When it comes to the luxury car market, Mercedes-Benz and BMW have been battling it out for years. Since we don’t drive much here in Boston, we’re not concerned with which car has better mileage or prestige. We’re more interested in who’s cruising the social media roadway in style, which is why we put the two brands head-to-head in this week’s Social Media Face Off.
In order to compare the brands on social, we set up search streams for each brand in the uberVU platform, including variations in spelling (e.g. “Mercedes Benz” and “Mercedes-Benz”) and including mentions that referenced other brand names or terms (e.g “Bavarian Motor Works”, “Bayerische Motoren Werke”, “benz”, “bimmer”, “beemer”). We’ve compared the results from the past two weeks to determine our winner.
Start your engines. Let’s see which luxury car brand is revving up in social.
Round One: Mentions
BMW gains the early lead with 432,168 mentions, bypassing the 261,146 mentions of Mercedes-Benz. That’s almost twice as many mentions!
Winner: BMW
Round Two: Sentiment
A very important metric in social media marketing is sentiment. How is the social web feeling about your brand? The number of mentions are important, but if they’re all negative, you have some work to do.
BMW and Mercedes-Benz had similar positivity scores—25% of BMW’s mentions were positive and Mercedes-Benz posted 26%. Though Mercedes-Benz had a higher amount of negative mentions—13% compared with BMW’s 12%—positivity wins, so Mercedes-Benz takes the sentiment round.
Winner: Mercedes-Benz
Round Three: Engagement
With the score all tied up we turn to engagement to determine our winner. Which car brand has better engagement across Facebook and Twitter? To find out we’ve compared the number of Likes, Shares and RTs.
BMW puts the pedal to the metal in this round, easily winning in all three engagement categories.
Winner: BMW
Overall Winner: BMW
Mercedes-Benz wins in sentiment, but ultimately stalls in overall mentions and engagement, leaving BMW to cross the finish line in style as the winner of this Social Media Face Off.