Social media does work, just ask Red Bull

Red Bull is just an energy drink, just a caffeine drink that gives you a bit of kick during a tiring day. Yet, how does this drink come to be featured in the top 10 Facebook pages?

I love the way Red Bull has embraced social media and has taken all of its marketing primarily on-line to become a vivid, bold brand which has changed the publics' perception of the product.

Facebook

I don't like to rank Facebook pages by the amount of 'likes' they have but gathering around 37 million fans is a ridiculously big number. Facebook makes up about 80% of Red Bulls social audience and for such a powerful number of 'likes' they only post around one to two times a day and it is never about the actual drink, it is more about the lifestyle associated with it.

With post's getting between 1,000 to 60,000 likes and around 50 comments each, it provides the perfect platform to reinforce just what people can achieve through Red Bull.

Sponsoring extreme sports events, following athletes and their journey to push themselves to their physical limits, helps Red Bull the brand capture some breath-taking collateral that is used to brilliant effect on their Facebook page.

Sponsorship has paid off massively for Red Bull, the highlight for me being the Red Bull Stratos space jump. The whole world seemed to have stopped still for the 10 minutes Felix Baumgarnter was falling for. It not only pushed the limits of free failing but pushed Red Bull to what they can achieve by devoting themselves to marketing a lifestyle.

Twitter

As an international brand, Red Bull has hundreds of Twitter feeds spanning the globe. Today I’ll just look at its main feeds, of which there are still a huge number.

The Primary Red Bull account has just over 900,000 followers and generally just tweets out links to images and videos of its sponsored athletes, though there are occasional questions and comments on current events.
Red Bull is certainly better at responding to users on Twitter than on Facebook, but it still only replies to between 10 and 40 tweets per day.

While the strategy is not as strong as Facebook, reinforcing the momentum gained from other on-line media it serves as another string to their successful bow. But, it doesn't seem like Red Bull makes a great deal of effort to have conversation on Twitter, instead it builds up the massive events and then just takes a step back and lets the followers do all the work on their feed, very clever.

I'll be back on Friday to bring you the other captivating ways Red Bull has changed the face of social marketing.

Til the next time, James x