As someone who has discovered a lot of beers and breweries through use of social media, how breweries use Twitter, Facebook and other such sites is a subject which interests me. This post performs a direct comparison between three British craft breweries - Brewdog (@brewdog), Magic Rock (@MagicRockBrewCo) and Thornbridge (@Thornbridge) and their use of Twitter during the month of December 2011. I'll cover their respective use of Facebook in a later post.
This is not about the products of these breweries or any preferences or favourites I may have among their beers (for the record, I like beers from all three!) so I won't be discussing those. It's really about producing a view of how they use these tools to promote their products and engage with customers.
This is not about the products of these breweries or any preferences or favourites I may have among their beers (for the record, I like beers from all three!) so I won't be discussing those. It's really about producing a view of how they use these tools to promote their products and engage with customers.
First of all, let's compare the number of Twitter followers, follows and Facebook 'likes' they have:
Brewdog
Followers: 7,369
Follows: 803 (11%)
Likes: 16,398
Magic Rock
Followers: 1,562
Follows: 150 (10%)
Likes: 433
Thornbridge
Followers: 3,725
Follows: 121 (3%)
Likes: 3,280
General use of Twitter
I'm going to focus on use of Twitter in December 2011, purely because that's the most recent complete month. The below three charts, created with Tweetstats show the number of tweets total and how many those were @ replies or retweets:
Brewdog
Magic Rock
Thornbridge
These graphs suggest the three breweries use twitter very differently indeed. Brewdog, who averaged 6.8 tweets per day have predominantly outbound authored tweets but with a fair percentage of @ replies and re-tweets, suggesting some engagement with those mentioning and replying to them (the graph alone doesn't let you draw that conclusion - but a glance at their feed seems to correlate). They mostly use Twitter to communicate out to followers.
Magic Rock's Twitter usage during December (averaging 19.4 tweets, the most prolific of the three by far) was made up of mostly retweets, which again is backed up by looking at their feed. However, contrary to what the graph shows (the line is hidden), they also sent plenty of @ replies. They don't seem to send many outbound authored tweets to all followers, preferring to retweet what others have written.
Thornbridge, well, it's very curiously almost always exactly three tweets per day and it's one way traffic suggesting no engagement. We'll look more closely at this in the next post - Thornbridge have a one way feed set up from Facebook and don't' appear to use the Twitter account directly at all.
Tweet Density and Distribution
Next, we'll look at when these breweries are tweeting. They're all UK based and the times below are GMT. A bigger 'blob' corresponds with more tweets at the time shown:
Brewdog
Magic Rock
Thornbridge
Looking at the above, Brewdog mostly tweet between 8am and 8pm Monday to Friday but have a preference for tweeting in the morning. Magic Rock are the most likely of the three to tweet during evening 'drinking hours', particularly later in the week when their tweet density increases. Thornbridge, well, you could set your watch by their morning tweet (yes, singular). It almost always goes out between 7 and 8am. To correlate the above, the below graphs (I've excluded Thornbridge) show the aggregate tweets per day in December 2011:
Brewdog
Magic Rock
Engagement
So who are Brewdog and Magic rock interacting with. Let's look first at @ replies:
Brewdog
Magic Rock
So Brewdog hearts Gizzi Erskine and Magic Rock hearts Zak Avery. Hmm. Seriously, there's not much to draw from this, other than to observe that both are engaging with trade customers and end consumers. So, let's look at retweets:
Brewdog
Magic Rock
This is more interesting. Magic Rock is mostly retweeting pubs and pub landlords. Looking closer, they're letting people know where to find their products. Brewdog on the other hand are mostly retweeting @BrewdogJames. This marries up with their general usage at the top of this post, with Brewdog mostly using Twitter for outbound communication and Magic Rock mostly using it for retweeting. I wonder how many followers of BrewdogJames also follow Brewdog? There's an app for that! They have 1200 odd common followers, so about 20% of those seeing the retweets have already seen the original message.
So what can we learn from this? Probably not much but it's interesting to see how usage of Twitter varies significantly between the three breweries. This may be down to a defined social media strategy or purely incidental.
How effectively do you feel each uses Twitter? Which approach of the three do you prefer? How does engagement via Twitter change or otherwise shape your perception of a brewery and their products?
Very interesting & very clever post. I follow all three & backing the stats up from memory I've only ever had a response, retweet or any real interaction from Magic Rock. Thornbridge tends to be a hello, good morning, what are you drinking today etc.
ReplyDeleteSocial media plays a massive part in the current climate & should be up there or over and above any other form of advertising in a brewerys sales strategy, you can't talk to a poster, well you can but.....
This is interesting stuff. I recently stopped following Magic Rock due to what I perceived as a constant stream of 'praise re-tweeting' without them really saying much. I have similarly un-followed places/people that seem to use Twitter entirely as a one-way advertising medium - as Phil said, I might as well try and talk to a poster.
ReplyDeleteIt strikes me, purely from a customer perspective, that without the right kind of interaction balance you might as well not bother with Twitter, stick to conventional web stuff.
Not that I'm expecting you to do the work - this is really good as is - but it would be cool to see results if it were rolled out to a larger cross-section.
A great bit of research, Andy.
ReplyDeleteI think the Thornbridge accounts aren't actually run by the brewery but by a social media firm.
ReplyDelete@beersay: Thanks for the feedback. This post had a lot of response and views were certainly mixed as to what people preferred. I agree that that role social media can potentially play is massive and some breweries (Magic Rock for one) attribute much of their success and market reach to it.
ReplyDelete@Gareth: I think there's a balance to be struck somewhere between over retweeting praise and ensuring that you acknowledge praise received - even an @reply saying 'thanks' would ensure the consumer feels engaged. Given the response this post had I might look into it more.
@thebeermonkey: Many thanks, Kenny. It's interesting to see the diversity in approaches.
@Monsieur: Yes, others have pointed that out. It seems they're obliged to post at a certain rate too, so perhaps that explains why some of what they send out is a bit inane. They do get good engagement on Facebook however.