The softdrink market is big. Nowadays people can find a refreshing drink in any color or with any taste they want. Differ the facebook pages of american softdrinks as much from each other as the taste of their product? Or do the pages simply exist to advertise the product by posting pictures of a cool bottle standing in the sunshine? We analyzed 32 pages to find out.
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Coca Cola franchises are the most well known
Coca Cola (78.8m), Pepsi (31.3m), Sprite (16.1m), Dr Pepper (15.9m), Fanta (13.3m), Mountain Dew (8.2m) Sun Drop (3.4m) Sierra Mist (1.3m) and Jones Soda (1m) are the pages with the biggest fanbase. Smaller, more regional brands end up with way less followers. An example is Hawaiian Punch Jamaica (1.8k), a softdrink that is only available in specific, barely populated areas of the US. On average the pages have 5.4m fans which is due to the incredibly big fanbases of the Coca Cola franchises.
The fastest growing brands? Coca Cola (0.32%), Fanta (0.27%), Pepsi (0.15%), Sprite (0.09%) and Mountain Dew (0.09%).
How involved are the fans?
The average engagement is with 0.08% very low. It is clearly visible that especially the big brands have trouble making their fans react. Smaller and more regional drinks, such as Double-Cola (0.5%), Manhattan Special (0.4%), Hawaiian Punch Jamaica (0.3%) Fitz’s (0.2%), Cheerwine (0.2%) and Bubbleup (0.2%) seem to be able to reach their fanbase more consistently. Neither Fanta nor Sprite deemed it necessary to post a single time in the last month, not really a good way to use a fanpage as a community hub. Hard to react to posts if there are none, right?
But not only known softdrinks are neglecting their facebook page. Grapico, Mug Root Beer, Cactus Cooler and Minute Maid for example havent posted anything in months. With a Facebook page that has 747k fans one would expect a company realizing that it can be really helpful to pump some money into facebook marketing, after all there seem to be a lot of people interested in their product.
The post interaction averages at 0.2%. Another sign that the community would like to interact more with the brand, but due to the lack of content cant. Double-Cola (1.1%) and Manhattan Special (1.3%) are also leading this chart, followed by Foxon Park Beverages (0.7%), BubbleUp (0.7%) and other smaller brands such as Dr. Enuf (0.3%) and Faygo Beverages (0.2%). Except for Hawaiian Punch Jamaica all of them have a higher post interaction than engagement.
The different posting strategies
It is clearly visible that the effort companies put into their facebook posts differs greatly. While small brands give their posts a more personal touch…
Hawaiian Punch Jamaica hat ein Bild geteilt – 15.01.14
1100
Manhattan Special hat ein Bild geteilt – 07.01.14
1623074
… the bigger ones usually just advertise their product with a catchy phrase.
Sierra Mist hat ein Bild geteilt – 07.01.14
1.21214429
On average a page posts 0.6 times a day, not often enough to reach out to your community on a constant basis. Dr Peper is leading the list with 1.9 ppd, followed by Sunkist (1.5), Fitz’s (1.5), Mountain Dew (1.1), Sun Drop (1.1), Welch’s (1.1) and Hawaiian Punch Jamaica (0.9). Sprite, Minute Maid, Mug Root Bear, Pepsi, Grapico and Cactus Cooler refuse to post any conent. It seems like the facebook page only exists to exist and got abandoned for some reason.
Mug Root Beer for example used to post at least once, from time to time even multiple times a week. But since the start of 2014 the page lies waste. No status upgrade, no links, nothing. Really weird especially considering that the feedback always was decent, but apparently not enough for them to justify expenses and effort.
Mediocre service and support
Only 45% of all user posts receive a reaction. On average it takes 55h. Both figure are mediocre at best. Welch’s (78%), Izze (77%) and Sierra Mist (74%) provide the best service, all answering more than 70% of the user posts they receive followed by drinks such as SunnyD (60%) or Shasta Soda and RC Cola (50%). Dr Pepper replies rarely (18%) but when the page does, it does so pretty quickly. Only 2.3h to respond is pretty good and none of the pages come close to this speed.
Sunkist (5h), Coca Cola (8.8h), Mountain Dew (12h) and Sprite (15h) still deliver decent results. So, even though brands such as Sprite, dont post any content themself they still try to provide a decent support platform for their fans and customers.
Pages like AMP Energy, Big Red and Mello Yello deserve to be mentioned as well. Even though not providing exceptional support they still try to help out their fans by reaction within 3 days to 40% or more of the user posts. Considering that there a lot of pages which require more than a week or ignore their fans completely this is still “ok”.
Conclusion
It seems to be common to not use Facebook to advertise your product. Most brands, especially the big ones, only use it as a support platform to answer questions customers come up with. Only a few seem to actually have a real strategy and deem Facebook important enough to spend resources on keeping their page alive. Which is somewhat weird because we found out that liquor and energy drink companies have a strong focus on Facebook marketing and maintaining their presenece.
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.
[cta type=”small” img=”1″ url=”http://www.fanpagekarma.com/” text=”” color=”blue”]Want to analyze the pages yourself? Head over to Fanpage Karma and try it for free![/cta]
Featured Picture: CC-BY Surian Soosay
