Guest Post by: Jo Stratmann
Having already looked at the Facebook engagement and content strategy of two large rival consumer brands (Unilever’s AXE v P&G’s Old Spice) we thought it would be interesting to use social analytics tool Socialbakers to look at the engagement levels for another two rival consumer giants – Coca-Cola and Pepsi.
1. Fans
At face value, Coca-Cola has 29,368,850 more fans than Pepsi. Coca-Cola’s fan total stands at a whopping 35,454,838:
During October Coca-cola’s fans grew by 1,020,439 and Pepsi’s only grew by 188,349.
2. Engagement
We’ve always believed in building real engagement rather than “likes” or fans and so, to us, the really interesting analysis comes when looking at the activity of Coca-Cola and Pepsi in terms of engagement.
Using Facebook’s “Talking About” metric, during October significantly more people were “Talking about” Coca-Cola instead of Pepsi:
While the people “Talking About” metric seems to be fairly consistent for Pepsi, the increase and subsequent peak in people “Talking About” for Coca-Cola on 29th October could be because tickets for the Coca-Cola sponsored NASCAR Sprint Cup Series race at Daytona International Speedway went on sale on Saturday October 29th.
However, even though more people were “Talking About” Coca-cola during October, in terms of other engagement metrics is appears as though Pepsi has the advantage:
Pepsi has an average engagement rate of 0.06% versus Coca-Cola’s 0.04%. What’s more, Pepsi has a total of 180,050 interactions (posts and comments) to Coca-Cola’s 117,964, again proving their higher engagement levels. Part of the reason behind this is that Pepsi used a lot of pictures and images to engage with its audience during October, rather than just links and text, thereby helping to generate a lot of interactions with the page.
Also, throughout October, Coca-cola made 21 posts, while Pepsi bordered on almost three times the activity with 53 posts, often posting twice daily. Updating and refreshing content on a regular basis is likely to have helped with Pepsi’s engagement rate.
So it seems that although Coca-cola has the more ‘famous’ Facebook page, with by far the most number of fans, in terms of engagement during October it seems that Pepsi is the winner.
It would be interesting to track this trend over a longer period of time than just a month to get a real understanding of the levels of engagement on each page.
Image by: Roadsidepictures
Original Post: http://www.freshnetworks.com/blog/2011/11/facebook-engagement-case-study-coca-cola-v-pepsi/
