Brief:

• Mercedes-Benz, the luxury carmaker whose unit sales have risen 13.7% this year to a record 1.14 million worldwide, had the most social media engagements among global brands during the first six months of the year, according to a study by adtech firm Origami Logic made available to Mobile Marketer. “Beautiful” imagery of its products on social media apps like Instagram helped the automaker reach 153.7 million engagements.

• Car brands had nine of the top 25 spots for social media engagement, including Mercedes, BMW, Jaguar, Dodge, Maserati, Porsche, Jeep, Land Rover and Audi. Luxury brands had eight of the top 25, including Gucci, Dior, Dolce & Gabbana, Louis Vuitton, Chanel, Prada, Fendi and Tiffany. The automotive industry had the most engagements with 385.8 million during H1 2017, but the luxury segment had the highest average number of engagements per brand with 20.5 million.

• Instagram was the most popular platform for people to react to brands with 965.7 million engagements during the first half, ahead of Facebook’s 144.4 million and Twitter’s 105.8 million. Origami Logic tracked all Facebook, Instagram and Twitter posts made by 305 brands during H1 2017.

Insight:

The high ranking of automotive brands in social media engagements is the likely byproduct of the huge budgets the companies have for advertising in all media, especially television, to reach a broad audience. The skew toward luxury cars and luxury fashion shows that people are expressing a certain aspirational element to their browsing on social media. It also underscores the importance of strong imagery for capturing consumer attention on these platforms. 

The engagements can vary by social media platform, Origami said. For brands, the variance points to the need to to craft separate strategies for each platform as what users react to will likely be different, making a one-size-fits-all approach inadequate.

Red Bull received the most total engagements on Facebook with a score of 17.5 million, but the brand of caffeinated soft drinks was the most active with 2,232 posts that received an average of 7,854 engagements. Disney posted on Facebook 1,082 times, making it the second-most active. The brand that got the most bang for its buck was luxury designer Chanel. It posted 111 times on Facebook, and each one received 50,516 engagements.

As for Twitter, the most dominant brand was Wendy’s because of a fluke tweet that went viral. The burger chain received 47.5 million engagements during the first half of the year thanks to the personal campaign of Carter Wilkinson. The Nevada 16-year-old student asked the company, “How many retweets for a year of free chicken nuggets?” Wendy’s replied “18 million,” and a grass-roots retweet campaign was born with the hashtag #NuggsForCarter.