Report Period: January 1 - December 31, 2015

2015 in Review: A Social Media Benchmark & Content Summary for the Energy Drink IndustryA benchmark and content analysis of how energy drink brands performed in 2015 on Facebook, Twitter, Google+, YouTube, and Instagram. Brands analyzed are Red Bull, Monster Energy, Rockstar Energy Drink, Burn Energy Drink, and 5-Hour Energy.

SummaryIn this report we look at the fan counts, posting habits, engagement levels, and content themes of the top energy drink brands in the US for 2015. We’ll analyze 5 category leaders: Red Bull, Monster Energy, Rockstar Energy Drink, Burn Energy and 5-Hour Energy.Highlights

❖ Facebook is the largest network with 75% of the average fan count across all networks.

❖ Instagram posted a growth rate of just over 90%. By comparison, the nearest network for growth rate was Pinterest at about 40%.

❖ Twitter had the highest posting volume for 2015, with an average of 1,243 per brand. Red Bull alone had 2,755 posts. The Facebook posting average was 865, with Red Bull posting nearly triple that.

Report Period: 2015

How fans are distributed across the social networksThe largest social network for our brands is Facebook, followed by Instagram.Red Bull’s Facebook fan count is the highest by far, almost double that of its nearest competitor, Monster Energy.

How fan growth is distributed across the social networksInstagram is the leader in growth for 2015. Facebook lost an average of nearly 13% for the year. This drop is due to Facebook’s decision to purge voluntarily deactivated and memorialized pages from business pages. You can read more about it here.

Facebook Fan PurgeYou can see from the two sample trending charts that fan counts took a sharp downturn in March following the fan purge. Looking at Burn Energy, we can see that they lost a total of about 1.5 million fans through May 19. From May 20 through the end of December, they only gained back a total of about 23,000 fans. So they only gained back just over 1% of the fans they lost previously in the year. 5-Hour Energy was able to recover about 65% of their lost fans.

Trending

How fans are engaging across the social networksThe majority of the networks’ average engagement happened on Instagram. Over 90% of average engagement happened on the network, despite having only about 25% of the average total fan count across all networks. You can compare engagement numbers listed here to the fan/follower counts on slide 3.

Posting volume by network by brandTwitter is the network leader for posting, with 42% of the public posts averaged across all networks. By comparison, Facebook is only 29%.Despite the high posting volume on Twitter, that network only received 1% of the average engagement for 2015.

Top data points on FacebookAs we discussed earlier, many brands posted a fan loss for 2015 due to the Facebook Like purge. Red Bull is posting at nearly triple the industry average of 865 posts with 2,359 posts for the year.

Top terms on FacebookThe top terms chart gives a snapshot of the most used or engaging posting topics for the entire year of 2015. Hashtags and URL’s here reveal campaign themes among the brands.Note that these are terms used at least 10 times throughout the entire year by any of these brands.

Top Posts on FacebookThese posts generated the most engagement within the first 24 hours of each post’s existence. It’s notable that none of these posts have extremely heavy paid impressions, with two of them having roughly less than 10% of their engagements generated through paid. Also, 3 of the top 5 are videos.

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