How Mecca's Carousel Posts Delivered 44x Better Engagement Than Video
Why brand-led carousel content outperformed native video across every metric—and what this means for your Q4 strategy.
I analysed every social post from Mecca’s biggest campaign this year, to figure out what works and what doesn’t for campaign launches in 2025… and I think you might be surprised by the results.
If you don’t already know what campaign I’m talking about, then I am sorry to inform you that you are, in fact, living under a very big, heavy and stinky rock.
On Friday, the 8th of August, Mecca opened their new flagship—a 4000 square metre, three-level store in Bourke Street Mall. Truly outdoing their George Street Store (apparently it’s three times the size) and newly defining the term mecca in the beauty space.
With a combined social following of 1.2 million people, it’s likely that the person sitting next to you on your morning commute either follows Mecca or knows someone who does. So nailing their social launch of the new Bourke Street Store was vital.
We all know and love Mecca—we love the in-store experience, asking for one hundred testers and using vouchers on a facial to maximise value. However, does this make a successful social presence?
When it comes to social strategy, I’m a believer that reviewing competitors from a brand lens is almost a waste of time. Instead, look at brands, influencers and creators who speak directly to your target audience.
If your social target audience is primarily Gen Z and Millennial women, then understanding the successes and failures of this campaign can help inform your social strategy—especially leading up to crunch time, i.e. biggest time of the year, i.e. cyber weekend, i.e. Christmas, or Q4.
I have one more controversial thing to say before we jump into all of this juicy analysis… I don’t think that Mecca’s socials have been hitting the mark as of late.
We have ushered in a new era of social strategy for beauty brands, lifestyle and sensory marketing. Instead of tapping into these trends or forging their own, Mecca sometimes struggles to produce video content that meets best practice standards, and this launch was no exception.
Now, I did do a lot of manual data capturing for this article, however, I didn’t have the energy in my mind, body, spirit and soul to collect and review engagement data outside of this campaign period, so instead, let’s review data from those dodgy Chrome extensions every Social Media Manager uses for a quick glance of engagement.
SocialIQ lists Mecca’s Instagram Engagement Rate as 0.04%. With 28 posts per week, their average likes sit around 397, with 12 comments on average.
On TikTok, their engagement rate is 0.08% with 216 average likes, 10 average comments and 15 average shares. SocialCat reports a 0.10% Instagram ER, and Social Insider reports 0.12%.
According to DataReportal, as of July 2025, average Instagram Engagement for Business Accounts across all post types is 0.47%. The median engagement rate for posts published by TikTok business accounts (engagement vs views) is 4.27%. Mecca’s typical off-peak engagement sits well under these industry benchmarks.
If you know me, you know I pretty much reject Engagement Rate as the be-all and end-all engagement metric; however, as it’s one of the only industry-wide and widely reported metrics, it is something to keep in mind.
Now that Mecca’s day-to-day success is established, it’s time to dig into their Bourke Street Mall Campaign.
For the sake of this analysis, I have calculated engagement rate as Likes + Comments + Shares / Followers for Instagram, and Likes + Comments + Saves / views for TikTok.
Pre-Launch
Mecca’s pre-launch campaign ran for a full month, with 18 posts published on both Instagram and TikTok. With an average of 28 published posts on Instagram per week, this means they contributed around 16% of total monthly posts to promote the new store opening.
Their pre-launch campaign was the largest portion of the total campaign by far.
Launch
The launch portion of the campaign included 9 posts in total, over a period of three days.
Post Launch
At the time of writing, there has been one post as part of their post-launch campaign.
So, let’s get to the nitty-gritty. What content worked, and what didn't?
Six posts achieved an engagement rate higher than 1% and five of six posts were… drum roll please… Carousel Posts. I could talk about Carousel Posts for days, and although I’m sure that it’s at the top of your to-be-read list, I might save that for another day.
One thing I do want to note is that Instagram recently shared via @Creators, that Carousels are one of the best ways to engage both new audiences and established followers—I would be curious to know just how many non-followers these posts reached.
Now, I hear you—You can’t just drop a couple of hundred mill to open up an impeccably designed and widely loved retail store to get good engagement on Instagram, and you’re right.
But you can review your strategy and up your weighting of Carousel Posts. They are driving engagement. Not only do they deliver higher proportions of likes, but they also deliver higher proportions of my favourite engagement metrics, shaves (shares and saves. No matter what I do, my brain merges them together so go with it ok!)
It’s also interesting to note that throughout the pre-launch period, Mecca posted a variety of influencer-led content, none of which made it into their top 5 posts.
What is it that makes Carousel posts perform well?
I have a platform-first approach when it comes to social strategy. If you don’t understand what the platform wants from you, then you might as well be yelling to the void, even if you have the sexiest retail store of all time.
What is the one thing every single social platform shares in common? They want you to encourage their users to spend more time on the platform.
Carousels do exactly this—to get the full story, you need to scroll through each slide. If you do it right, each slide can feel like a cliff hanger, and before you know it, you keep swiping through.
In addition to this, if you add a trending audio to your carousel, it can appear in the Reels feed, which is the best way to access non-followers.
With all of this combined, Carousels are becoming the powerhouse post type in 2025.
What didn’t do so well…
I just know the concessions team would be shuddering reviewing the bottom-performing posts. Four out of the six bottom posts were posted in collaboration with concession partners, Trophy Wife, Josh Wood Hair and Melbourne Apothecary.
Considering these went live utilising the collaboration tool, and these posts were exposed to a wider audience, it’s disappointing to see that they performed so poorly. There is one other common thread between these bottom-performing posts… They were all natively filmed videos.
Alongside Carousels, Instagram Reels are the best way to reach non-followers—and I think it’s quite clear that this content doesn’t resonate with their followers, or new audiences.
In my opinion, this is no fault of the content type; it’s a fault of the content quality and execution. I personally find Mecca’s video strategy confusing, especially for such a well-loved brand and for such a big launch. Collaborative, native video could have, and should have been a top performer throughout this campaign.
What I like and don’t like about these videos:
The Good
Utilising the collaboration tool, tick number one
The Mecca team have utilised in-platform editing tools like platform-based text and captions—each platform loves to see accounts that utilise their tools directly, so it’s good practice to be utilising the Edits app.
Mixing mid-fi editing and native video: layering voiceover over a variety of b-roll, using the split screen trend and layering images
Not so good
The execution of audio in some of these videos is just… not so great. The Josh Wood video sounds like a mix of franken-bites and mismatched audio. In this Trophy Wife video, the audio isn’t well synced, giving it a bit of an uncanny valley feel. It also feels like the enhance sound and isolate voice tools on CapCut have got a bit of a run on these videos. Which I sympathise with. Often, social teams are given a too-short period of time, in a less-than-ideal environment, to create content.
The entertainment factor is not there. And to be fair, a lot of this content does feel like bottom-of-funnel content. Perhaps understanding that carousel content was working so well, the social team could have decided to pivot and instead feature their service providers through carousel posts instead.
Let’s touch on TikTok quickly…
If I’m honest with you, I want to skip TikTok completely. IF ANYONE FROM MECCA’S SOCIAL TEAM IS READING THIS, PLEASE DO NOT TAKE THIS PERSONALLY. I LOVE YOU, MY SHAYLAS. But also, please let me help you.
Throughout the entire launch campaign, only five of 28 posts were made for TikTok first, with all remaining videos reposted from Instagram.
This is the biggest mistake you can make on TikTok in 2025—the platform wants custom content, and the number one thing audiences on TikTok are looking for is entertainment. None of this content is made with entertainment in mind; therefore, it’s pretty much destined to fail.
With this in mind, let’s circle back (you can take the girl out of corporate, but you can’t take the corporate out of the girl) to the industry benchmarks I mentioned earlier.
Social Insider notes that the median Engagement Rate per View on TikTok is 4.72%, and Mecca’s campaign posts averaged out to 4.79% per view. However, per follower, their average Engagement Rate for this campaign sat at 0.22%, and the median sat at 0.12%. A refreshed platform strategy, establishing a video series framework and active community management could assist in increasing views and engagement.
I’m gonna leave this there because I have so much to say on this topic, and if you’ve made it this far, I’m not going to take up any more of your precious time… today at least.
Ok, so what should I take away from all of this?
If you are opening a gorgy gorg, amazing, perfect and impeccable retail experience, make sure you are contracting incredible photographers.
But that aside—across my career, I’ve seen this trend proven true. Customers like to see shiny, high-end photography of new store openings. So, I would highly recommend factoring this into your launch plans.
And maybe, if you feel like you don’t have a strong entertainment video pillar, it’s worth pausing on native video altogether for any key retail launch.
If you do want to execute a video campaign (and you should), it needs to be entertainment-led and executed with quality and structure in mind.
Having perused the Bourke Street Store myself, I do think that the images are what truly do the store justice.
Here's the thing—this isn't just about Mecca. It's about understanding that in 2025, the platforms want what they've always wanted: content that keeps users engaged. Carousels do that. Well-executed video does that. Random product shots? Not so much.
The brands winning right now aren't just posting more—they're posting smarter.
What's your take? Are you team carousel or still leading with video? Let me know in the comments.
Love this insight!