Social Media Face Off: Chevrolet vs. Ford

Chevrolet challenges you to “Find New Roads” and Ford wants you to “Go Further”, but which car brand is going the distance in social? In order to find out we’ve put the brands head-to-head in the first Social Media Face Off of 2014.

In order to compare the brands in social, we set up search streams for each brand in the uberVU platform. Since Ford is a popular name and not just a car brand, we’ve made sure mentions of Ford also included “motors”, “car”, “auto”, “truck”, “hybrid”, etc. in order to isolate for mentions of the car company. We used the same parameters for the Chevrolet stream and also made sure to include mentions that referenced the brand nickname “chevy.” We’ve compared the results from the past two weeks to determine our winner.

Let’s see which brand is navigating best in social.

Round One: Mentions

Ford takes off in round one with 133,747 mentions, quickly pulling ahead of Chevrolet’s 4,710 mentions.

As you can see from the line graph Ford had a large surge in mentions from January 2nd to January 3rd. We did some digging and found that January 2nd was the day the car company announced plans for a solar-powered hybrid car, which clearly spiked social’s interest.

Winner: Ford

Round Two: Sentiment

It’s important to know how the social web is feeling about your brand, which is why sentiment is a very important metric to monitor. Ford had the most mentions, but was the sentiment behind those mentions positive or negative?

Chevrolet claims the win with 23% of its mentions registering as positive, beating out the 21% posted by Ford. Both brands are pretty close to the sentiment standard for the auto industry according to our recent sentiment analysis.

Winner: Chevrolet

Round Three: Conversation Mapping

In round three we’ll take a closer look at the mentions of both brands by comparing their conversation maps. The maps highlight the hot topics associated with each car brand in social so we have a better idea of what exactly people are talking about.

Ford’s maps shows positive brand recognition with its models “Mustang” and “Focus” both appearing on its conversation map. Chevrolet’s map focuses more on sales and specific car parts with “best offer here”, “radiator” and “rear.” The bad news for Chevrolet is that its competition is on the social web’s mind when discussing the brand—both Ford and GMC rank on its map.

Winner: Ford

Overall Winner: Ford

With wins in total mentions and conversation mapping, we declare the winner of this Social Media Face Off to be Ford. Ford is definitely going further in social.

Want to see how your social stacks up against your biggest industry rival?
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