Secrets of Walmart Canada’s Facebook Strategy

We’ve analyzed 1,000 Walmart Canada Facebook posts (published between March 6, 2020 – August 31, 2024), to figure out what works and doesn’t work for Walmart Canada’s Facebook strategy, and how other retail brands can improve their own social media marketing efforts.

While this data is specific to Walmart Canada, the findings are relevant to social media practitioners everywhere, especially those in the retail sector. Use these insights to create or refine impactful strategies tailored to your unique brand and target audience.

Is there another brand or sector you’d like us to analyze? Let us know! Email [email protected] with your request. 👍

Let’s start off with some quick facts to set the stage:

• Walmart Canada’s Facebook page was launched in 2012. and current has 1.3 million followers
• It is managed by over 60 people all over the world:
  • 34 in Canada
  • 11 in the U.S.
  • 6 in India
  • 4 in the UK, Netherlands, Egypt, and Argentina
• Facebook engagement per post is down -500% since 2024.

As social media professionals, we know that algorithms evolve and audience interests change. That’s why it’s crucial to monitor the data and adapt constantly. We need to look at what our metrics are telling us and respond accordingly. Not acting on these insights will jeopardize all the time and money we’ve invested in building up these channels.

The data reveals that morning posts (published between 6 a.m. and 12 p.m. EST) and evening posts (published between 6 p.m. and 12 p.m.) get the best organic engagement on Walmart Canada’s Facebook page.

When Walmart Canada’s content is organized into themes, it becomes clear what kind of posts get the best organic engagement.

But wait! We need to look at the number of posts in each category. “Guidelines and Information” has the highest engagement, but there were only 7 posts in this category. Statistically, we’re looking at a huge margin of error and low level of confidence here.

Walmart Canada’s social media managers (and any others in the retail space) should post more “Employee Recognition” content. Don’t forget to stay on top of the data as it becomes statistically relevant. Also, keep it up with the “Community Support & Engagement” posts! They do consistently well. Conversely, step back from “Fashion & Self-Care” and “Home Decor & Organization” categories, as they are consistently the worst-performing post categories.

Here’s a surprising trend: photo posts significantly outperform videos in driving total engagements on Walmart Canada’s Facebook page.

Why are photos getting more engagement on average than video posts? Since we can’t know how many people each post has reached (as it’s not public information), we can’t be certain if it’s due to the algorithm or to lack of interest. It could be a mix of both.

Let’s take a look at another metric, video engagement rate, to see if there’s any other context that might help. To get the following data, we divided total engagements by total number of video views for each year (both are publicly available).

Lucky for Walmart Canada, we can see that the engagement rate for videos is trending up. In other words, for each view, the chances that it someone will engage with it (i.e. react, share, or leave a comment) are getting better and better. This might be the reason that Walmart Canada’s Facebook strategy has favored videos instead of photos since 2022. The chart below compares the percentage of posts that contain a photo to those that contain a video.

The data shows that almost all posts now contain a video instead of a photo even though, as we have seen, photos continue to outperform videos in terms of engagement value.

OK, we know that photo posts do better than video posts for Walmart Canada’s Facebook audience. Now let’s take a look at what kinds of videos do best.

To begin with, we’ll look at video views.

A video view is counted any time a video has played for at least 3 seconds. On a desktop, the full video frame has to be in view before it starts playing. On a mobile device, half of the video has to be on screen before it starts playing. This ensures that someone scrolling through their feed is actually pausing to check it out.

Out of 334 videos, the top 10% of videos had an average of 11,527 views, and the bottom 10% had an average of 1,775 views.

Here, we can see that vertical videos tend to get about 1,000 more views on average than square videos. This is likely due to most video consumption being done on smartphones, and the Facebook algorithm prioritizing vertical video for this purpose.