Beers and Blogs: Linking Social Media and Beverage Brands

Ahhh, nothing quite like tweeting about the beer you’ve just cracked open, am I right?

Okay, so maybe not everyone associates enjoying an ice cold beer with social media, but you’d be surprised at the level of correlation between the two.

In fact, the beverage sector is quite intricately linked to social media. Insights from platforms like twitter can be used in a variety of ways to help beverage brands establish a strong social listening framework.

We find the beverage sector so interesting to analyze that we decided to put together a Beer Industry Report to gain a brief understanding of the industry’s social media landscape.

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Evaluate competitive landscape and overall brand health

Social Listening tools are particularly adept when comparing several brands within an industry. In the Brandwatch Analytics app we looked at 5 beer brands in our Beer Industry Report:

• Samuel Adams


• Lagunitas


• Heineken


• Blue Moon


• Guinness

Right away we notice that the import beers have larger volumes of mentions than the domestic craft brews and are dominating the social realm in terms of mentions. This kind of comparison can help a brand identify their social competitors and discover the means through which consumers discuss them.

Our report uncovered a total of 914k mentions in the industry (between July 1 2013 to March 30 2014), making it clear that to ignore a brand’s social media is to ignore valuable insight.

What stands out from the above image is the significant number of mentions Heineken received (even when disregarding all sports and music sponsorship mentions). By delving further into Heineken’s mentions we can measure the success of marketing efforts.

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Measuring marketing campaigns

Heineken’s themes are measured through content analysis based on the frequency of words or phrases mentioned when talking about the brand.

It is interesting to note the prevalence of competitor brands among Heineken mentions – Sam Adams appears almost as frequently as Heineken itself! The loudest theme shown in this data set was clearly the #ShareTheSofa campaign.

This campaign, which attempted to affix watching sports on TV with drinking Heineken, used Twitter as the main platform to connect with consumers and stimulate brand conversation.

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Is there anybody out there?

What is key when engaging with consumers via social media is knowing where they are talking about what.

The chart below shows that 56% of online conversation around beer is occurring on Twitter.

This highlights two things.

First of all, any beer brand without a Twitter is missing out on direct customer engagement.

Secondly, almost half the conversation happens elsewhere on the social web, which can lead to missed opportunities if brands fail to monitor the entire social realm.

Beers and Blogs: Linking Social Media and Beverage Brands