Recently, Royal Enfield launched one of its much awaited bike – Thunderbird500. The offline madness matched with the online hype as the online community it has built over the last two years had immensely helped in spreading the buzz. It saw a wonderful launch on social media with different strategies adopted to make it a success. One of the reasons for its social media success can be attributed to its huge online social presence on Facebook, Twitter and YouTube.
This obviously motivated me to dig deep and find out how the social media community of bull lovers has been growing and how the brand has nurtured them over the period of last 9 months i.e. from Jan,2012 to Sept,2012.
Facebook Community
The Royal Enfield Facebook page launched in July 2010, has covered many milestones over the two years of its existence. One of them is the sizeable fan growth which now stands as a 200K strong community.
1. Fan Growth: As part of our study to understand the trend of the fan growth, we captured data for the first 9 months of 2012. According to Unmetric, a social media monitoring tool, the community gained more than 100K fans with a higher growth rate of 117% than the average automotive Facebook page, which is 38%. The community that is predominantly male with 92% has support from an age group of 21-30 years followed by the 21 and below age group. The below screen grab provides a visual presentation of the fan growth in the last nine months along with the metrics of “Number talking about”.
The growth of fans has various aspects associated – 1) Running of Facebook ads 2) Offline fan following 3) Content and 4) Running Contests.
I am sure that all these factors have helped the page to grow in the last two years but over a period the content plays a key role in driving such communities and Royal Enfield has done the same.
2. Content Strategy & Engagement: The content strategy on Facebook has been focused and top notch. If you run through the timeline, the content that is shared is all about bikers, upcoming models, offline meetups and their love for riding. We can see one such content in the below screen grab.
Majority of the content falls under three categories – 1) About Royal Enfield 2) Automotive and 3) General Happenings. The below screen grab shows the visual breakup.
As we see, the above data clearly shows that posts that were related to automotive and general happenings had a far better response. “About Automotive” posts from the admin had better engagement compared to the number of posts posted. Further break down of ”About Automotive” shows that “Automotive Advice” had a better response from the community. Being a biker, definitely automotive posts would attract my attention more but then that has to be blended well with other content too. Royal Enfield has a good content mix.
In last 9 months, the page saw more than 7K posts and more than 6.5K were from fans. A clear indication that the Facebook page is a community-driven one and I think every brand manager would die for such a community.
The page has been engaging well in the automotive section. The most engaging content has been images and most of them contributed by fans have definitely done really well. Here is one such post that managed to get 1K+ shares and 235+ comments.
Along with the admin posts, the content that was shared had more positive vibes on the wall. However, the page admins have shown active response to posts that had positive sentiments. Out of 6429 fan posts, the brand replied to 15.7% and had only 3% negative response.
Twitter Community
The brand has been active on Twitter since 2009 and has more than 7K followers. Twitter, known for its one-to-one interaction has been used effectively. In the last 9 months, the brand had more replies to its community.
1. Follower Growth: The brand procured more than 3.5K fans in last 9 months and with that it had 100% higher growth rate than the average automotive Twitter account. The below screen grab shows the growth chart of followers.
2. Content Strategy and Engagement: As said earlier, the brand has used Twitter more for communicating with it’s fans on a regular basis. Over the last 9 months, the brand on an average has posted 10 tweets/day of which about 56% were replies. The below screen grab gives you a more detailed breakdown.
The sentiment on Twitter has been positive but the brand on an average took more than 3hrs to reply. However, it was good to observe that the brand was ready to take any kind of feedback on a positive note. If you see the below screen grab, the brand replied or acknowledged 20 tweets that were related to the category “Brand Apology”.
YouTube Community
The brand has also made sure that it has the same amazing presence on YouTube too, from Nov 2010. At present, the YouTube page has more than 1K subscribers and more than 1M video views. The latest launch of Thunderbird500 had a great impact on the brands overall social media presence but YouTube had far reaching effects. The latest video which was uploaded on October 11th, 2012 already has more than 188K new views. The growth of the view can be seen in the below graph.
And if you haven’t seen the video, then here it is but you will only love it if you love the thumping of the bulls.
Ending Thoughts
Royal Enfield has built its community for Enfield lovers brick by brick on social media and not on one network but on three different social networks. Also, the brand has done justice by adding meaning to its presence on all the three networks.
This strategy of building a community paved the way for an integrated successful launch of Thunderbird500 on social media. Maybe right now it won’t be possible to measure how many bikes were sold via social media but then that was never the primary objective of Royal Enfield as I can see from the content. But by the amount of buzz it has created, I am sure that fans are already praying for faster delivery dates. Definitely, the brand has set a new benchmark on social media.
Only thing now the brand should do is start shipping bulls at a faster rate and make fans happy!
