A Student's View: What companies make the best use of social media?

By Erica Wenham, Friday 11 January 2013.

BMW

BMW Facebook

BMW has attracted over 13.8 million fans to its main Facebook fan page and entertains its visitors with daily updates featuring images of its cars. A majority of the content links to photo albums, car reviews and YouTube clips as well as other external links. It averages around 50,000 ‘likes’ per post and it’s not uncommon for them to exceed 100,000 on some occasions. As a result, it performs much higher than other competitive car brands such as Toyota and Ferrari. One of the most noteworthy features on the main BMW page is its range of apps. It has six apps that allow you to explore the various aspects of each of its car models, and others for BMW TV, Worldwide and Imprint. For example, each car app has a neat tool that allows you to arrange a test drive for almost any country in the world.

It’s also implemented a user-generated video competition that BMW launched through Facebook and YouTube in February 2012 where fans were asked to create a six-second advert to promote the launch of the new BMW 3 Series. The car goes from 0-60mph in just 5.9 seconds, hence the limitation on the duration of the ads. It received more than 2,000 entries, with the eventual winner taking home a brand new car. Though it wasn’t predominantly a Facebook competition, it’s a good example of a campaign that requires some genuine creativity from fans in return for a great prize, and resulted in some excellent user-generated content for the BMW brand.

BMW Twitter

BMW hasn’t attracted quite the same following on Twitter as it has on Facebook, yet its various feeds seem to do a fairly good job of responding to customer queries and @mentions. The most popular feed appears to be BMW i with over 145,000 followers, while the official BMW Group feed has attracted over 120,000. Both feeds tweet roughly once per day and include a photo or a link in almost every post, so for car enthusiasts it must be quite an interesting source of BMW information.

“Overall BMW appears mainly to be using Twitter to educate consumers about the brand by posting relevant product information, while shying away from any hard sales tactics. It also clearly appreciates the potential for interacting with customers and tracks hashtags as well as @mentions so it can respond to customers where necessary.”

BMW Pinterest

“Though various local dealers have gone rogue and setup their own Pinterest pages, there doesn’t appear to be an official BMW corporate account. This could be because cars potentially aren’t among the most popular topics on Pinterest, however car brands do tend to produce some striking visuals so in theory it could be a good platform on which to share branded content. Both Honda and Chevrolet have official accounts and have attracted several thousand followers each, so it might be in BMW’s interest to test the waters.”

BMW Google+

BMW’s popularity on Facebook is mirrored on Google+ where it has some 2.7 million followers, which is far more than other consumer brands in competition with the BMW franchise. The daily updates are identical to its Facebook posts, which is probably a sensible strategy considering the low level of interaction that takes place on G+. That said, BMW achieves a relatively high level of responses on G+ and frequently achieves more than 1,000 +1s on its posts. There are also official pages for sub-brands such as Motorsport, BMW i and M, however none has attracted more than 20,000 followers.

Source: http://econsultancy.com/uk/blog/62741-how-bmw-uses-facebook-twitter-pinterest-and-google

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