Car Brands in Ireland – Social Media Comparison

A while back I took a look at supermarkets in Ireland on social media. I then compared the top 25 Irish hotels on social media. Now, I’ve turned my attention to car brands in Ireland…

Why it’s interesting

It’s only when you look at all the car brands and models of vehicles they have on offer that you realise this is a pretty competitive industry. For most people, buying a car is *at least* the second biggest purchase they’ll make in their lives. It’s a pretty big deal. Does social media play a role? Can it play a role? Absolutely. As a potential car buyer, I want to know everything there is to know about the car i’m going to buy and the other options available to me. A poorly designed, frustrating-to-navigate website is going to damage my opinion of the manufacturer. A website that uses flash is going to anger me and alienate most mobile users… no presence on Facebook or YouTube will leave me slightly frustrated…

If you’re buying a car, you want to see photos and videos. As many as possible… you want to see a crash tests, the car being driven on ice, in snow, on a race track… you want to see the car being driven off the roof of a 20 story building or driven in to the sea to determine how long it takes to fill up with water… feed me as much information as possible. Everything is a potential opportunity to sell and promote certain aspects of the car and get a one-up on the competition. Everything matters. If you’re thinking about buying said car, no amount of information is enough…

The more favourable the exposure the car gets, the more likely I am to buy it or test drive it or look through a car showroom window at it after hours when i’m not going to be bothered by a pushy sales person. You see with purchases of this size, every little detail matters to the customer, therefore every little detail should matter to the car manufacturer. Including their website and their social media presence.

Out of all the comparisons I’ve done so far, this one is definitely the most interesting, simply because the stakes are so high.. watching how these brands operate on social media is fascinating and in some cases, sad… because I know they could / should be doing so much more.

The Results

Quick Facts

• All 26 car brands I looked at have an Irish Facebook page.
• Totoya, Audi & Volkswagen are top of the ‘likes’ table (each with over 60,000 likes).
• Fiat, Mitsubishi & Suzuki are bottom of the ‘likes’ table (Suzuki Ireland have just 1,180 likes).
• 22 out of the 26 have a dedicated Irish twitter account. The other 4 only have a global twitter account.
• Toyota, Audi and Mitsubishi are top of the ‘followers’ table.
• Volvo haven’t tweeted in over 6 months.
• 22 out of the 26 have a dedicated Irish YouTube channel. The other 4 have a global youtube channel.
• Average total number of videos uploaded on a channel is 31.
• Average subscribers to a channel is 72.
• Skoda, Nissan & Ford are top of the ‘views’ table (all with over 270k channel views).
• Mercedes Ireland have just one video on their channel which has 23 views.

Correlation with sales?

I know someone will ask me if there’s a correlation between social media presence and sales, so i decided to go all out and fetched sales stats for you, then compare them with a social media table. According to SIMI (who record sales figures for cars in Ireland), the top 10 best selling brands in Ireland in 2014 are:

So it would appear that ‘yes’, there is a relationship between social presence and sales (or vice versa). I compiled a social media table, based on the average position of each brand when it comes to likes, followers and views (giving each metric an equal weight)…

Of the top 10 best selling car brands in Ireland, 7 also fill top 10 positions in the social media table.