Auto Companies and Social Media Usage [Infographic]

Almost all automotive brands have adopted social media actively and most of them are maintaining independent social presence for each car model instead of a unified brand presence. Most luxury brands like Audi and BMW have unified brand presence with no separate profiles for individual cars.

When it comes to fan-base, Tata Nano comes up trumps with 3.07 million fans on Facebook. But the largest isn't always the most engaged of communities. While assessing the ‘talking about’ score on Facebook, Volkswagen India takes the crown with a whopping 1.45 lakh fans ‘talking about’.

Most brands are using Facebook, Twitter and Youtube principally to:

• Disseminate information about Car models & elucidating USPs
• Engage fan base using contests and activities
• Promote brand campaigns active on other mediums
• Urge users to submitted created content in lieu of some gratification

Twitter, as a platform, caters to quite a different audience as compared to Facebook. The automotive giants seem to be incorporating the same in their strategies too; one look at the top 10 twitter profiles of car brands proves the same. Volkswagen with 10,000 + followers and Audi with more than 6,000, take up the top slots on account of their premiumness echoing well with the twiteratti.

The third frontier that automobile companies are utilizing the best on social media is Youtube. Here, the traffic and volumes are mostly dictated by the volume and quality of video content created by brands. Mahindra XUV500 with its flashy image and series of rally videos has performed well on the video views front to climb up to the top of our Youtube list with 3.5 million views on its channel. Mahindra’s other SUV, the Scorpio comes up 2nd with 2.8 million views albeit with much lesser number of videos.

For a complete overview of how the brands perform on each platform checkout the full Infographic.

Here are some key takeaways we derived from our research:

• Brands are taking this media seriously
• Sharper Consumer Segmentation – Each brand adds different weight-age for different platforms based on their product positioning
• Activation plays an important role in content creation – The quantum of brand events and activations has a direct impact on volume and traffic of the YouTube presence
• User Engagement is the decider – Content creation, both quantity and quality of it, defines engagement levels
• Brand Vs Product pull – Reach on Facebook is directly proportionate to the popularity of the brand, NOT related to target market of the product
• Cross platform promotion is not being equally leveraged by all brands

Infographic by: Qilometer Automobiles