Car brands on Instagram: Who is the king?

I have been following automotive brands on Instagram for quite a while now. I am fascinated by automotive design and how much love for the details is behind every curve and which imagery car brands choose. It’s easy to recognize different styles among brands, each of a specific metaphorical language. You can see a lot of lensflare in Volvo’s imagery, while Ferrari tries to stay within a certain range of colors and always use red as the center of attention. Lamborghini is colorful and crazy. American car brands tend to show their cars in very urban scenes. So I was interested in how they perform on Instagram and found some fun details in this numbers.

This article shall in no way represent a scientific study, it is only a use case of Instagram usage by brands in a certain industry. Also, I have only chosen certain car brands and also I did not use other popular brands like Volkswagen or any Japanese brands. The questions I asked myself were:

Is it true that the usage of a lot of blue in your photos creates more engagement because it is more appealing to people?
Do brands with the highest amount of followers also have the highest amount of interaction?
Who is the most active?
Who is using Video and how do carbrand-followers engage with video content?
I have defined the following in advance:

A like is easily given on Instagram and the easiest way of interaction. But a comment is much more worth because it creates real engagement and is not as easily given as the double-tap. That’s why I have only counted comments as interactions and engagement. It says a lot more than a like. If a brand has a lot of followers but almost no interaction, those followers are not worth that much.
I have taken all postings from January 1st until March 31st 2017. Three months is a pretty good sample.
The sample of photos for the photo analysis was 50 per brand

I paid attention to the following brands:

Alfa Romeo
Aston Martion
Audi
BMW
Bugatti
Cadillac
Chevrolet
Ferrari
Jaguar
Lamborghini
Maserati
Mercedes-Benz
Porsche
Tesla

The basics

If you look at the follower numbers, it is pretty easy to see that BMW is the king amongst the car brands I have analyzed.

Brand	Follower
BMW	11335157
Mercedes-Benz	8850581
Audi	7569808
Lamborghini	6885600
Porsche	6780187
Maserati	4478810
Jaguar	4199825
Bugatti	3776810
Aston Martin	3452543
Ferrari	2296454
Chevrolet	2296454
Tesla	1704917
Cadillac	1328193
Alfa Romeo	461639

The most active account is most definitely held by Mercedes-Benz, whose Social Media team has posted 554 times in those three months, almost double as much as the second placed, BMW. Tesla is the extreme opposite: They have posted only five times in three months, which was not bad for the interaction at all, which we will see later.

Brand	Postings from January through March
Mercedes-Benz	554
BMW	270
Ferrari	141
Aston Martin	122
Jaguar	120
Alfa Romeo	79
Cadillac	72
Chevrolet	71
Lamborghini	65
Maserati	53
Porsche	42
Bugatti	35
Audi	29
Tesla	5

Although Mercedes is the most active, the engagement of the brand’s followers is only somewhere in the middle, whereas Audi – who has less followers than Mercedes-Benz – has a more engaged crowd as followers and they perform very well in that area. So it is not said that a lot of postings also bring you a lot of engagement. I am 100% sure that Mercedes could post half as much as they do now and they would perform not worse than now.

Brand	Comments
Mercedes-Benz	141826
BMW	90726
Lamborghini	27212
Ferrari	25173
Aston Martin	16916
Audi	16155
Jaguar	16045
Porsche	13861
Maserati	9996
Bugatti	9571
Chevrolet	5535
Cadillac	3794
Alfa Romeo	3504
Tesla	2240

The total amount of comments does not really say anything, because every brand posted a very different amount of content. So I have just estimated the average amount of comments per posting for a certain brand. As you can see in Audi’s case as I mentioned before, the engagement is not depending on how much you post on Instagram. Tesla is an extreme case, but also their five postings created way more engagement than BMW or Mercedes does on average.

Brand	Comment average per posting
Audi	557,0689655
Tesla	448
Lamborghini	418,6461538
BMW	336,0222222
Porsche	330,0238095
Bugatti	273,4571429
Mercedes-Benz	256,0036101
Maserati	188,6037736
Ferrari	178,5319149
Aston Martin	138,6557377
Jaguar	133,7083333
Chevrolet	77,95774648
Cadillac	52,69444444
Alfa Romeo	44,35443038

The most interesting finding was that video content – except for Lamborghini, Tesla and Ferrari – is commented significantly less than still pictures. Video is only a high engagement content for brands where sound is important. In general, car brands do not operate a lot with video content. Only Lamborghini and Tesla seem to have a higher ratio of video to still image. Of course, video content is more difficult to produce, post-process and use the right snipet for social media. Audi, for instance, is not using video content at all and look at them: they have the highest engagement rates. So, I assume, video content is still not a big thing on Instagram, except for very the highly priced brands like Lamborghini. The content of the video itself is also important, which I will tell you later about.

Three of five Tesla postings were videos, by the way.

Brand	Relation Photos/Videos
Tesla	60%
Lamborghini	35,40%
Jaguar	21,70%
Alfa Romeo	20,30%
Cadillac	19,40%
Chevrolet	15,50%
Bugatti	14,30%
Mercedes-Benz	14,10%
Porsche	9,50%
BMW	8,10%
Ferrari	7,80%
Aston Martin	5,70%
Maserati	3,80%
Audi	0%

As you can see above, Lamborghini has a 1/5 video, 4/5 photo ratio, which seems to work very well for the brand.

A few months ago I have stumbled upon an article that said: Some scientists found out that the bluer a photo and an Instagram feed is, the more likely we engage with it, because blue tones are more appealing to us human beings. I wanted to see if car brands used a lot of blue tones and if the more engaging brands also have the bluer Instagram feeds. Let’s look at every single brand.

Audi

Tesla

Lamborghini

BMW

Porsche

Bugatti

Mercedes-Benz

Maserati

Ferrari

Aston Martin

Jaguar

Chevrolet

Cadillac

Alfa Romeo

If you compare the amount of blue tones (the ones you can see as blue with your eye) with the engagement, there really is not a significant thing to find. Tesla uses the most blue colors, followed by Audi, Lamborghini, Bugatti and Mercedes.

The content of the content

All those statistics are fun but the most interesting things were to be found in the analysis of the content: Which postings are the ones with the most likes and the best engagement? I have analyzed every single feed (yep, that was pretty intense) and found that

• lifestyle shots seem to be more appealing than pictures from e.g. auto shows
• detail shots are more commented than those “spontaneous” auto show photos
• pictures from auto shows are only highly engaging when the car is completely new and an absolutely new model
• pictures with a lot of text in the image are commented a lot less
• videos are only often commented from sports car brands like Lamborghini
• completely new cars and very very old models are commented way more often than models in between those.
• people on pictures are less popular, even if they are famous testimonials
• American car brands have a higher engagement rate on pictures that show their very old models
  *the more action a video shows, the more people comment on it. But in general, videos have a significantly smaller engagement rate than still pictures.
• People don’t like to engage with pictures from a composition (when you put together three ore more photos to get a bigger picture in the feed)

Example for a posting with very high engagement:

New cars are always the best way to have people comment and like, especially in the case above where they present a completely new category of car in their brand. This is an only-exception because usually pictures from car shows are not very popular.

Also interesting and intriguing shots like this one from BMW are liked and commented a lot. BMW is a master of the light and shadow game and their fans seem to enjoy this.

This post appeared on my blog first (in German)