5 Social Media News Stories You Need to Read This Week
By Yasmin PierreSep 29
Online Trends
Published March 6th 2020
How a Viral Moment Gave Beverage Brands a Huge Opportunity to Learn About Their Customers
As a marketer at any company, the better you know your customers, the better placed you are to speak to them.
In the beverage industry, it’s no different. But getting to know your audience can be a challenge. Focus groups and surveys might be one way to do it, but these methods can be costly and time consuming.
What if there was a large pool of unprompted data where tens of thousands of consumers willingly listed their favorite drinks?
That was what happened on Twitter recently, when consumers across the globe participated in a trend listing the five drinks that resonated most with their personalities. In a short span of just one week, it had garnered more than 70k participants who tweeted their own versions of the list, just like this:
What made this trend so widespread was it’s universality – everyone across the world can relate. And this was reflected in the global nature of the response – we saw responses (in English) from all over the place:
And, because of the huge amounts of data available, there are plenty of insights to be drawn from this ‘large scale social survey’.
Brand visibility and share of voice
With a large repository of consumers’ favorite drinks worldwide, we were able to segment the conversation by popular beverage brands to see which were getting the most conversation.
Coke was the top-mentioned brand across the whole conversation.
Breaking things down further, we’re able to see how the brand-split occurred across regions, finding, for example:
Dr Pepper is more prevalent in favorite drinks lists in North Africa than in Asia or Africa
Nescafe scored very well in Asia despite its origin in Switzerland
Looking at alcohol brands, Smirnoff has a strong digital footprint in Asia while Guiness is relatively strong in Europe
Beverage categories across locations
Similarly, we can identify the type of drinks that are popular across different markets.
In Asia, we observed that milk tea, green tea and caramel macchiato are commonly named drinks in the lists.
Whereas the word cloud of Africa is very different, where ‘Turkish Coffee’ and ‘rooibos tea’ are more popular. Water was also more likely to place high on the list!
Looking at these beverage categories overall, we can find the most popular drinks worldwide that consumers listed as big parts of their lives:
Overall, consumers tended to describe themselves using drinks that are widely available across cultures such as tea, coffee, milk and juice.
It is also interesting to note that despite kombucha only making its appearance in the market recently, it is now a drink that is resonating a lot with consumers – so much so that it is among the most popular drinks that supposedly define people.
Marketers might want to understand this group of first-movers or ‘trend setters’ better.
With just a few clicks on our dashboards, we’re able to look at them from a demographic point of view, finding that women are leading the conversation (69% of gender-segmented tweets are coming from women).
And we are able benchmark kombucha fans against the general population on Twitter using Brandwatch Audiences:
Not only are kombucha fans more likely to be female, they’re also more likely to be in the research/science or creative industries and to be into beauty, fitness, and fine arts.
Don’t wait for a trend to roll around
Picking up on all this data might look like a lucky break – after all, it just landed in our laps!
But, with the right set up, data like this is available all year round.
Social data is crucial in uncovering genuine unprompted insights that help brands understand their consumers better, and Brandwatch is able to retrieve full historical data from Twitter back to 2010. If you’re interested in learning more, get in touch today.
Special thanks to Tyler Tai Bing Xiang for his data analysis on this trend
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