Aston Martin, Rolls-Royce & Bentley. Where They Shine & Where They Fall Flat on Social Media
Sleek. Sophisticated. Luxurious. Expensive. These may be some of the first thoughts that come to mind when you think of luxury car brands such as Aston Martin, Rolls-Royce, or Bentley. But does their social media strategy drive as well as the cars do? Or does it fall flat?
For the past two years, I worked for a digital marketing firm which specializes in the automotive industry. Our biggest clients were primarily premium brands. Having not worked with too many luxury car brands, I recently decided to look into a few. In my previous position before leaving to begin my newest adventure — enrolling as a full time graduate student in the Global Luxury Management program at NC State — I managed a team of data analysts who assessed the online presence of hundreds of dealerships per day. I became very familiar with which dealerships and brands excelled (or didn’t excel) in optimizing their online presence.
Some dealerships would amaze me with how on top of it they were with their engagement with consumers while others sadly fell flat. Using a similar lens, I decided to see how three of my favorite luxury car brands stacked up.
I assessed the most recent 10 posts by each brand across Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram.
With no surprise to me, each brand favored Instagram over Facebook and Twitter for posting. It makes perfect sense. What better way to show off your brand than by posting well edited photos of the beautiful cars? It’s easier and (arguably) more effective than crafting the perfect verbiage for a Twitter or Facebook post.
Social media users tend to be more interested in quickly glancing at a photo on their feed than pausing to read a post which may or may not be worth their valuable time. 2 seconds is a lot for us millennials to commit to. I don’t even let my microwave finish it’s ‘1 minute’ cycle. If I can hit ‘pause’ at 58 seconds and still have hot tea, then I’m going to. It sounds ridiculous (and it is) but it’s the reality we as marketers are facing today. If you’re like me, you would rather spend half a second to see whether you want to pause in scrolling through your Instagram feed to admire a post of a Bentley on the lawn of the Windsor Castle than spend a few more seconds to read a paragraph on the latest model’s specs.
Curiously, Bentley (with the smallest audience) has the most engagement. And the largest share of voice on Google. Seems contradictory, no?
Aston Martin has the largest audience by far. About 3 million more followers to be exact. This should be great for their social media engagement. Right?
Well not exactly… Aston Martin actually only had 0.58% of its total social audience actually engage with the brand on these social media channels. In case you are wondering, that’s not a lot. It’s about half of what the standard minimum should be.
Authentic brands should receive about 1% engagement from their audience. Think about all the followers certain brands typically accumulate and then think about how many people are prone to actually engage by liking, commenting on, or sharing a brand’s post. Far less people than your personal account which probably averages more around 10%. People are more likely to have more engagement with their personal pages than with a brand’s because you know the person and you care about them. Using this theory, the margins for user engagement with each brand fall flat.
Each brand is posting on a frequent and consistent basis. They all have some engagement with their audience. And they are using top of the line images and video clips to draw people in.
They each have large audiences totaling in the millions and appear to have pretty decent social media strategies. So how could these three prominent and respectable brands yield low engagement?
The truth lies within the numbers. It would appear to me that these brands must have done something different along the way that caused the numbers to result in a skewed fashion. Or perhaps it’s a behavioral change amongst social media users.
It appears that the Instagram accounts have ‘authentic’ user engagement since each brand averages at double the recommended margin at 2%. When it comes to Facebook and Twitter, however, the results fall well below 1%.
Facebook and Twitter are phasing out which is noticeable here as to why the numbers appear skewed. Big player, Instagram, takes the lead with engagement.
These leading luxury brands have room for improvement in the social media game as far as Twitter and Facebook are concerned. But when it comes to Instagram, they are doing well at keeping up with their audience for now.
— Sarah B.
This post was created as part of the Global Luxury Management Program at the NC State Poole School of Management. All thoughts and opinions are my own.
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