The Effectiveness of Red Bull's Campaign Via Social Media Resources

The fisrt question I am going to answear sounds like “What social and mobile media tools is Red Bull using?” So Red Bull’s social media presence is ubiquitous. Red Bull is active on multiple social channels whether it’s Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Google+ or YouTube. In the world of social media, Red Bull has become a brand with 43 million likes on its Facebook page. It’s Instagram account commands over 12 million followers, Google+ has 5 million and its twitter account with punchline hashtag #GivesYouWings has a following of over 2 million people. Red Bull’s YouTube account has over 9 million subscribers with hundreds of video contents and multiple channels such as Red Bull Dance, Red Bull Surfing, Red Bull Snow, Red Bull Skateboarding, etc.

Red Bull’s mobile app (Red Bull TV) is a global multi-platform app designed for smartphones and tablets and distributed free globally allows users to access Red Bull’s wealth of music, sports and event entertainment content and serves as a marketing tool to advertise its products and promotions of special events to customers.

It’s interesting to note that though Red Bull maintains an active presence on multiple social media sites, it seems to strive to keep the contents different on each of its social media sites. Red Bull’s posts on Instagram seems to be more engaging than that of its any other media channel.

The second question relates to social media marketing strategy that Red Bull’s company uses. There are few point of their strategy: 

• Excite the customer - Red Bbull’s strategy to engage its audience is by associating itself with extreme sports on its social media sites. It sponsors and promotes dare devil and high adrenaline record breaking events such as Felix Baumgartner’s BASE jump from Petronas towers in 1998 followed by his space jump in the much-publicized Red Bull Stratos project on 14th October 2012.
• Educate the custome r- Red Bull educates its customers about its products by sharing information through videos & tweets and by pushing alerts on its mobile app about in-store promotions and also upcoming sporting events that Red Bull sponsors.
• • Experience the product or service - Red Bull helps its audience experience the thrill involved in the attending the events it sponsors by posting a video clip form of its past events that went viral along with links for the fans to purchase tickets for a full season, half season, or individual games.
• Engage the custome r- a good example of how Red Bull engages the customer on social media is when Red Bull posted the picture of New York Red Bull MLS team Thierry Henry’s celebratory pose after scoring a goal that went viral and encouraged fans to vote for it as their favorite shot of the season.

And the last question I am going to consider is “How should Red Bull assess the effectiveness of its campaigns?” Red Bull takes to several social networking to promote a lifestyle creating a cult-like following and a unique brand image in the making. The simplest way to assess the effectiveness of its online campaigns is to look at the number of views or likes of a video post or tweet to measure the awareness or how far the message of the campaign has spread, or to look at the number of reposts, retweets or comments to measure the level of engagement achieved by the campaign. For more in-depth analysis, there are several social media analytics software on the market such as Keyhole or BrandWatch which help to understand what attracts the customers, their demographics, brand monitoring, business intelligence and competitor spying etc.

So Red Bull could use the insights from the assessments to understand whether the customer base is growing in size or has become stagnant or even shrinking. Knowing what the customers are looking for could give Red Bull a sense of direction for it to focus its energy and efforts to improve the brand value, move into new markets and maximize profits. For example, if there is a growing interest in a particular sport, such as how soccer is becoming common in the US, Red Bull could sponsor more events related to that sport to gain a marketing advantage or create its own sport brand such as Red Bull Air race for example. Considering the fact that the primary product of the company is energy drink with sales of over 6.5 billion cans in 2018, Red Bull could use information gained from the social media to gauge how food industry is trending to understand whether that might necessitate any change in the formula of the drink to stay relevant in the market.