Automotive Facebook Fans by Brand: March 2011

March was a rather subtle month without a lot of on-site fan growth ads from the automotive brands, but it was the first month a new brand returned to the United States. It’s been 27 years since Fiat has sold a car here. They returned with the Fiat 500 and I have added Fiat to this list. Like BMW, MINI and Mercedes, Fiat also has a USA-focused Facebook fan page, but like those brands I am reporting on the global brand’s Facebook fan page, but do record all of the USA-focused fan pages.


Meanwhile, Acura continued to run and promote their “Compete Like a Pro” contest for the all-new TSX Sport Wagon (as an interesting side-note, the TSX Sport Wagon is the Japanese Honda Accord wagon that everyone was hoping for back when the Honda CrossTour was announced last year causing quite an uproar on the Honda fan page.) The “Compete Like a Pro” contest is an interesting example of fan growth from marketing, CRM, and engagement.

Back in January they promoted the contest and bought some Facebook ads to support the effort creating a 23% increase in fan growth. In February, some marketing continued but most of the effort to promote the contest was done through Acura’s email communications (see image at left from a February 22 email) and there was some promotion by contestants to create interest (votes) for the contest that resulted in a 10% fan growth. As the initial surge of contestant promotion tapered, so did the fan growth, as it was only 5% in March when the contest was closing the voting.

Many of us see friends in our own communities promote – ask for – votes when they do an online contest. This initial surge in friend participation comes to an end rather quickly and then near the end of the contest, the highly competitive top people in the votes make an additional request for votes, but this is a much smaller group. What we see with the Acura contest is fairly typical and shows that the biggest impact in fan growth is still advertising to promote instead of counting on organic growth. The final 5% growth in March is a normal organic fan growth so the contest was doing very little in fan growth. Of course it might of (and hopefully did for Acura) create more clicks to dot.com and engagement which were probably the primary goals of the contest.

There was very little else going on in March for the automotive brands on Facebook. Lexus saw some positive growth with the biggest bump of 22% fan growth coming from their heavy media buys around the all-new Lexus CT200h.



Note: Unfortunately I missed a month in March, a first since starting this monthly post in November of 2009. I did record the fan numbers and you can see the early fan numbers from March in this post. I never did a February 2011 report, but have all the raw data if any one wants it. Please send me an email at red335i@yahoo.com if you do.

Automotive Facebook Fans by Brand: January 2011

There wasn’t a lot of growth in January’s Facebook fan numbers. Perhaps it’s all of the ad agencies working on their Super Bowl ads. Many brands were pushing their vehicle sites and a couple of German companies were focusing on their USA Fan pages, instead of their global brand pages.

Both Mercedes-Benz and BMW created USA focused brand pages in 2010 (see the USA pages growth in the image below to the left.) Mercedes just completed a “Tweet Race” contest between 4 teams spending all kinds of money on celebrities, charities, providing luxury vehicles, and all congregating this weekend at the Super Bowl in Dallas, Texas. Even though it was a “Tweet” contest, Mercedes spent quite a bit on advertising the event on Facebook throughout most of January.

BMW ran several advertisements promoting the new X3 and the all-new 1M. The X3 Matchup was promoted in January ads on Facebook to promote their coming Super Bowl ad. Players match different images and watch for clues in the Super Bowl ad to win a X3 for 2 years and a VIP trip to their Spartanburg plant, museum, and most importantly their Performance Driving School. Facebook fans are asked to build a X3 where they try to guess the exact build of the one appearing in their Super Bowl ad. I’m guessing silver.

Toyota heavily promoted their name the “Prius Goes Plural” campaign after the brand launched several new Prii, Prius, Prium vehicles at the Detroit Auto Show in early January. It seemed as if every day Toyota had the reachblock bought on my Facebook’s Home screen. With all of their promotion, only one of my Facebook friends voted and I have a ton of friends who are car nuts and in the industry (661 friends total.) Sure my checking my friends against people participating is far from scientific, but it did surprise me when the typical auto ad on Facebook has at least 3 or 4 of my friends liking it. Voting of course is different.

An important note on Toyota’s Prius campaign, it didn’t drive fans to the brand’s Facebook page; hence, the measly 2% growth rate for them in January. Fortunately, Toyota has a pretty strong presence with their Prius brand and many in the industry wonder if they’ll ever move Prius off to its own brand. Perhaps with so many new models that scenario may be playing out.


Finally, the strongest growth came from Acura. They recently abandoned their separate vehicle pages so now whenever they have a vehicle promotion they drive traffic to their brand page. In January, they ran a promotion to their “Compete Like A Pro” contest for the all-new TSX Sport Wagon. What’s great here is that they grew their overall fans instead of just a single vehicle fan page so they can promote other products to those fans. It was a smart move for Acura and their growth in January shows how it helps the overall brand presence.

Automotive Facebook Fans by Brand: December 2010

Milestones are a time for celebration. BMW gave thanks to its fans when it crossed 1/2 million fans. Audi recently celebrated its reaching 2 million fans and Mercedes Benz also showed some appreciation when it hit 2 million fans. All of these prior celebrations involved a wall post and video, but none of the automotive companies have done anything truly creative to celebrate such a milestone until now.

Porsche passed the 1 million fan mark a couple weeks ago and as part of the celebration they are placing a special model Porsche in the Porsche Museum in Stuttgart. Fans can ask for their name to be on the displayed vehicle by signing up on their Facebook fan page tab called "1,000,000". It's a creative way to bring the milestone to life, much more interesting than some thrown together ad agency video.


Major milestones aside, GMC blew everyone away with the most significant monthly fan gain - a whopping 95%. Like most double-digit changes, GMC's rise is attributable to media spend driving fans to their Facebook page. GMC has a sponsorship with the NFL that has fans voting for the "Never Say Never Moment of the Week." There are weekly prizes, a trip to the Super Bowl and a chance to win a 2011 GMC Sierra Denali.

Hyundai ran some reachblocks in the beginning of December. Other companies that did some marketing in Facebook were Lexus, Chrysler, and Dodge (this is not a comprehensive list just some of the ads I personally saw.) Mercedes-Benz worked to promote their Tweet Race. The ad units sent people to the recently created Mercedes-Benz USA Facebook fan page.

Yes, Mercedes like BMW, Mini and Smart now has a "USA" fan page. As part of their way to create interest for the page they are doing the "World's First Twitter-Fueled Race" which looks basically like a road-trip with four teams driving from four different cities to the Super Bowl in Dallas. This sounds eerily similar to last year's Chevrolet SXSW road-trip scavenger hunt. (Look for a coming article on Mercedes' event around when it begins on February 2.)

A final insight in December comes from Mazda. I find it interesting how some brands promote sales events (Acura has one right now), or they keep a corporate logo, or others promote a new product as part of Facebook's profile image. Mazda is promoting their new Mazda5 but they also found a nice, clean way to promote their other social media brand destinations in the profile picture. The promotion of other channels and their dot.com site is effectively communicated.



Download the Excel file: Facebook Auto Fan File (December 2010)

Automotive Facebook Fans by Brand: October 2010

BMW continues to rack up Facebook fans quickly. They were near 3 million fans at the end of October and a now over 3 million as of early November. What’s interesting isn’t BMW’s continued rapid growth nor is it Audi following close behind; instead, what’s interesting is another German luxury marquee has decided to play the Facebook fan game. Mercedes-Benz grew an astounding 65% in October and surpassed their own first million-fan milestone.

This month Lexus and Toyota both redid their profile images to include additional messaging. Lexus is cross-promoting their Twitter and YouTube accounts while Toyota takes a page from Dunkin Donuts, but with their own twist by featuring a fan’s vehicle. Toyota is also promoting a new shopping application for mobile phones called mLot.

Some brands kept up their brand page marketing as Cadillac continued to run reachblock ad units featuring their new Cadillac CTS Coupe that drove fans to the main Cadillac fan page. Volkswagen also promoted their brand fan page. The VW ad units featured the new Jetta that launched last month. What was interesting is that VW used to promote vehicles and bring people to their vehicle fan pages, not the main VW fan page. Seems they are making a change and focusing on the main fan page, not surprising as most of the action is on brand pages not vehicle pages.


Also interesting is quite a high number of fan pages seeing 20% plus growth in one month. Several of the brands didn’t seem to have ad units running in October yet they experienced some rapid growth typical of buying media.




Download the Excel file: Facebook Auto Fan File (October 2010)

Automotive Facebook Fans by Brand: September 2010

Let’s get the big news out of the way. BMW surpassed the 2 Million fan number September 28th. On July 5th they hit 1 Million fans, so in a mere 3 months they gained over 1.1 Million fans. BMW has been on a fan rampage and finished the month promoting their secret reveal (I’m guessing it’s the new BMW 6-series.)

Hyundai saw a massive increase in fans as they nearly doubled their fans in September from 41,653 to 82,773 fans. This was done in part by some reachblock ad units I did see Hyundai run on the Facebook site. Others doing reachblock ads where Cadillac and Toyota continued to promote their safety and user story ads throughout the month of September.


Honda worked on promoting their Honda CR-Z Hybrid, but the ad units drove consumers to the CR-Z vehicle page. Honda saw a typical 10% gain on the brand page. Unfortunately, I think they missed an opportunity to drive more fan traffic to their primary brand page. It’s interesting to note that at the end of September Honda’s luxury family member Acura decided to abandon their vehicle fan pages. It will be interesting to see if Honda makes a similar move with their product fan pages or if other brands will follow Acura’s lead here, especially as brands probably look to 2011 and 2012 as ways to increase social media efficiency as social destination effectiveness comes clear with years worth of supporting data.

MINI finished their major Facebook campaign where they gave away a MINI Countryman from their Facebook fan page. Fred Manuel Roldan Rivero from Lisbon, Portugal won the MINI Countryman and the brand shared the giveaway PR event with their fans. Overall it was a nice promotion for the Facebook fans but MINI didn’t really see any major bump in fans which I find interesting because this contest may have more to do with energizing its fans than say growing the fan base. I don’t have any of the ad units promoting the event, if there were any, but MINI only saw a mediocre 11% increase in fans in September and XXX% in August. It’s tough to judge the contest as I don’t know what MINI was trying to drive. I assume handraisers and contest entries but Facebook fan growth didn’t seem to be a goal or a goal that wasn’t met.

In another notable move, Scion experienced a 34% jump that probably was due to the launch of Scion in Canada. Previously, Scion was only available in the United States. Scion launched the brand in Canada last month and one can assume the launch helped some fan growth from those to our north.

Automotive Facebook Fans by Brand: August 2010

It was bound to happen and September was finally that month where I didn’t have an opportunity to get the monthly Facebook Fans report up on the blog in the first couple days after capturing the numbers. Fortunately, I did record all the fan counts on September 3, but with the Labor Day weekend and a week of social media fun on the new job (more here at TechCrunch.) I didn’t get a chance until now to finally analyze this month’s data.

First, let’s talk about the brand I used to do digital strategy for: Lincoln. Lincoln’s growth in August definitely received a major jolt as it increased fans from 4,533 to 13,161 leading to a 190% increase. Most of this can be attributed to a contest Lincoln was running in July and August where the brand showcased a chance to be the first to test-drive the all new Lincoln MKZ Hybrid. Lincoln created a special tab for the MKZ and also accompanied the promotion with some email marketing and advertising on Facebook. Of course, the jump is significant, because Lincoln’s fan base is a small number so adding almost 9,000 fans will cause a big boost percentage wise.



Another brand with a rather small fan count, but also a generous gain in fans was Mitsubishi. They saw a 44% gain in fans as they added nearly 13,000 fans in the month. They had several sweepstakes where fans could win a Flip SlideHD Camcorder, $500 gas card, Nikon Digital SLR camera, and ultimately a trip to Japan. Giveaways are certainly an effective way to gain “Likes” as we see in several reports about why people “Like” a brand on Facebook with the number one reason being discounts, support for company number two, and number 3 to get a freebie (full study from ExactTarget.)


Finally, in the giveaway to get Fans Facebook strategy, Mini also participated with their Win a Countryman contest. They saw a strong 36% increase in fans. Product launches naturally tend to increase fan counts beyond the normal 3-6% organic growth, but by adding a giveaway Mini boosted their growth significantly.

Toyota continues to do a lot of marketing on Facebook. They continued throughout August with ads throughout the Facebook site where they mostly promoted their Auto-Biography contest where participants submit videos about their personal experience with Toyota. Toyota is letting the message come from customers, a very smart message after a year I’m sure the company can’t wait to be over.

The other big news for August is BMW is rapidly gaining fans to cross the 2 million fan mark. They just crossed 1 million fans back in July. Yet, they continue to still spend time on the BMW USA fan page. Segmenting fans by creating unique fan pages has never been a good approach in my book, especially considering you can segment your messages to your fan base by using Facebook’s features to send a message only to people in a particular geographic location. That issue aside, they are dominating in the automotive Facebook fan grab.

Automotive Facebook Fans by Brand: July 2010

BMW and Audi are definitely proving all it takes to drive significant Fans on Facebook is a healthy marketing budget. Both brands had over 40% gains in July and both crossed the laudable 1 Million-Fan mark. Considering it took BMW years to cross the half-a-million-fan mark back in February 2010, where they celebrated the milestone by launching a YouTube video, it is interesting to see how ad impressions on the social media site can drive significant gains for aspirational, luxury car brands. (Note: the BMW Facebook Fan page was assumed by the brand in November 2009 where it had been managed and originally created by a BMW dealer in Spain. So, the first 1/2 million fans was dominantly, if not entirely, gained organically.)

Some of the smaller volume brands like Mitsubishi, Smart and Scion also experienced over 40% growth leading me to believe both also ran Facebook advertising this past month.

Toyota gained an impressive 38% fans in July. They were actively promoting their latest social media user generated content idea called “Auto-Biography” where the social media team selected a few stories to be “animated with the help of [their] artistic friends”… i.e. ad agency. This is interesting, as Toyota has been running several safety videos in response to their much publicized recalls.


Here we finally see Toyota recovering from the bad public relations and turning to the voice of the customer, which I think is a good move based on where the brand is today. Let the consumer voice showcase their passion for the products. It was a risky bet, except that Toyota approves every story before it is posted on the Facebook tab.

The only odd thing in July was a negative fan dip for the Infiniti brand. It would be interesting to see why this is happening. My guess is that some Infiniti fans are a bit turned off by the social media team’s wall posts promoting the Cirque du Soleil promotion; though, this guess is just that a guess. Looking at the fan page comments on the Cirque posts, several fans do enjoy the association. It still could be due to an increased frequency of the team pushing every marketing promotion on the page's wall. Without knowing the Facebook analytics and insight data, it is difficult for me to assess what is going on, perhaps their Facebook team should look at frequency of posts and also when the fan drop may have occurred since it is pretty rare to see a brand page lose fans in a month.

Automotive Facebook Fans by Brand: June 2010

Well after a fairly mild, ho-hum couple months life is heating up on the automotive brand fan pages with several companies upping their marketing on the site and a lot of double digital month-over-month growth from several brands in June.

The big battle of fans was last month’s BMW vs. Audi battle royal. It seems both brands answered the challenge by working hard to get new fans. BMW had a staggering 36% increase in fans which is an insane growth percentage from a brand with already the highest numbers of major automotive fans on the social media site. They added 244,181 fans in one month!

Audi did very well too with a 16% growth rate and 103,255 fans added in June. That’s almost the total amount of Toyota Facebook fans; 107,389 fans to be exact.


I’m still trying to figure out what BMW and Audi did to drive so many “Likes” in one month. My guess is outreach to owners through Become a Fan messaging and some social media marketing on Facebook, but I can’t confirm either.

Toyota did a lot of marketing on Facebook this month, but they didn’t do it to drive people to the Toyota fan page; instead, they took users to their Toyota Safety landing page where they are working on their safety perception issue after many recalls.

Lexus had its own Facebook goals where they drove consumers to their Facebook fan page by enticing them with the new halo vehicle advertisement for the new LFA super car. The message must be getting through as my own father in-law, not a car guy at all, started asking me about the LFA one day on a Home Depot run; though, he saw the ad on television.

Honda reignited their love machine this month by running Facebook ads for their Everybody Knows Somebody Who Loves a Honda Facebook application and they even did a Father’s Day ad that tied in that Day’s message with Honda’s own campaign message (sorry I had a screenshot of the ad but must not have saved it.)


Mini and Infinti both had big jumps in fans with 32% and 43% gains respectively. Infiniti ran a campaign promoting their Cirque du Soleil contest that brought users to a Facebook tab promoting the contest. Meanwhile, Mini had its fun challenging Porsche to a race.

The Mini vs. Porsche effort definitely spawned some major engagement with its fans that mostly loved the idea of challenging the all mighty Porsche 911.

It certainly was a crazy June on Facebook. I’m curious what July will bring.


UPDATE: Thanks to one of my new Twitter followers @ChrisBrashear it seems Audi ran a photo upload contest in June which I'm sure was supported with some ad dollars on the site too.

Automotive Facebook Fans by Brand: May 2010

For the first time since I started reporting these numbers, we have a new leader. BMW overtook Porsche this month. BMW’s lead may not last long as Audi is gaining followers at almost two times the rate BMW is and Audi is only about 20,000 followers behind BMW. Audi gained 13% while BMW gained 7% in May leading me to believe the top spot may change hands quite a bit between BMW and Audi. Porsche’s growth is a mere 3% and hasn’t been strong in awhile so I expect them to stay out of the lead unless the company decides to spend marketing dollars for Facebook fans.


Besides a new champion and threatening soon to be champion, not much else is going on in the automotive Facebook Fan world. Scion has the biggest surge since establishing their “official” fan page a couple months back. They are running a new promotion called Unlock the tC Road Trip. The contest uses Facebook Connect and game players can recruit their “Crew” using their Facebook friends. The game just launched June 1st so other than some early promotion it probably has little to do with Scion’s surge of fans, but the new game could impact fan growth in the coming two months.

One trend I am seeing is in use by Honda. The use of a custom Facebook tab to use for contests is becoming very popular since it is another avenue to attract people to a contest promotion, particularly people who have already demonstrated interest in your brand or product. The Honda Civic vehicle fan page markets the Civic Tour which has been going on for several years now, but I believe this is the first (or possibly second time) Honda has used Facebook to feature the event on its fan page.

The Honda Civic Tour example is more of a landing page message that jumps the user to a microsite, which allows for contest entry and more details (checkout the Honda Civic Tour site.) This is becoming very common as Scion too is following the same approach with their latest sweepstakes/contest.


This month I wasn’t served any automotive “become a fan” ads on Facebook. It’s possible Facebook is getting more intelligent with its ad serving or there just isn’t the rush to gain Facebook fans that was going on late last year and earlier this year. The more modest growth numbers tell me companies are not buying “become a fan” ad buys right now and maybe finding other methods of marketing their Facebook presence like adding Become a Fan to their website or email materials.

Download the Excel file: Facebook Auto Fan File (May 2010)

Automotive Facebook Fans Likes by Brand: April 2010

Welcome to the all-new less committal Automotive Facebook “Likes” by Brand monthly report. In case you haven’t kept up with the monthly changes in Facebook-land, the company decided to remove the Fan distinction and move to a Like action that people can do on a brand page. So that Ford Mustang you were a huge fan of, guess what? Now you just “like” it.

Oh well, maybe one can show their enthusiasm in other digital ways, perhaps by doing something we all did long before Facebook existed – add a picture of their favorite car to a computer’s wallpaper. Now that’s being a fan!



So who convinced the social community to really, really Like them the most in the month of April? Two brands definitely standout and both are very new to the Facebook fan page world so they have some major growth percentage-wise mainly because they are starting from such low fan count numbers.

Scion had a user community fan page converted to “Unofficial Scion” last month only to come out with their own page in March. In April, Scion drove up fan numbers running some simple Become a Fan ad units; thereby, increasing their fan count by 780% in April.

So who beat a 780% growth in one month? Some big trunks with menacing grilles: Ram had 1,029% growth with 18,894 fans added in one month. Ram also had Become a Fan ad units run in April to help generate such impressive growth. All of the Chrysler brands are making a strong push to advertise for fans over the past several months with major ad buys from Ram, Dodge and Jeep.



The remaining brands experienced typical fluctuations in growth. Most double-digit increases can be accounted to product releases or news. Toyota meanwhile continued with their video ad unit to showcase their response to the recall news. ‘

Other than a lot of changes with Facebook’s change from Fan to Like, the month was mostly uneventful for the automotive world on Facebook.

Automotive Facebook Fans by Brand: March 2010

It’s getting pretty interesting on Facebook these days. Facebook is finally making brand Fan pages, oops I mean Like pages – more on that later, clearly pages owned by brands. Unofficial pages will soon move to the new Facebook Community pages designation with some changes in functionality, plus if they reach some threshold of fans they turn into community ran pages (think Wiki.)

The Like pages, okay they will still be called Fan Pages, will change a commonly held behavior where people “Become a Fan” of a brand or product. Soon people will simply “Like” a brand or product page. According to Facebook, people choose Like significantly more than they choose Become a Fan; though, how is this really that surprising when one can Like just about everything on Facebook? By design, Like should garner far more clicks than Become a Fan, but someone looked at some data and didn’t think about the user interface already in place to justify the decision.


Free Cars & Basketball

The big news this month was a nicely ran promotion from Infiniti that was done to support a College Basketball bracket game on CBS Sports. Infiniti ran banner ads supporting their marketing of the new M37/M56 models where one could win a new M.

What was interesting is that Infiniti also bought some media on Facebook supporting the CBS Bracket Challenge but also gave people an opportunity to Become a Fan of the Infiniti fan page. In the day or two the ad started running on Facebook, Infiniti added around 50,000 fans. Now I never know how many impressions a brand bought to get such a gain, but it is still an impressive upswing for the brand and the combination with the College Basketball passion point surely helped increase engagement.

Jeep was an interesting one this month too. They ran a Tweet-to-Win contest to increase the exposure of their @Jeep Twitter account, but to find out when Jeep was going to ask a trivia question for their Twitter contest people had to visit the Jeep Facebook page to learn the time. One would think this promotion would also increase Facebook fan page numbers for Jeep since they were giving away a free Jeep Wrangler Islander Edition. Unfortunately, Jeep had typical fan growth that ran in the 3% increase realm for March, in other words no gain from the Tweet-to-Win contest; though they did have significant follower growth on Twitter (more here.)


Continuous Marketing

Several brands continued running ads throughout most of the month of March, if not all of March. They included Mazda, Dodge and Toyota; though, Toyota’s ads were not a promotion to increase Fans of their fan page; rather, they promoted Toyota loyalty (you can learn more about that effort by reading my post on Toyota’s marketing loyalty.)

The Mazda and Dodge ads were constantly showing up on my Facebook pages even though I’m already a fan of both brands. This makes me wonder two things. Does Facebook not support a good retargeting message capability on their site or is it that the Facebook inventory of relevant ads is so small they keep serving me the same units? Seems it could be a little of both and one would think after a brand has gained that person as a fan that other messages could be sent to support further brand engagement.



Housecleaning

Lincoln has officially taken over their fan page and now are doing regular updates yet still not Become a Fan campaigns or promotion of the page (full disclosure: I'm involved with this effort.) Scion had asked their unofficial fan page to be identified as such last month, well now we know why as Scion has started an official Facebook page that had it's first post Monday March 29, 2010.

In European Facebook news, Aston Martin finally took ownership of a friendly URL for their fan page http://www.facebook.com/astonmartin. Also, I changed my tracking of SMART as I follow the global fan pages for BMW and MINI so it seemed appropriate to follow SMART's global page instead of it's USA specific fan page.



Download the Excel file: Facebook Auto Fan File (March 2010)