For our client Electric Zoo Music Festival, we were tasked with creating a very specific type of video content, cinemagraphs.
Cinemagraphs are part photo, part video. Parts of the image are completely still, much like a photograph yet certain component(s) move, like a movie. In the example below, the Red Power Ranger is the only one in motion while rest of the Rangers as well as the background remain still.
Done right, cinemagraphs can be quite magical and are great content to wow and entertain your audience.
We analyzed 22 cinemagraph posts we made and analyzed their performance on EZoo’s Instagram feed. Their Instagram had 93K followers at the time.
[Just to be transparent we only shot and delivered the content and did not post or come up with the captions for this particular campaign.]
Here are the results:
On average, the cinemagraph posts received 5,003 views and 22 comments which gave us a 5.4% views-to-followers ratio. With the current algorithm, 3%~5% is considered great so this campaign was clearly a success.
The weakest posts received 1,274 / 1,541 / 2025 / 2294 views respectively (1,783 views per post on average), and collected 5 / 5 / 7 / 9 comments (6.5 comments per post on average).
Now let’s look at the top performing posts. Our best 4 posts received 8,822 / 9,294 / 9,502 / 10,454 views (9,518 views per post on average) and 46 / 20 / 92 / 49 comments respectively (51.75 comments per post on average).
Most views don’t necessarily mean most comments, but you can see overall that posts that do well have high engagement metrics overall.
What these results tell us is the importance of consistency.
As you can see from the chart, the first cinemagraph post did really well, but the next 6 posts were below average. Although there are ups and downs, the following 15 posts performed much better. Had we quickly written off cinemagraphs after the first few posts, we would have missed out on all the great engagement which were yet to come.
The only way for you to grow and see if a content type is working is to be consistent. Don’t try to hit home runs on every post and don’t put so much weight on individual posts. You need to look at the metrics and performance overall.