This month’s Facebook Fans by Brand analysis shows some brands continued their efforts from November, one brand made a significant increase in fans over a weekend, and a new brand entered the automotive world with their own fan page.
Jeep Polls for Fans
Jeep did a "reach block" to US Adults on Sunday December 6th where it served a significant number of impressions using “Become a Fan” and poll ads. In the end, they
netted around 80k fans from this one effort. The increase, plus some additional fans in the month, brought Jeep pass VW and Honda to become the fourth highest ranked major US automotive brand on Facebook. I’ve provided an example of one of the polling ad units Jeep did. I do know the ad impressions Jeep ran to obtain the fans and the numbers are pretty close to the response rate one would get for a standard homepage banner ad on a major website; in other words, nothing any other brand couldn’t expect doing the same effort.
A Few Brands Keep at It
Chevrolet and Cadillac continued fairly strong fan increases like they did last November. Both brands are still running “Become a Fan” units.
Hummer and Kia also experienced double-digit growth, but that is mostly due to small starting numbers and modest fan increases result in significant percentage increases. Though it is important to note that Kia was running some “Become a Fan” ad units, but they all pointed to Kia’s Sorento vehicle fan page.
A Couple Brands Get Branded URLs
This month Saab changed from http://www.facebook.com/saabcars to just http://www.facebook.com/saab. While the Chrysler brand went to a clean http://www.facebook.com/Chrysler link. Neither change was followed by any marketing, at least as far as I could tell, looking at their email marketing or other online efforts.
A New Brand Joins the List
Chrysler separated their trucks from the Dodge brand back in October to create a new brand: Ram. As part of the change, Ram has been actively making several efforts across social media to get the word out. Part of the strategy included establishing a presence on Facebook in December and also a presence on Twitter too. So far they have 198 fans to start, but I will not be surprised if the Ram team will include some Facebook efforts in their online marketing plan for 2010.Download the Excel file: Facebook Auto Fan File (Dec 2009)
