A benchmark and content analysis of how energy drink brands performed in 2015 on Facebook, Twitter, Google+, YouTube, and Instagram. Brands analyzed are Red Bull, Monster Energy, Rockstar Energy Drink, Burn Energy Drink, and 5-Hour Energy.

1. Report Period: January 1 - December 31, 2015
2015 in Review: A
Social Media
Benchmark & Content
Summary for the Energy
Drink Industry
A benchmark and content analysis of how
energy drink brands performed in 2015 on
Facebook, Twitter, Google+, YouTube,
and Instagram. Brands analyzed are Red
Bull, Monster Energy, Rockstar Energy
Drink, Burn Energy Drink, and 5-Hour
Energy.

2. Summary
In this report we look at the fan counts, posting habits, engagement levels, and content themes of the
top energy drink brands in the US for 2015. We’ll analyze 5 category leaders: Red Bull, Monster
Energy, Rockstar Energy Drink, Burn Energy and 5-Hour Energy.
Highlights
❖ Facebook is the largest network with 75% of the average fan count across all networks.
❖ Instagram posted a growth rate of just over 90%. By comparison, the nearest network for
growth rate was Pinterest at about 40%.
❖ Twitter had the highest posting volume for 2015, with an average of 1,243 per brand. Red Bull
alone had 2,755 posts. The Facebook posting average was 865, with Red Bull posting nearly
triple that.
Report Period: 2015

3. How fans are distributed across the social networks
The largest social network
for our brands is
Facebook, followed by
Instagram.
Red Bull’s Facebook fan
count is the highest by
far, almost double that of
its nearest competitor,
Monster Energy.

4. How fan growth is distributed across the social networks
Instagram is the leader in
growth for 2015.
Facebook lost an average
of nearly 13% for the
year. This drop is due to
Facebook’s decision to
purge voluntarily
deactivated and
memorialized pages from
business pages. You can
read more about it here.

5. Facebook Fan Purge
You can see from the two
sample trending charts
that fan counts took a
sharp downturn in March
following the fan purge.
Looking at Burn Energy,
we can see that they lost
a total of about 1.5 million
fans through May 19.
From May 20 through the
end of December, they
only gained back a total
of about 23,000 fans. So
they only gained back just
over 1% of the fans they
lost previously in the year.
5-Hour Energy was able
to recover about 65% of
their lost fans.
Trending

6. How fans are engaging across the social networks
The majority of the
networks’ average
engagement happened on
Instagram. Over 90% of
average engagement
happened on the network,
despite having only about
25% of the average total
fan count across all
networks.
You can compare
engagement numbers
listed here to the
fan/follower counts on
slide 3.

7. Posting volume by network by brand
Twitter is the network
leader for posting, with
42% of the public posts
averaged across all
networks. By comparison,
Facebook is only 29%.
Despite the high posting
volume on Twitter, that
network only received 1%
of the average
engagement for 2015.

8. Top data points on Facebook
As we discussed earlier,
many brands posted a fan
loss for 2015 due to the
Facebook Like purge.
Red Bull is posting at
nearly triple the industry
average of 865 posts with
2,359 posts for the year.

9. Top terms on Facebook
The top terms chart gives
a snapshot of the most
used or engaging posting
topics for the entire year
of 2015. Hashtags and
URL’s here reveal
campaign themes among
the brands.
Note that these are terms
used at least 10 times
throughout the entire year
by any of these brands.

10. Top Posts on Facebook
These posts generated
the most engagement
within the first 24 hours of
each post’s existence.
It’s notable that none of
these posts have
extremely heavy paid
impressions, with two of
them having roughly less
than 10% of their
engagements generated
through paid.
Also, 3 of the top 5 are
videos.

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