• by Sara Guaglione , October 26, 2017

MPA, the magazine media trade association, has introduced a new metric to its Magazine Media 360° Social Media Report to compare magazine brands’ social media performance across Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and Pinterest.

The metric, called the Social Media Engagement Factor, found that audiences are more deeply engaged with magazine brands than non-magazine brands on social media, according to MPA’s 2017 third-quarter report.

The metric is designed to measure audience engagement by comparing the number of social actions (likes, comments, favorites, retweets, repins, sharing) to the number of posts on social media by publishers.

Using this methodology, an average Social Media Engagement Factor is developed for each magazine and non-magazine brand across the four social networks, and a median Engagement Factor is reported by network and content category (such as auto, business and politics).

The third-quarter Social Media Report revealed magazine media brands outperform non-magazine brands on Instagram, Facebook and Pinterest, while audience engagement with non-magazine brands ranked higher on Twitter.

Magazine brands’ audience engagement was especially high on Instagram. The top three brands on the platform include National Geographic Magazine, National Geographic Traveler and ESPN The Magazine.

"The Social Media Engagement Factor makes it easier than ever for publishers to chart and track their social-media effectiveness,” stated Jim Anderson, CEO of social media optimization platform SocialFlow, which collected the data for the report.

The report includes social-media statistics for about 200 magazine media brands from 36 companies.

MPA also reports total followers and likes for magazine brands on social-media platforms has reached 1.1 billion in 2017 so far, up nearly 5% compared to last year.

On Facebook, the top three brands ranked by engagement factor were HGTV Magazine, AARP The Magazine and Country Living. On Pinterest, the top three also includes HGTV Magazine, as well as The Family Handyman and Taste of Home. On Twitter, ESPN The Magazine, Sierra Magazine and Slam were the magazine brands with the highest audience engagement on the platform.

The top five magazine brands with the most total likes or followers across social networks were National Geographic Magazine, ESPN The Magazine, Vogue, Time and The Economist.