Using Facebook fans to improve automotive marketing
Facebook Fan Pages have become the most recent in a long line of social media “must-haves” for automotive marketers –- but what do they really tell you? And are they even helpful?
Does a high fan count equal success?
It’s no surprise that lots of people feel strongly about their favorite automotive brands and show their allegiance to those brands by flocking to automakers’ Facebook Fan Pages. Consider the high fan counts for some of the best-known automaker Fan Pages: As of Jan. 22, 2010, I found an average of nearly 111,000 fans across 33 OEM Fan Pages, which is pretty amazing considering the average fan count across all Facebook Fan Pages is only 4,600. Even for the 24 OEM Fan Pages with fewer than 111,000 fans, the average was just shy of 30,000 while the nine above-average pages weigh in closer to 330,000 fans each. The top five, in descending order, were Porsche, BMW, Audi, Jeep and Volkswagen.
However, high fan count alone is a poor measure of Facebook Fan Page success. Yes, the total fan count is the equivalent of reach, but the message you put out to that audience and the interactions and insights you pull back will determine the real Fan Page winners. Also, you are not limited to your own fans as a source for strategic insights; automotive marketers who learn to leverage other pages have a chance to really pull ahead.
What Facebook tells you about your fans
If you own a Facebook Fan Page — you are the creator, administrator, or otherwise have backend access — then you can access data that will help leverage your fans for free.
Take a look at the aggregate demographics. Examine the fan growth over time, overlay that with other campaigns or key product launches, and see which ones had a Facebook halo effect — then talk about those campaigns to that audience.
Look at interaction rates — page views, comments, etc. — and match your messaging strategy accordingly. Passive audience? Broadcast offers and updates (think Toys “R” Us). Interactive audience? Leverage them for feedback with surveys or projects (think Audi).
What Facebook doesn’t tell you … but you want to know
It will be the marketers who learn from their fans — and their competitors – and then apply those insights both on and off Facebook who will really win.
Because my employer, Rapleaf, recently launched the ability to study Fan Pages and offer insights beyond what Facebook provides, I decided to look at what can be learned by studying Facebook fans of two competitors: Audi and BMW.
I looked at roughly 50,000 random fans from each of the Audi and BMW Facebook Fan Pages, with an overlap of less than 1 percent. The results showed both striking similarities and insightful differences.
Audi and BMW fan similarities
It is not surprising that fans of German sports-luxury vehicles are similar. It is, however, the extent of those similarities that caught my eye. Demographically speaking, they could be twins; both groups are just over 70 percent males in their mid-to-late 20s (26 for BMW; 28.5 for Audi). Socially, twins again; Audi fans have 206 friends on average while BMW has 212. More surprising still is the near-identical distribution of friend counts between the brands (see graph at left).
What this tells me is that any media targeted to social males in their mid-to-late 20s should focus on brand differentiation within a narrow segment. Basically, you need to tell why Audi is better than BMW or vice versa. This is a brand battleground because the very next impression is likely your top competitor. But they can’t be exactly alike, can they?
It turns out there are some subtle, but very insightful, differences that can turn the tide of a marketing battle.
BMW and Audi fan differences
BMW fans are more media-oriented than Audi fans. They share about twice as many photos, more than five times as many videos and have a higher membership across several social communities outside Facebook: Hi5, Tagged and Flixster (see graph).
So what can you do with that? You could approach the sites where you have the advantage and buy up inventory, most likely at a lower CPM than more popular sites. Focus less on safeguarding against the next impression, because your enthusiasts outnumber theirs, and more on the quality of content in each one. For BMW, the focus could be on media-savvy ad units and playing up all the audiovisual bells and whistles in each vehicle. For Audi, attention could be drawn to the straightforward design and ease of use related to navigation or audio equipment.
CRM opportunities
And lastly, but perhaps most importantly, any marketer should understand the Fan Page makeup of owners vs. aspiring owners. In a different study against a single vehicle fan page, Rapleaf overlaid the known owners with fans and found a 10 percent match. What does this mean? The Fan Page can easily become a sales channel, helping provide information and offers to the 90 percent of fans who are not current owners of the vehicle.
With more Fan Pages being created all the time, the amount of data available is only increasing while the battle for customer attention wages on. Automotive marketers who can best tap into and leverage these new data assets will have a definite advantage as they plan, create and execute their campaigns.
The comments in this article are the opinion of author and are not necessarily reflective of his employer, Rapleaf.
Related links:
- Inside Facebook Pages, Sysomos, November 2009
- Toys R Us finds hordes of fans on Facebook, VentureBeat, 11.24.09
- 2010 Los Angeles Auto Show: Audi joins Facebook for Design Challenge Entry, Automotive.com, 11.17.09
- Facebook Fan Page and Twitter Follower Analysis and Insight, RapLeaf, 12.09.09
- Audi Fan Page on Facebook
- BMW Fan Page on Facebook
Posted in Marketing on January 28, 2010
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Tags: audi, bmw, facebook, fan page
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9 Responses to “Using Facebook fans to improve automotive marketing”
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This post was mentioned on Twitter by vsodera: Article by @nathanscripps on using FB fans to improve auto marketing (w/fan page analysis of Audi vs BMW) http://bit.ly/nscripps...
[…] automotive-focused Headlight Blog recently featured a post by Rapleaf’s Nathan Scripps on how manufacturers are currently […]
[…] Using Facebook fans to improve automotive marketing. Facebook Fan Pages have become the most recent in a long line of social media “must-haves” for automotive marketers –- but what do they really tell you? And are they even helpful? […]
Great article! Do the same principles apply on a dealership level?
@ibeattie
Michael here from Rapleaf — For the most part, what holds for manufacturers should hold for dealers but there are some important nuances that you’ve probably already guessed:
1) Scale - Data and info at the aggregate level is not as representative once it comes down to smaller populations, so while the overall fans of a certain brand may look like X, Y, and Z, it will be different with smaller numbers. CRM is effective regardless of scale, but the ROI will probably be lower unless a dealer has a lot customers. Also this depends a lot on how tech-savvy a dealer’s customers are and whether or not they will go into the showroom based on local firms using social media. I think the jury’s still out on that one, but that will probably be the general direction things are going (more targeted). Which brings us to the next point…
2) Locality - the type of customers at local dealers may look like car fans online at some level, but can be quite different and dealers will probably have a much better idea of who their customers are. You can imagine that Audi and BMW customers in certain towns will look more different than what the Rapleaf study suggests.
That said, this can still be useful information to dealers. Putting better CRM into place is never a bad thing, and understanding competitor customers is also a plus.
More specifically, it can still help dealers buy ads online. With Facebook for example, you can specify ads by region and demographics (either overall data or your own customer impressions), so you can limit them to just the surrounding regions of the dealership and advertise against competing dealers.
Great article. A couple questions that popped into my head:
1) Was Rapleaf able to uncover any insight on facebook fans of model years past? Take the Ford Mustang, for example. What percentage of facebook fans are primarily interested in 60’s/70’s “classic” model years? Of that 90% mentioned who aren’t owners, what portion could reasonably be considered in market for a new vehicle?
2) Some auto companies have only a few fan pages, while others have many (fragmented amongst different models, even model years) Is there any value in rolling up data from multiple fan pages, and if so, are there relatively painless methods of doing so?
Great questions…
1) No, RapLeaf does not have a good measure of intent to purchase for the 90% non-owner fan base. And considering a vehicle like the Mustang, I would recommend studying a couple of the fan pages that exist to see overlaps and get a better feel for the audience, rather than relying on a single page like the Ford page.
2) There is definitely value in rolling up data, but unfortunately it is a bit painful to do. RapLeaf can run reports against any number of fan pages and then help stack the data side by side for quick comparison, also, you can do an overlap test (think Ven Diagram) to see ho interconnected the fans are (for example of the Mustang Fan Page and the Ford Fan Page).
I really enjoyed your analysis and the additional insights provided by data not typically available. It certainly sparks my interest in the Rapleaf product.
I have been following automotive brands on Facebook and run a monthly report on my blog showing growth and rankings with some explanation around how some brands are increasing their fan counts, mainly through marketing efforts.
Increasing fans is very easy with a ‘Become a Fan’ marketing buy. What would be interesting is seeing brands that have done it more organically like BMW or Ford. Compared to other brands like VW or Honda who have grown Facebook fans with significant marketing spend using Facebook ads or campaign driving consumers to their Facebook page. Does organic or advertising for fans cause different engagement levels from those who become fans?
Anyway, thanks for some great insights.
Christopher… thanks for the support and great questions. I have also monitored the growth rates for manufacturers periodically and noticed the same trend of growth for those that push fans toward signing up.
As to the question of engagement, I can only offer my opinion: an organic audience will be more engaged over a longer period of time than an artificial audience. That applies (again, in my opinion, not based on studies) to all brands and in environments on and off Facebook. Mail out a ‘buy one, get one free’ coupon and you will get some buyers, but long term purchase habits are harder to impact.
For fan pages, I think about ‘passive fans’ vs. ‘active fans’ - which may be a good corollary for artificial vs. organic fans. You always have to know what audience you have and message them accordingly. Active/ organic fans will create their own content and carry their own discussion (which marketers should learn from). Passive/ artificial fans will rely on you to pull them back into conversation and create content (so marketers can distribute offers, coupons, viral videos, etc. like a dedicated broadcast channel).
Again, great comments and happy to continue the conversation any time.
~N