They are supposed to keep you awake and make you feel energized. Some people don’t drink anything else anymore. Energy Drinks are way more than simply beverages by now: they are a lifestyle, to most people they represent fun and a good time. And since the brands heavily differ from each other we thought that it would be a good idea to check out various pages and try to find out how successful the different strategies actually end up being.
Big, stagnating fan bases
On average the pages have 1.6m fans. Quite a lot, considering the fact that we also included smaller, less known brands. Red Bull is leading the chart with 42.7m supporters, followed by Monster Energy (24m), Rockstar (2m), Burn Energy (2m), Pepsi MAX (1.4m), SoBe (828k), Lucozade Energy (607k), AMP (584k), V Energy (546k) and Shark Energy (514k).
The fan base increases only by 0.12% weekly. Action Energy manages to win more new fans than any other page (0.7%). HOT Kiss Love Drink (0.6%), Hype Energy (0.5%), Raubtierbrause (0.42%), Booster (0.34%) complete the top 5. It’s noticeable that even the fastest growing pages have a really small growth rate compared to other industries.
Little interest in the published content
With 0.08% the engagement is pretty low. The page of Raubtierbrause manages to make 0.9% of their fans react per day, Cannabis Energy Drink 0.5%, followed by IRN-BRU with 0.4%, Wired Energy Drink (0.3%), Booster (0.2%), Xyience (0.2%) and XS Energy (0.2%).
The post interaction looks pretty similar. 0.1% on average means that only 1 in 1000 fans react to a post. It’s definitely possible to increase this number with better support and more interesting posts. Raubtierbrause has the highest post interaction. With 1.8% they double their engagement, which is a clear sign that they should post more often, their fans definitely are interested in the content they publish. IRN-BRU (1.3%), XS Energy (0.8%), Wired Energy (0.6%), Mad Dog Energy (0.4%), Booster (0.3%), Rip it, NOS Energy, rhino’s energy (0.2%) are the other pages who perform above average.
But why are interaction and engagement so low? One explanation could be the posting strategies.
Different strategies and business models
On average the pages post 0.8 times per day. Cannabis Energy Drink takes the cake with 13.7 posts per day, quite an impressive accomplishment. Most posts are direct product advertisement that show the can, and the can only. Next in line are Red Bull with 2.4 post per day, Rockstar, Monster, Hype Energy, Boost with 1.9 and Sobe Energy, Burn Energy, 5-Hour Energy with 1.4
The posting strategies differ heavily from each other. Some put the focus on building a brand, rather than just selling a product. Here are some examples of the different strategies:
– Extreme Sports, Event and Lifestyle
Red Bull, Monster, Rockstar, Burn Energy are rather promoting a lifestyle than their product. The goal is to make people think of their beverage as soon as they see someone jump off a cliff, fly a kite or perform stunts on a motorcycle or snowboard. You will barely find any posts of the product itself.
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Rockstar Energy Drink US hat ein Bild geteilt 11.02.14
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Burn Energy Drink hat ein Bild geteilt 08.02.14
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– Interesting facts
Cofain 699 Middle East has a different approach. Even though posting pictures of events and cans is a common practice for them as well, they also publish infographics that inform people about interesting facts, like the products ingredients and where those come from.
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– Direct Product Advertisement
For example Cannabis Energy Drink, Wired Energy, XS Energy, Effect, XXL Energy Drink, K1XEnergy. These pages directly promote their product by posting a lot of pictures of cans and bottles, showing new flavors or prominent people holding drinking their product.
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XS Energy Australia & New Zealand hat ein Bild geteilt 29.12.13
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effect (DE) hat ein Bild geteilt 08.02.14
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XXL Energy Drink – LB hat ein Bild geteilt 12.02.14
4000
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The fact that most of them don’t combine multiple strategies, but only follow a specific posting style, makes experience become stale pretty quickly. If nothing ever changes, what is supposed to be my motivation to keep paying attention?
Service
The service level is at 39% on average, with a pretty impressive performance by Effect, Lift Plus, XS Energy who manage to react to every single user submitted post. Battery Energy comes in fourth with 91%, followed by rhino’s energy with 81%, V (79%), and Relentless Energy (76%). The problem is that most of them need pretty long to respond.
33 hours, that’s the average time a fan has to wait until he receives a response of the page. Xyience answers user posts within 1.8h, NOS Energy within 4.4h. Booster (10h) and 5-Hour Energy (11h) also do a good job. Cannabis Energy manages to respond within 3.2h on average, but since they only react to 2% of the posts that is a rather irrelevant figure. Reacting to 1 of 50 posts isn’t a great performance, in that case one should probably just disable the option for fans to even submit content.
Conclusion
It is surprising that most pages seem to have a really thought out marketing campaign but can not be bothered to offer proper support and community management. Only publishing content will not help with establishing a dedicated fan bases and it needs more that a couple pictures here and there. Reacting to user submitted content would be a first step into the right direction. If the page is able to create trust, people can turn into loyal customers, customers that will probably stay for way longer than the ones who keep being ignored.
All calculations were made with Fanpage Karma. Fanpage Karma is an online tool used to analyze social media profiles. Users can monitor an unlimited number of Facebook pages, Twitter profiles or YouTube channels. Either their own or those of competitors. Fanpage Karma provides valuable insights on posting strategies and performance. It gives hints on how to improve engagement.
Want to analyze the pages yourself? Head over to Fanpage Karma and try it for free!
Featured Picture: CC-BY Rhiannon
