Soda Wars: Top 5 Soda Brands on Twitter

by Member of TrueSocialMetrics team ~ 6 min

As long as we remember there was an intense rivalry between soda brands on the market, including an endless epic battle between Coke and Pepsi. But in 2011 something unimaginable happened - the battle was lost, by Pepsi to DietCoke, who took the second place on US market. Everyday this Soda War unfolds on different battlefields and one of them is Social Media.

In this study we’ll take a look at top 5 soda brands on Twitter at Summer (1 Jun' 13 - 31 Aug’ 13). Using metrics like Conversation rate (comments per post), Amplification rate (shares per post), Applause rate (likes per post) to assess and compare their Twitter accounts performance.

The market domination by soda brands

So What was the best performing soda brand at Summer on Twitter?

The most important indicators of successful presence in social media is social interaction with brands’ posts - comments, shares and likes (or replies, retweets and favorites). Comparing all the brands accounts to the Upper limit (maximum) value among all soda brands shows the leader of the Twitter race and how much faster other participants should run to catch with the winner.

Mirror mirror on the wall, who is the fairest of them all? Hail the Soda Kings of Twitter:

But taking into account different number of followers for all brands, let’s look at the Relative Kings nomination - engagement calculated per 10 000 followers:

Mountain Dew has won 4 out 6 nominations both in relative and absolute terms. Which is a really surprising result, taking into account that Mountain Dew has much less followers than big brands like Coca Cola and Pepsi.

Follower Wars

Which leads us to a question: Does having the big number of followers garanties good interaction results for the social media page? Lets look how the number of followers correlate (or doesn’t) with their activity at Soda brands Twitter accounts.

For example, Coca-Cola has 8 times more followers than Mountain Dew. But Mountain Dew has 4 times more replies and retweets per tweet and 5 times more favorites per tweet than Coca-cola does.

Tweet Wars

We can see even visually that almost all Mountain Dew tweets demonstrate a good performance, while among Coca Cola’s tweets there is only one superstar tweet and others just don’t get too much interaction.

Mountain Dew tweets

Coca Cola tweets

What was the best performing Soda tweets at summer?

In absolute numbers the best tweets belong to Coca-Cola and Pepsi. The most Favorited Pepsi-tweet features a contest with a chance to win tickets to Beyonce’ s show in NYC.

The most Viral and Commented tweet nomination is monopolized by Coke, presenting a positive viral video about the power of a smile.

But taking into account different size of the accounts, which means the different number of followers, it is also wise to calculate the winner in relative terms per 1 follower. So here are the best performing tweets in relative terms per follower:

The Most Viral tweet belongs to Mountain Dew

It informs the fans about the epic comeback of their favorite flavour.

The Most Favorited tweet was also made by Mountain

Featuring their awesome promo videos.

The most Commented tweet was written by Dr Pepper

iI includes a contest with a cool branded one-can-mini-fridge.

Based on both relative and absolute results, it looks like contests and creative videos are a good receipt for top tweets.

Soda Benchmark

And how does an average soda brand tweet performed at Summer on Twitter?

One more great way to compare social media performance is using benchmarking - an industry standard. Which helps to understand brand’s social media performance in the context of the overall market.

Average Soda brand profile

One more great way to compare social media performance is using benchmarking - an industry standard. Which helps to understand brand’s social media performance in the context of the overall market.

Market Wars

And, finally, the last question, how does Soda brands perform in social media comparing to their market domination?

The Bottom-of-the-list brands hold the same position at Twitter presence, Diet Dr. Pepper and Diet Mountain Dew doesn’t have a Twitter account, and Fanta has one, but the last their tweet was posted in March 2013. An interesting tendency to see The Middlers climbing higher up the Twitter peformance list, maybe they are trying to win the market by gaining social media domination? On the contrary, the Leaders of the market, cede their leadership on Twitter.