Booze-alytics: Greater Reach in the Social Sphere

With our newly launched Lumen8: Social Media Metrics & Insights analytical suite, our curiosity led us to look at how liquor brands fared over the 2011 year end holidays.  We studied tweets on a variety of brands to understand consumer chatter and engagement.  Here is what we found!

• Adult Beverage Brands ARE part of social media chatter even if they not actively participating.
• Organic reach plays a critical roll in the social media sphere.
• Tweeters are talking about multiple brands.

To Tweet or Not to Tweet…

Whether your brand spends a lot or little time and money on tweeting, you are part of social media sphere. We first looked at the major liquor brands tweets, followers and friends and found that there is a large variety of activity.

While Stoli tweeted throughout the holidays, as indicated by the size of the bubble (in the graph below), but has a comparatively low number of friends and followers.  Absolut and Bacardi, on the other hand, have acquired a high number of followers and so they reach 25,000+ consumers for each tweet.  But this only tells half of the story.

What about organic reach?

One of the best parts of social media is that customers become brand ambassadors and you don’t have to add them to the payroll.   Organic reach measures the unsolicited activity of these ambassadors and gives you an measurement of how many customers are being exposed to your brand and how you rank against the competition.

While it does not have the highest follower count, nor is it the heaviest tweeter, Absolut had the greatest Organic Reach on Twitter (see chart below).  The brand garnered the highest exposure during the holidays by reaching the greatest number of people from unsolicited tweets, re-tweets and forwards among active tweeters.

But what are the ambassadors talking about?

You AND your competition!  The word cloud below  ranks the top 200 words contained in organic Grey Goose tweets over the holiday season.  While the cloud is specific to Grey Goose, the findings were similar across all of the brands.   Tweets were focused on:

Who are these brand ambassadors anyway?

From everyday fans to celebrities, WHO is tweeting about you determines your reach and sphere of influence.  Using Lumen8,  we identified some of the most influential ambassadors across the brands.  Most of the tweet tonnage is made up of everyday fans but if you can attract or pay a celebrity spokes person, you can touch thousands of potential customers with one tweet.

And the New Year’s Eve winner is…

Smirnoff!  As the midnight hour approached, overall twittering increased.  Bacardi pulled ahead for a short time but in the end the vodka giant Smirnoff trumped the competition.  Grey Goose and Absolut came in a close 3rd and 4th.

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