Which brands are driving the most buzz heading into the Super Bowl weekend?
In our first post, Shock Top won the title for the Rookie Brand with the most fan engagement. Next, we analyzed The Comeback Brands, and Taco Bell reigned supreme. In our final pre-game post, we bring the biggest battle: The Vets, brands who are returning to the Super Bowl after one or more consecutive years of being at the Bowl. This group is divided into three categories: auto, food, and beverage.
We used Mavrck’s Fan Grader to analyze which Super Bowl brand has the most influential Facebook fans, based on each brand’s top 100 micro-influencers and their ability to drive engagements with brand posts, to predict who will be victorious on Super Bowl Sunday.
Scroll down to see which brand is crushing the game in each category:
The auto brands with the biggest Facebook fan bases are Mini Cooper and Audi, with 10.6 million and 9 million fans, respectively. Mini Cooper is using celebrity influencers for its Super Bowl ad, and has been releasing video teasers for the game on its Facebook page. In comparison, Audi is taking advantage of outer space in its Super Bowl campaigning, with several videos featuring astronauts.
Skittles’ fan base of 24 million is the largest of the food brands by far. It has already released its Super Bowl commercial (featuring celebrity influencer Steven Tyler) on its page, generating some solid buzz with over 20k shares and 2k comments on the post. Dorito’s falls behind Skittles with 15.6 million fans, but don’t count it out just yet…
No contest here. Coca Cola has the biggest fan base of any vet brand across the board, with 96 million fans and counting. Coca Cola has always been the king of UGC-inspired content, but its Super Bowl #MakeItHappy campaign is aiming to highlight UGC from a different perspective: the commercial will address the negativity that can spread between users online, and encourage its fans to promote positivity instead, both on the internet and in the world.
People Talking About This
Audi’s PTAT score spiked on February 3rd, in response to the outer space-themed video released on its Facebook page that promotes the new Audi R8 V10 plus. The video drove 600+ comments and 5k shares. In addition to this pre-game boost going into the weekend, Audi posts regularly on its feed, generally focusing on product placement alternating between images and videos.
Doritos and Skittles battled again for the top brand spot, but this time Dorito’s edged out the win. As a brand known for its excellent use of UGC and its ability to engage creatively with its fans, Dorito’s PTAT score of 61k is just the tip of the social media iceberg. This weekend, it will continue its decade-long tradition of crowd-sourcing its Super Bowl commercial in the ultimate UGC event. Dorito’s released the three commercial finalists on its page this week; the three videos have driven a combined 37k shares and 6k comments, and have been viewed over 3 million times.
Coca-Cola sweeps the beverage vets again with a PTAT score of 43k. No direct references to the Super Bowl yet, but Coke is an expert at distributing emotionally charged content that consistently engages its fans. For example, its latest video for its ongoing #TasteTheFeeling campaign drove 20k shares on Facebook, as well as 3k comments on the post.
Brand Posts & Micro-Influencer Comments in the Last 30 Days
Everyone loves an underdog: it was the auto vet with the lowest number of brand posts that drove the highest number of micro-influencer comments. Honda received 269 micro-influencer comments on its 22 brand posts; in other words, for every one brand post, 12 micro-influencers on average rallied around it, driving further engagement around Honda\\\’s brand through likes and replies by their friends.
Skittles and Butterfinger generated 138 and 142 micro-influencers comments, respectively, but Skittles takes the top spot on the podium for being an efficient buzz-generating machine and driving those comments while posting twenty less times than Butterfinger.
Almost a dead heat between Budweiser, Coca-Cola and Pepsi- but Pepsi’s ratio of brand posts to micro-influencer comments shows the highest efficiency within a brand’s ability to drive engagement. With only 16 branded posts, Pepsi generated 141 micro-influencer comments. Pepsi’s page is almost exclusively filled with videos in each brand post, a strategic move that both caters to the new Facebook algorithm and that drives heavy fan engagement as we head into the Super Bowl.
Percentage of Engagements Driven by Micro-Influencers
Auto Vets
Food Vets
Beverage Vets
Highest Avg. Influencer Index
12.09
Friends Influenced Per Micro-Influencer Comment
99.23
Friends Influenced per Micro-Influencer Comment
57.79
Friends Influenced per Micro-Influencer Comment
The Vet Brands with the Most Fan Engagement
Dorito’s is the champ to end all champs, with an off-the-charts influencer index of 99. No one can compete with this level of engagement- Dorito’s marketing strategy is a finely tuned machine optimized for UGC, which then drives insanely high levels of engagement from its most influential fans. Coca-Cola and Audi take second and third place respectively for their high influencer index averages, as well as Coca-Cola’s UGC strategies and Audi’s PTAT score.
How it works:
Our Super Bowl Brand Battle contenders are scored using Mavrck’s Fan Grader. This free tool measures engagement with a brand’s Facebook page driven by its top 100 micro-influencers on posts published during the past 30 days. The brand with the highest total overall engagement will be crowned the victor. If it comes down to a tie, the tiebreaker will be the highest average Influencer Index, which averages the Influencer Index of a brand’s top micro-influencers, based on the likes and replies driven per comment.
