Marketers and advertisers have relied for decades on brand characters like Tony the Tiger and Mr. Clean to build brand trust and awareness through print, TV and packaging. Today, brand marketers use these same characters in visual content on Facebook in an effort to engage their target audience.

Which poses an interesting question - do brand characters actually help a brand's visual content marketing efforts on Facebook?

We recently conducted a study of visual content on Facebook in order to answer this question. We used Taggs' visual content marketing technology to analyze thousands of brand images on Facebook and quantify how some well-known brand characters impact the shareability of owned content.