We know Coca-Cola broke their last traces of the cocaine habit back in 1929, so what kind of medicine are they mixing now to lure what amounts to 11% of the U.S. population to its Facebook page? How does a company selling nothing more than what some see as “carbonated sugar water” (9 teaspoons per can, to be exact), make such a big splash on Facebook?!
According to this Adage.com article, [Coca-Cola’s Facebook Page]…”wasn’t even created by Coca-Cola, but by a pair of Los Angelenos who just love Coke. In late August 2008, aspiring actor Dusty Sorg was hunting for a Coca-Cola fan page he could join on Facebook. He didn’t find one that seemed legitimate so he hunted down a high-resolution digital image of a Coke can, uploaded it to Facebook and made a page.” At the time that Coca-Cola fans, Mr. Sorg (with Mr. Jedrzejewsk), started the now wildly popular Coca-Cola page, there were 253 other pages devoted to Coca-Cola. What made theirs different is a mystery, but Coca-Cola marketing execs. theorized that it was the high resolution photo of Coca-Cola can covered with condensation being featured in the logo space.
A quote from this October’s Harvard Business Review article, Shaking Things Up at Coca-Cola–An Interview with Muhtar Kent [CEO of Coca-Cola] suggests social media is still a big part of Coca Cola’s advertising:
The world of communication is evolving at a fast pace. In the past we needed premium advertising to create effective consumer impressions. Today consumers are much more empowered. You need to communicate with them. We have more than 33 million fans on the Coca-Cola Facebook page—the largest Facebook page of any single brand—and it wasn’t even created by us. You still need great advertising, but that’s just part of a dialogue. [–Muhtar Kent]
Let’s take a look at what’s shaking on Coca-Cola’s Facebook fan page:
If you didn’t notice, Coca-Cola’s wall doesn’t have the same controls you would expect to see on big corporate brand pages. In fact, its default is to display “everyone’s” posts! In the last 12 hours, there have been about 70 user-generated wall posts, most of them raving about Coca-Cola. By scrolling through hundreds of the last posts, it seems obvious that some monitoring is in place to prevent spam–but with so many user-generated posts, Coca-Cola seems able to step in only intermittently to respond.
In the above screen-shot, we can see a lot of creative fizz jazzing up Coca-Cola’s managed wall stream. There doesn’t, however, seem to be a precise timing strategy in place, as posts seem to be published randomly. But there is a consistency in that posts are coming out every week, whether it is once a day or every couple or few (last week there were four posts).
As we’ve mentioned before, it’s difficult for any company to achieve more than 1% interaction rate. Looking at the above post’s metrics, which represents one of the more popular posts, we can see that from 34,495,915 fans, 20,407 of them have made their voice known. This equals a aluminum tab size 0.05915 % interaction rate, which is way below the 1% goal many companies aim for. Even if we combine comments and “like” numbers for this post, we only see a sickly 0.062963 interaction rate.
To further put Coca-Cola’s Facebook fan page performance in perspective, they are far ahead (in total fan numbers) of other top brands like Disney, which to date has 28,775,099 fans (see our blog, Facebook Marketing, the Disney Way). When Tech Crunch reported top brand Facebook Page numbers last year, Disney had 3,475,487 fans, which put them only 2,054,108 behind Coca-Cola, which had 5,529,595 fans.
The alchemy behind Coca-Cola’s silver tongue transformation seems to be that they’ve backed off from the controls and let fans define and drive the brand on Facebook–though it’s still too early to say for sure, especially when it has only been in the last year or so that big brands like Coca-Cola have seen such exponential growth in the social space. What the next big features are for top brands on Facebook may be hermetically sealed in Mark Zukerberg’s brain-box, but it’s apparent from Coca-Cola’s success, fans will be the ones anointing the feet of the fastest climbing brands.
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