Which car manufacturers do the best job at managing their Facebook community? What do they focus on and what is neglected? We analyzed the pages of various car brands from all over the world and ended up being quite disappointed.
European cars are the most popular
German can brands have the most fans on Facebook. BMW with 15.1m fans, Mercedes with 12.7m and Audi with 7.6m are all incredibly popular on the international stage. The only brands that can really keep up are the sports car manufacturers Ferrari (12.8m) and Lamborghini (6.5m). Companies such as Vauxhall, who are rather focusing on the national market than the international, end up having a way smaller fanbase (38k). Companies such as Koenigsegg and Lotus can barely get past 100k fans, the reason for that probably is the fact that they are niche brands that are rather unknown to most people. It’s hard to catch up to the traditional italian super car manufacturers, especially when not participating in any racing series.
The average growth is 0.74% and the majority of the companies is way below it, with the mean being 0.45%. Lincoln is growing the fastest of all manufacturers. With 2.95% they increase their fanbase nearly 4 times faster than the average, followed by Bentley Motors (2.12%), Hyundai (1.94%), Nissan (1.82%) and Vauxhall (1.66%). Brands such as Mini (0.11%), Chrysler (0.17%) and Citroen (0.25%) have trouble increasing the amount of people who follow them, which is surprising since Mini’s german page has nearly 1% growth.
Content not interesting enough
The average engagement is 0.3%, which is pretty low. Tesla Motors is leading the list with 1.1%, followed by Aston Martin (0.9%), Koenigsegg (0.8%), Cadillac (0.8%) and Nissan (0.7%). Quite a few brands barely make it past 0%, with smart (0.08%), Land Rover (0.07%), Fiat (0.04%), Hummer (0.01%) and Honda (0%) generating the least feedback. The low engagement-rates can’t be explained with the size of the page though. Mercedes (0.4%) proves that, even with over 12 million fans, it’s still possible to make your fans respond, you simply need to post interesting content. It doesn’t even have to be a concept car or a fancy new feature, a simple concept of a cars interior seems to suffice.
Mercedes-Benz hat ein Bild geteilt – 14.01.14
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The post interaction is quite similar. It averages at 0.3% and is lead by companies such as Koenigsegg (1.6%) and Tesla (1%), followed by Saleen (0.6%), Bentley (0.6%) and Volvo (0.6%).
Searching for an answer
The service level is pretty abysmal. With 19% on average it’s lower than what the worst german page provides. Responding to less than one fifth of all wall posts is pretty bad, why activate the option to post on the pages wall in the first place if you don’t even consider to respond to questions or feedback anyway? With 0.83% smart is leading followed by Koenigsegg (56%), Skoda (50%), Nissan (43%), Citroen (41%), Mitsubishi (41%), Subaru (40%) and Volkswagen (39%). It seems to be common among sports car manufacturers to not react to fan-posts. Ferrari, Lamborghini, Dodge and Corvette refuse any form of communication.
Considering how few posts actually receive a response the response time is, with 36h on average, acceptable. Suzuki (1h), Nissan (4.2h), Ford (4.5h), Koenigsegg (4.5h), Lexus (5.5h) and Tesla (5.8h) manage to react in less than 6h on average.
Prototypes and super cars
On average the pages post 1.2 times per day. Quite a few brands post multiple times with 24h, for example Ferrari (3.2), Hyundai (3.1), Mercedes Benz (2.9), Aston Martin (2.9) and Toyota (2.3). It’s also noticeable that american brands, such as Cadillac, GMC, Vauxhall and Chrysler publish a lot of content and are able to generate way more reactions than the average page by doing so. Due to the pages being global and representing brands from all over the world it’s hard to figure out what time posts go best. One thing is visible though: Its different to german pages.
Even though content is not always getting positive feedback in the morning, we can still see that the amount of received reactions keeps declining until evening.
The most successful posts usually have a picture of a concept or sports car attached to them. Especially Koenigsegg excels at generating a lot of positive feedbacks for their pictures.
Koenigsegg Automotive AB shared a picture – 1/11/14
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Koenigsegg Automotive AB shared a picture – 12/30/13
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But it’s not like the fans only care about nice looking cars. Bentley for example offered their supporters to have their name inscribed on a fan wall at one of their local factories. The amount of feedback was immense.
Bentley Motors shared a link – 12/23/13
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Conclusion
International pages differ heavily from national ones. They post as much but receive way less feedback. One reason might be the horrible service most pages provide because instead of just disabling the opportunity for fans to post on a pages wall, they decide to simply ignore most of the feedback and not show any form of reaction.
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.
You want to analyze the pages yourself? Head over to Fanpage Karma, create an account and subscribe to the ranking below. Now it’s accessible in your dashboard and you can rank the pages by whatever stat you deem most important. Try it for free!
Featured Picture: CC-BY Vicente Piorno
