Two of the most popular energy drinks on the market—Red Bull and Monster Energy—both promise to wake you up and keep you going. Red Bull guarantees to “give you wings” while Monster Energy dares you to “unleash the beast,” but we’d rather find out which brand is energizing social.

To find out we’ve put the brands head-to-head in this week’s Social Media Face Off.

In order to compare the brands in social media, we set up search streams for each in the uberVU platform, including variations in spelling (i.e. “red bull” and “redbull”).

We’ve compared the results from the past two weeks to determine our winner.

Let’s see which brand is fueling social.

Round One: Mentions

With 371,244 mentions, Red Bull easily wins round one, crushing the 20,404 mentions of Monster Energy. That’s almost 18 times as many mentions!

As you can see on the line graph Red Bull hit a spike in mentions on October 13. That was the final day of the brand’s Red Bull Rampage, an invite-only freeride/downhill mountain bike competition, and social chatter was about the round up of the competition and the winners.

mentions

Winner: Red Bull

Round Two: Sentiment

Sentiment is a helpful social media metric as it’s important to gauge how people feel about your brand or company.

Red Bull smoked the competition in total mentions, but were the majority of those mentions positive or negative?

Round two is close, but Monster Energy edges out Red Bull with 29% of its mentions registering as positive, edging out the 25% posted by Red Bull.

sentiment

Winner: Monster Energy

Round Three: Conversation Mapping

So we now know Red Bull had the most mentions and Monster Energy had the most positive mentions but what was the social web actually talking about when it came to each brand?

To get a better idea we took at look at uberVU’s conversation maps which highlight the most talked about topics.

Both brands’ sponsorships were popular topics in social. “Sebastian Vettel” and [Mark] “Webber” are both on Red Bull’s Formula One racing team and hot topics in social. “Bull Rampage”, the cause of the brand’s spike in mentions, also made the map.

Monster’s “Energy Cup,” a supercross competition won by James Stewart, was the number one phrase on the brand’s map and a hot topic throughout.

The sponsorships are clearly gaining a lot of attention for both energy drink brands, so we have to declare this round a tie.

convo map

Winner: It’s a toss up

Round Four: Engagement

With the score all tied up we turn to engagement to determine our winner. To find out which brand has better engagement across Facebook and Twitter we’ve compared the number of Likes, Shares and RTs.

Red Bull easily dominates in all three engagement categories, taking the final round and the overall win.

engagement
Winner: Red Bull

Overall Winner: Red Bull vs Monster Energy

With wins in overall mentions and engagement we declare the winner of this Social Media Face Off to be Red Bull. Looks like wings trumps beast in social.