but was inconsistent when broken down by days. Also from the volume of impressions, it suggests there were different goals in terms of micro- or macro- influencers being used. Different marketing plans for different brands, it makes sense!
No matter what the data says, we know Valentine’s is all over social media right now. Hopefully, your marketing was super sweet!
Happy Valentine’s Day from Sideqik.