Dive Brief:

• Fresh research from TrackMaven looking at social media content marketing found Instagram commands the highest levels of engagement by a wide margin.
• The photo-sharing app leads over Facebook, LinkedIn, Pinterest and Twitter. And although it kept a healthy lead throughout last year, Instagram’s engagement rate fell at the same ad options on the platform increased.
• TrackMaven’s "The Content Marketing Paradox" report looked at social media content marketing trends for paid and organic content posted to the five social platforms by analyzing 75 billion interactions on over 50 million pieces of shared content. 

Dive Insight:

The TrackMaven report found brands increased content marketing output by 35% per channel last year, but across all five channels engagement fell 17%. Even though Instagram had the highest engagement by far, video engagement dropped 31% and picture engagement 36% over the course of the year. Pinterest, coming fourth only ahead of Twitter in overall engagement, had the largest drop at 49%.

According to TrackMaven, content generation peaked in October with 87.5 social media posts per channels per month, but at the same time engagement dropped to the lowest level with 2.19 interactions per post per brand for every 1,000 followers on average.

Meanwhile, Instant Articles is one area where Facebook is offering publishers an opportunity for engagement. The social network in December made changes on advertising policies for the mobile app that appeased some concerns from its publisher partners. Last week the Wall Street Journal reported that according to multiple publisher partners some "currently generate the same amount of ad revenue on a per-view basis as pageviews on their own mobile properties."

Per TrackMaven's study, though Facebook trailed Instagram, it still delivered triple the engagement over Twitter.

"As more brands put up money to pay-to-play on Facebook, overall engagement per brand could hover at healthy levels on the network," TrackMaven told Marketing Land.