We recently analyzed over 3 million tweets and 2 million Facebook posts in our Social Engagement Benchmark Report for Twitter and Social Engagement Benchmark Report for Facebook. These reports analyzed benchmark statistics across our seven key industries-including Consumer Packaged Goods (CPG)-and revealed several key insights. I've pulled out some of the key recommendations and findings for the CPG industry below. You can also see our Slideshare decks with all our CPG research at the bottom of the post.

Social Engagement Benchmark Report:

Metrics from 3+ Million Tweets Sent Through Our Platform
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Test increasing social publishing during "off-hours."
Consider posting between 12:00 a.m. and 4:00 a.m. CST on Facebook, which is a high-performing time slot for CPG audience engagement. 9 p.m. to 12 a.m. is also one of the most popular time slots for comments and average shares.

For Twitter, 9 p.m. to 12 a.m. CST saw the highest average replies and average retweets. Only 12% of CPG brands' tweets were during these hours, though. Consider testing tweeting more during these traditional "off-hours" by scheduling posts out.

Focus on the weekends.

CPG Facebook engagement rates also tend to be highest on Saturdays and Sundays, so pay attention to the weekend in your marketing strategy.

Twitter engagement by day of week was very similar to Facebook engagement as well. CPG brands will get the most retweets on Saturdays with more than double the activity of any other day of the week, but only 7% of CPG tweets are posted on Saturdays, leaving a great deal of opportunity for those that do.

Beef up your visual content.

The table to the right shows the average Twitter engagement rates for each industry. The chart breaks out tweets that contain photos vs. text-only tweets. Like other industries, CPG photo tweets garner much more retweets and replies than text-only tweets. They also interestingly have a dramatic peak in photo retweets on Wednesdays.

Use this as an opportunity to re-evaluate your visual strategy on your social properties. Photo tweets encourage the user to click through and view a photo, which is a direct request for further engagement. Apply that principle to other tweets by including links to engaging content, while making sure that all content you tweet is mobile-optimized, given that 78% of monthly active Twitter users access the network via mobile device.

Below you can see our major findings for the CPG industry for both Twitter and Facebook:

Interested in seeing all of this great social engagement data for your industry and others? Download the entire Social Engagement Benchmark Report for Twitter and Social Engagement Benchmark Report for Facebook.