War of the Germans: Mercedes, BMW and Audi on social media.
Three great car brands, all three with their own audience and fanbase, all three with their renowned reputation. When you think about these brands, you know you don’t need to explain what they are and what they do. However, it is interesting to dig deeper and see how each of these brands engage their biggest audience.
Let’s take a look at the grid on the left. As for all of my research, I always first go to Google and see how the brand is positionned in the results. BMW seems to have the greatest presence online, followed by Mercedes and then Audi. However, if we take a closer look at the brand’s activity on social media, the numbers might say otherwise.
In terms of followers, BMW and Mercedes run pretty close to each other while Audi is left far behind.
Audi has pretty much half the followers that BMW and Mercedes have, although its reputation is in reality just as big.
A great indicator of engagement here is Twitter. If you ask me, and that is only my personal opinion, Twitter is quite obsolete now, or at least it is not fit for every subject.
For this reason, it is quite amazing to see how much BMW is far ahead its two competitors! For Audi and Mercedes, the engagement is below 500. For BMW, it is nearly 9000.
That only shows how much BMW’s fanbase is active and how well the brand is capable of connecting and engaging with its followers.
However, these figures are not completely exact.
Like a lot of brands, Mercedes, Audi and BMW have specific social media accounts for each country or region, which makes the calculations a lot less accurate.
While it is definitely a good move to have their social media content reshaped for each target market, it makes our comparison a little less revealing.
In my example, I tried to stick to the american market. However, depending on the social media channel, the same brand might have multiple accounts for one and just one for another (one global Facebook account but multiple Instagrams for example).
With that in mind, it makes it hard to decide which brand wins the social media race. But how about you? Which one wins your heart?
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. #Luxemarketing #NCStateGLM
