Coca Cola Social Media Strategy
A Look at Coca Cola social media strategy
Coca Cola is among the world’s largest sparkling beverages brands. Its main rival is Pepsico. Apart from its vast range of products that includes more than 500 beverages and several market leading beverage brands, the company is also known for its excellent focus on marketing. Coca Cola was founded in 1892 and is headquartered in Atlanta, Georgia. The company has experienced a lot of growth over the past several years. In 2019, it acquired Costa Coffee and became one of the leading players in the coffee industry too.
There has always been a fierce rivalry between the two leading players in the soda industry - Coca Cola and Pepsico. Their rivalry has extended to the world of marketing as well. Each of the two spends billions on marketing each year to aggressively promote its brands.
These companies also use social media extensively for promotions, customer engagement and for creating brand awareness as well as driving sales. Coca Cola has established itself as an iconic brand and proved its marketing prowess through various campaigns like Taste the Feeling and Open Happiness.
In this post, we will analyze the main objectives of the social media strategy of Coca Cola and how it is doing in terms of achieving those objectives.
Coca Cola Social Media Marketing Objectives:
The main objectives of Coca Cola’s social media strategy are as follows:
Brand awareness: One of the primary objectives of Coca Cola’s social media strategy is to improve brand awareness which is key to achieving faster growth and higher sales in its established as well as less penetrated markets. The company uses a mix of social media channels and various content formats to promote its brand and products online before a global audience,
Grow sales: Another primary objective of Coca Cola’s social media marketing strategy is to grow sales of its individual brands. Coca Cola also does paid marketing through social media and other channels to grow its sales and revenue.
Customer engagement: This is among the leading objectives of social media marketing for Coca Cola. It actively creates and posts engaging content on social media channels to engage its customers and achieve superior customer loyalty.
Brand promotions: Coca Cola also uses social media channels for brand promotions. It promotes individual brands and products on social media channels using both paid and unpaid marketing.
The key to succeeding on social media is to take a balanced and consistent approach. Being too showy or only pushing for sales can have a negative impact on the perception of a brand. Leading brands like Coca Cola avoid this approach and instead focus on creating content that engages and drives higher loyalty. Gripping story telling has an important role in terms of social media marketing. It engages customers like nothing else. Creating emotionally driven and shareable content is also equally important.
Key components of Coca Cola’s social media strategy:
Compelling content:
Coca Cola creates visually stunning content to engage its customers. Its content includes photos, gIfs and videos, mostly capturing the joy and shared experiences in people’s lives related to Coca Cola. The content shared by Coca Cola mostly centers on themes of friendship, happiness and creating cherished moments of joy.
Storytelling and emotional content:
Coca Cola’s social strategy doesn’t focus just on brand promotions. Beyond promotions, it focuses on creating heartwarming stories to stir emotions and reemphasize the brand’s identity as a cherished partner in people’s lives. In its social media posts, the company shares images and videos that are easily relatable for families, depicting moments from family reunions.
Personalized Experiences:
Coca Cola creates content that is tailored to the individual social media channels. The content quality and messaging plays an important role in terms of customer engagement and delivering personalized experiences to target audiences. In this way, the company is able to create personalized experiences that resonate with the consumers and strengthen its customer relationship.
Leveraging Influencers and partnerships:
Influencer partnership is a critical part of the social media strategy of Coca Cola. The company partners with a diverse range of influencers from global celebrities to niche micro influencers targeting different customer segments. Coca Cola aligns with influencers whose content and values resonate with Coca Cola’s brand image. This enables the company to create more authentic and impactful content. Influencer driven stories help Coca Cola promote its unique image as more than a beverage brand and a brand integral to customers’ lives everywhere.
Real Time Marketing:
Coca Cola also uses social media for real time marketing. For example, by capitalizing on trending topics, cultural events and holidays for creating timely, and relevant content, the company maintains higher brand recall and higher consumer engagement. By posting content related to special events and holidays, it engages customers on a more personal level and also promotes its brand and products in real time.
Social Listening and engagement:
Coca Cola engages with consumers actively and responds to consumer feedback to address concerns raised by users. It also promotes user generated content through its social media accounts. This has helped the company strengthen its bonding with its followers and consumers.
We will now take a look at how Coca Cola utilizes individual social media channels for marketing and growing customer engagement and how its social media strategy has translated into higher sales and superior brand awareness.
Here is how Coca Cola is utilizing various social media channels:
Facebook:
Number of followers: 109 million
Facebook is the social media network of choice for a large number of businesses and features as the primary social media platform in their social strategy. Coca Cola also uses Facebook as one of the main social media marketing channels. However, it does not post content too regularly on this platform. Rather, it posts once or twice a month through its Facebook account. The number of Coca Cola followers in its Facebook account is 109 million. Its main focus is on customer engagement through Facebook by posting relevant, engaging and emotionally compelling content.
X:
Number of followers: 3.3 million
X also features as a leading social media channel in the social strategy of Coca Cola. The number of followers in its X account is 3.3 million, which is much lower compared to the follower count on Facebook. On X also Coca Cola has reduced its activity and posts only a few times a month. The focus here is on real time marketing and engaging customers through posts made during special events. However, the engagement level of the company on X is quite impressive with some of its posts having views in millions.
Instagram:
Number of Followers: 3 million
Coca Cola does not use any of the social media channels too aggressively and the same is true about Instagram also. Coca Cola has 3 million followers on Instagram and the total number of posts is 66 only, most of which are reels. There is not much to say about Coca Cola’s Instagram strategy except that Coca Cola only posts excellent quality content on its Instagram account and the number of posts is also limited to just one to two each month.
YouTube:
Number of Followers: 4.44 million
When it comes to video marketing, there are very few that are as good as Coca Cola. The soda beverages brand uses YouTube for posting video content and engaging consumers. Its use of YouTube is more aggressive compared to the other social media platforms. It has posted more than 4.5K videos on YouTube. These videos also include a very large number of shorts. Many of these videos are music videos from Coke Studio which are mainly meant to drive higher customer engagement and brand awareness. Coke Studio India has more than 6 million subscribers and most of the videos uploaded to the various Coke studio accounts are highly popular with views in several millions.
LinkedIn:
Number of followers: 7.7 million
LinkedIn is a social network of professionals and businesses. Compared to the other social media networks, Coca Cola appears more active on LinkedIn. The main objective of its LinkedIn Strategy is to promote a positive image of the company. Its LinkedIn posts are mainly dedicated to sustainability and corporate social responsibility. These posts highlight how the company is doing in terms of promoting sustainable business and the steps it has taken across various geographic regions in terms of giving back to the community.
Conclusion:
Coca Cola is hailed as an excellent marketer that has run several iconic campaigns in the past. The company uses social media channels for user engagement, managing customer relationships and growing brand awareness mainly. The focus is less on sales and more on customer experience and engagement. Since social media features as an important channel in the overall marketing strategy of Coca Cola, the focus is on achieving more while doing less. Some of the most iconic social media campaigns run by Coca Cola include Share a Coke, Taste the Feeling and Holidays are Coming campaigns. These campaigns were highly popular on social media channels and successfully hit an emotional chord with the audience.