[Facebook Research] Starbucks Has The Most Followers, And Wins People's Hearts On Facebook

An engaged audience on Facebook is an audience that is more likely to buy or to recommend your products or services to their friends.

There was a time when brands were competing for fans, total fans is still a solid metric for agencies and digital marketers, but it's a vanity metric - good for feeling awesome, bad for action.

A higher number of fans doesn't reflect the way brands should empower their users and welcome them.

Is Facebook engagement a good metric? Should we focus on Facebook engagement?

When it comes to the coffee industry, it seems that people not only enjoy drinking coffee but they also group in active communities.

Today, I'm going to show you how engaged is the audience of top US coffee brands and how you can create Facebook strategies that drive conversations.

Important note 👇
We analyzed more than 1,100 Facebook posts from a representative sample of US coffee brands which had an active presence on Facebook between January 2018 and May 2019 with the help of Socialinsider.

These pages had Facebook fan counts between 500,000 and 36 million as of the same date.

Facebook Engagement Report Of Top US Coffee Brands

• Gloria Jeans Coffees
• Caribou Coffee
• Starbucks
• Costa Coffee
• Tully's Coffee
• Peet's Coffee
• Tim Hortons
• Dunkin' Donuts
• Folgers
• Seattle's Best Coffee

Let's dive in ⇣

Key findings

1. Starbucks has the highest engagement among top coffee brands on Facebook
2. Posting every day or multiple times a day doesn't necessarily mean higher engagement
3. Get people's attention with behind the scenes videos and seasonal campaigns
4. Facebook strategies you should apply to your local brand or coffee shop

1. Starbucks has the highest engagement among top coffee brands on Facebook

Maybe you are wondering what you can do to keep your audience interested in your brand. All you have to do is  give them a reason to search and follow you, induce curiosity and create real conversations.

If you are a social media strategist, you must know that your focus should be on the community's needs. Communicate with your audience, react to its concerns, always answer to its questions.

Apart from its premium quality products, Starbucks is also known for great customer service. With more than 35 million followers on Facebook, the brand has quite a large fan base in social media.

Starbucks is using Facebook to announce exciting news, the release of the new products and promoting new coffee shops openings, and available jobs. Besides this, they are using this social media platform to talk to their customers and address their complaints.

For Starbucks, Facebook works both as a marketing and customer service platform. They regularly posts photos, videos and other updates related to its products and events.

From January 2018 to May 2019 the average engagement rate per post for Starbucks is 0.032% which can be translated that only 32 people from 100k saw that Facebook post.

Looking at the graph below you can see how the average engagement rate per post looks for the top US coffee brands that we've studied.

• Average Engagement Rate/Post

We define engagement as sum of comments, shares and reactions. Engagement rate is calculated based on all these interactions divided by the total follower count.

For these top US coffee brands that we've studied, the average engagement rate per post is between 0.021% and 0.129%.

As you can see from this graphic, Starbucks holds the first place with 0.032% average engagement rate per post, followed by Seattle's Best Coffee with 0.059% average engagement rate per post, and Costa Coffee with 0.071% average engagement rate per post.

• Total Engagement

Engagement measures the number of times someone took action on your posts, and this metric is one of the most important Facebook metric you can track.

Let's see how the engagement looks for this top US coffee brands.

Analyzing the total engagement of these brands, Starbucks leads the engagement on Facebook.

Based on our Facebook data, the majority of Starbucks posts are photos: 65.3% photos, followed by videos with 24.8%, links 6.9%, and statuses 3%.

According to some statistics, Starbucks has the largest number of stores worldwide within the coffee chain industry.

Since 1987, this brand has added an average of 2 stores a day, with great locations, higher marketing budgets, and 14.606 stores only in the US. All these facts, made in time Starbucks one of the biggest names in the coffee industry and increased its Facebook presence.

2. Posting every day or multiple times a day doesn't necessarily mean higher engagement

Based on our data, we noticed that the coffee brands are posting more photos on Facebook compared with other types of postings: status, videos or links.

From the beginning of 2018 to May 2019, 67% of Facebook content is represented by photos, and only 29,6% by videos for the coffee industry.

Further, we analyzed the frequency of postings for these ten brands and we observed that there is no correlation between the number of posts and engagement.

Let's take a closer look:

• Average Posts per Day

As you can see, Caribou Coffee is on top when it comes to posts per day on Facebook, followed by Tim Hortons and Costa Coffee.

• Average Daily Engagement

Surprisingly, even though Caribou Coffee is posting an average of 0.56 posts per day and Starbucks an average of 0.2 posts per day - Starbucks leads the engagement on Facebook.

Looking at these two charts, we can say that you can post one, two even three times a day, but this doesn't mean that more people interact with your postings.

3. Get people's attention with behind the scenes videos and seasonal campaigns

We wanted to find out what works best for this industry, how top posts look like and how they captured people's attention on Facebook.

Based on our research, we discovered these types of postings which are the winning content strategies for this industry:

• meet the people behind
• seasonal campaigns - in this particular case Christmas and Halloween campaigns
• giveaways

👉 Meet the people behind

Starbucks and Caribou Coffee are presenting their team, and they are using both videos and photos to present the people behind.  

In this case, Starbucks is using one of its posts to present the opening of a new store. You can see how the new store looks like and meet the barista who's preparing your latte. ☕️

Starbucks

Caribou Coffee

👉 Seasonal campaigns

Next, you can see how the Costa Coffee, Folgers, and Seattle's Best Coffee brands are promoting the new coffee flavors for Christmas and Halloween.

Folgers

Seattle's BestCoffee

👉 Giveaway time

If you want to increase your Facebook followers, giveaways are a great tactic here. You can learn from the Peet's Coffee how they run a giveaway on Facebook, and invited their audience to buy, and win new coffee capsules.

Peet's Coffee

4. Tips & tricks for coffee brands on social media

Studies show that the coffee industry is growing at a significant growth rate of 5.5%.

On average, 500 billion cups of coffee are consumed on Earth every year. With an increasing audience for coffee, opening a new coffee shop and using social media to attract more customers may be the key for your success.

If you're wondering how you can promote your coffee brands on Facebook, here are some ideas:

• think local
• invite nano-influencers to be part of your journey
• create instagramable corner venues where people could take photos and upload them on social media
• share the user generate content to promote your products
• make sure you don't miss the seasonal flavors for the new lattes. People will love these flavors and they'll post photos on Facebook and Instagram
• show the people behind the bar
• write the story of the coffee on walls and promote these stories on Facebook
• run giveaways

👉 Conclusion

Creating this benchmark for the coffee industry, here's what we learned:

1. Photos are the key for engagement. Make sure you create quality images your coffee account.
2. Posting every day or multiple times a day on Facebook doesn't necessarily mean higher engagement.
3. Use Facebook to talk to your customers and address their complaints - make them part of your business.
4. Focus on the seasonal campaigns and promote your coffee flavors.

With the help of social media and Facebook, in particular, these 10 US coffee brands are promoting their product and brand, also growing their customer base.

Take your Facebook strategy to the next level using facebook analytics feature by Socialinsider.

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