Bagged snack brands and social media. Are brands winning at social?
How well are bagged snack brands using social media? Is there value in social media marketing for crisp brands? A recent article suggests that many snack brands are actually retreating from Facebook due to declining post reach. We’ve taken a look at the data to see if snack brands are using Facebook and engaging with consumers.
We love our crisps…
There’s no doubt that we Brits love our snacks, munching our way through 318 million kilos of them in the last year and buying over £2.7 billion worth of crisps and snacks1. We started with the Grocer’s Top 15 brands to see which brands used Facebook or Twitter.
There’s a split with just over half having social channels: eight brands have Facebook pages and nine have Twitter profiles (though one, Quavers has just a handful of followers and has been left un-loved since it’s first Tweets).
Our first step was to track how often brands were posting and how recently they’ve been active. The table below shows how they rank:
Two brands, Sensations and Sunbites haven’t posted since the summer. Of the others, four have posted as recently as the last couple of days. Doritos have been quiet since the end of Jan and Walkers have yet to post in 2015. For the six active pages we tracked engagement from their last 20 posts. The ten best performing posts were:
Kettle Chips results are skewed by the one post. Walkers, Doritos and Pringles are evenly matched. McCoy’s probably need to rethink their approach.
Overall engagement seems to be relatively low especially given the size of some of the audiences. #Facebook Zero will be a factor for pages with likes that run into the millions. Kettle Chips and Walkers may also be seeing reduced organic post reach whilst McCoy’s and Tyrells will benefit from organic reach though this will depend on how well audiences are reacting.
Looking at the numbers, Kettle Chips looks like it’s flying but the image above shows the response to their best post for the launch of a new flavour. This post may also have benefited from being promoted. Irrespective, it shows how well consumers respond to the right content.
Is Facebook a lost cause for bagged snacks?
No. By looking solely at the big players the Grocer’s conclusions are skewed. For brand pages with millions of likes, #FacebookZero is real and understandably so. Want your posts seen? Then you need to put your hand in your wallet…
For pages with under 500,00 likes the jury is out on reach. It is possible to get good engagement and therefore reach if content resonates with fans. Kettle Chips page shows that even above the 1 million likes mark it is possible to generate good engagement if your content is right.
Pringles use of video clips as clues to competitions as part of a movie quiz campaign shows that imaginative, quirky content can also resonate with fans. The flipside is when lazy content or repetitive posts fail to excite. Brands that fail here risk ending up in a pattern of low engagement and poor reach. Why should Facebook care about sharing your posts if you don’t care enough to craft decent content?
1. Market data from The Grocer’s Top Products Survey 2014 (20th December 2014).
