IZEA’s 2020 report analysed over 439 million social media posts generated by more than four million online influencers between May 1, 2019 and April 30, 2020.
Its first-annual look at the most influential brands in the Cold Cereal category examined 46 prominent cold cereal brands.
The platform analysed brand keywords, mentions and hashtags over 438.5m pieces of data across Pinterest, YouTube and Instagram, of which, 45.1k pieces of data were associated with Cold Cereal.
Results found Kellogg’s Rice Krispies and Pebbles grabbed the top spots for share of voice (SOV), based on volume of both organic and sponsored social media content created by influencers.
Key findings:
The Top 10 Cold Cereal brands by total organic content volume
Rice Krispies averaged 26.1% SOV, followed by Pebbles at 17% SOV.
Rice Krispies was mentioned organically by influencers in over 11k posts during the 12-month period. Pebbles featured in nearly 8k posts.
Conversely, General Mills’ Chex lagged considerably behind its peers in terms of both organic and sponsored influencer content creation. BrandGraph found the total count of organic content relating to the Kellogg’s brand was more than 12x that of Chex.
However, Chex led the charge for most positive influencer sentiment, with 96% of its influencer content being categorised as positive. Only 4% was categorised as negative or neutral.
Nestle’s Cheerios surpassed all other cold cereal brands in terms of the count of sponsored influencer posts by the brand or third parties. Analysis found the whole grain oats and honey cereal had twice the volume of sponsored content compared to the next most prolific brand, Pebbles.
Oreo was the most common brand name mentioned by influencers alongside Rice Krispies. 7.24% of all influencer content mentioning Rice Krispies also mentions Oreo.
The top influencer for cold cereal brands based on the number of engagements on organic content is American supermodel Chrissy Teigen. BrandGraph found a single post from her for Rice Krispies reaped more than 745k engagements.
The average creator producing content about Rice Krispies had 129.5k followers, compared to 73.4k average followers for the Cold Cereal category.
“Cold cereal brands are actively investing in influencer marketing and social media content strategies to increase new sales and loyalty for their products,” said Ted Murphy, founder & CEO of IZEA, which automates influencer marketing and custom content development, allowing brands and agencies to scale their marketing programmes.
“We found that 6.2% of all influencer content we measured in this category during this period was sponsored by cereal brands.
In the time of coronavirus
“Interestingly, while cold cereal brands sponsored fewer influencer content pieces overall in March and April during the pandemic, the amount of organic content created by influencers during this period was at an all-time high for the category,” added Murphy.
“As more people are cooking and buying longer-lasting food items while confined to their homes, we saw more influencer content about cereal brands being produced. In fact, as more consumers spend time on social media, the average engagement rate for influencer content featuring cold cereal increased in both March and April by about 29%.”
Sponsored content engagement for the cold cereal category averaged 1.45% during the evaluation period, well below the 4.3% average for the 3k+ brands currently observed through BrandGraph. Trix lead the category in sponsored content engagement with 10.18% versus Rice Krispies at 0.93% engagement.
The total number of engagements with influencer content featuring cold cereal brands increased by more than 51% in March and April relative to the prior six months.
Said Murphy, “Due to the pandemic, some brands chose to pause or decrease sponsored content activity during this period – however, BrandGraph tells us that, because more consumers are at home and spending time on social channels, this is actually a strategic moment for brands to work with influencers to generate social content and capture share of voice.”
