Irn-Bru, Volvic and Haribo the top FMCG brands for social engagement
Challenger brands are outshining top selling brands on social media, research from Headstream has found, with Irn-Bru topping the list of FMCG brands for social engagement.
Volvic, Haribo, Whiskas and Pepsi Max also made up the top five on the list from Headstream, while Chicago Town, Heinz Soup, Ginsters, Tetley and Capri Sun concluded the top ten. The full list can be seen below.
Steve Sponder, managing director at Headstream, commented: “Facebook and Twitter continues to evolve, and the brands scoring highly this year are the ones that appreciate both the strengths and weaknesses of each platform, and have adapted their use accordingly.
“We found that successful brands on social are the ones that place a greater focus on quality, relevant content that adds value. They are also intent on growing community size organically, ensuring their following is of true fans that are more likely to share branded content. This is something that bigger, top-selling brands have been slow to react to, and they need to follow suit to regain lost ground.”
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It was found that market-leading brands with very high numbers of fans/followers have to work proportionally harder to engage them at the same rate as the challenger brands.
For Ian McCarthy, marketing controller at Heinz, the success of Heinz comes from the four-fold mantra: “Be authentic, add value to consumer lives, tell a story and listen as well as talk”.
The Social Brands 100 FMCG Ranking analysed the UK’s 100 biggest-selling grocery brands (as defined by market analysts IRI) by examining their engagement levels on key social media platforms Facebook (likes, comments, shares, wall posts and fans) and Twitter (tweets, retweets, replies and followers).
Adrian Troy, head of marketing at Irn-Bru, said: “Digital plays a key role in everything we do and social is a huge part of that. We use social to connect and engage with our community and to express the personality of the brand.”
The research found that more than half (53 per cent) of brand Facebook pages, and six of the top ten brands included in the ranking, have less than 250,000 followers, with average page engagement rates tending to decrease as the community size (total page likes) increases.
On Twitter, meanwhile, engagement rates and community sizes for FMCG brands were smaller: only four per cent exceed 200,000 followers and three-quarters (73 per cent) have feeds with less than 20,000 followers.
