You’ve probably heard of BeReal by now: The anti-Instagram photo sharing app that bills itself as, “not another social network.” While it may seem like just another buzzy social craze, BeReal is gaining significant traction and may be worth keeping an eye on. With brands like American Eagle and Chipotle already upping the realness and dipping a toe into the platform, marketing teams are beginning to explore its possibilities.
As of September 2022, BeReal has over 28 million installs, and per The Information, its daily active users are up by a whopping 29,200% year over year. The top age group on the site skews heavily Gen Z, meaning this is where the future of social media may be heading.
Because we specialize in social media analytics, all of this has us wondering: How will brands know if their BeReal initiatives are successful? What metrics are available to help optimize efforts?
Well, there is no clear answer yet. The platform is still growing and methodology around brand success and tracking is anything but defined. However, every platform has to start somewhere. For BeReal, here are the basic metrics you can start to track now:
1. Comments
BeReal allows users to comment on photos that you have posted, so tracking the volume and sentiment of comments on each post can serve as an engagement metric to help identify top performing content, and provide a look at overall performance over time.
2. RealMojis
RealMojis are BeReal’s reaction option, and involve users taking a picture of themselves in tandem with an emoji in order to respond to a friend’s content. You can measure how many of these your brand’s content receives, to serve as an additional engagement component.
3. Friends
Friends serve as BeReal’s follower metric, and you can measure friend growth over time to identify account growth trends.
4. Engagement Rate
To calculate a variation of an engagement rate, you can combine the comment and RealMoji counts and divide by your brand’s number of friends to get to a somewhat standardized metric. Note that this ER could feel wildly skewed versus other platforms, so take it with a grain of salt: BeReal metrics will not be an apples to apples comparison with other social platforms (and the platform seems to want to keep it that way, at least for now).
5. Cross-platform metrics
Brands are also experimenting with other attribution efforts. For example, Chipotle added extra layers to their popular Halloween promotion, which incentivizes customers to come dressed in a costume for free food. This year, customers will need to post their pic on BeReal, screenshot it, and share it to their public Instagram story with a specific hashtag and brand tag. On the flip side, American Eagle took a more straightforward approach, sharing a pair of discounted jeans on BeReal, and making it easy for customers to find them by adding a searchable product code in their caption.
So while there are certainly some markers of success that can help brands set initial goals and track success, the bad news is that social analysis currently needs to be conducted manually. BeReal does not offer a backend metrics interface nor an API that allows other tools to track engagement or friend counts. And because of this, brand- and advertising-friendly features may be slow to come – if they are released at all.
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