134 THE POWER OF VISUAL STORYTELLING The BRANDERATI team found that Both Ekaterina and her strategy and account teams using a data-optimized content at BRANDERATI are huge believers in the data-opti- strategy can increase brands’ social mized approach described above. Granted, they do use a engagement 2,000 to 4,000%. proprietary analytics and engagement tool to answer the Using data-optimized visuals can questions we raised above in a much faster fashion than increase brands’ social engagement any manual analysis could. And by doing so, they help 40 to 60%. a large list of their clients reach unprecedented levels of engagement on their social properties. Running the data across a variety of brands and indus- tries over the past two years, the BRANDERATI team found that utilizing a data-optimized content strategy increased their clients’ engagement on their social media properties. Even brands with a significantly sized and established social media presence saw their monthly engagement increase with the use of historically optimized and strategically placed visuals ver- sus the use of posts with randomly selected visuals. One example of a brand that saw success with this strategy was DIRECTV. The company’s content strategy includes a large variety of elements such as TV and celebrity news, movie, and sports updates, as well as a complete rundown of offers and features DIRECTV provides. It is critical for a brand with such a diverse content strategy to identify the most popular and relevant types of content to help drive the high- est level of social engagement possible. Partnering with BRANDERATI, the team identified significant peaks in engagement around the brand’s content over the summer of 2013. One of the things they found was that DIRECTV’s Facebook engagement increased by 148% when they initiated social conversations about the TV series Duck Dynasty! Armed with this information, DIRECTV decided to create a larger three-tiered engage- ment program related to Duck Dynasty. The first step was to develop weekly content schedules and increase the number of Duck Dynasty updates and features. The team designed and posted countdown images to the season premiere, which were wildly popular among their fans. The brand also used this information to boost their ongoing Facebook fan acquisition campaigns. The company targeted