Social Media Analysis of Top Sports Brands: Who Runs Fastest in Social Media?

Last month saw interests in sports events peak around the world. In English premier league, two Manchester clubs fought neck to neck for getting home their only silverware this season, while in India, Indian premier league saw most of the matches having a last over nail biting finish.

While sports fans were filled with adrenaline supporting their teams the past month, sports goods manufacturing brands saw it as a perfect opportunity to promote their products and give a push to their topline based on sales of jerseys, shoes and other products during this period.

Naturally, these events resulted in social media being flooded with related content; we thought it would be interesting to feel the pulse of the chatter going on social media for the top sports goods brands. We decided to monitor the social media mentions in the past month for the following brands

1. Nike
2. Adidas
3. Reebok
4. Puma

We further short listed the following sports products manufactured by all of these brands to identify the products which are causing more buzz for each brand in social media.

1. Shoes
2. Caps
3. T-Shirts
4. Watches
5. Jerseys
6. Jackets
7. Bags
8. Sunglasses

While we saw, nearly half (47%) of total mentions on social media for these brands were for Nike but when it came to mentions related to the above products this figure dropped to less than one-third (29%), similar to Reebok (29%) which only had 16% of total mentions. Graph below summarizes the findings for each of these brands.

We then looked at the distribution of mentions for these brands within each of the product categories to gauze which Brand is being talked of more for which product. This distribution for each of the products is shown below.

Interestingly, while Reebok had a share of 23% of all the product mentions, it gained a huge share with 55% of all mentions of Reebok referring to its popular Jerseys. We were now curious to find what this can be attributed to. Is it because of some news event or is it because of people really liking it or disliking it? We decided to look at all of these mentions relating to Reebok Jerseys and create a word cloud to know what all of this buzz is about.

Looking at the above word cloud it was perfectly clear it was the NHL premier jerseys for various teams which were driving bulk of the buzz on social media on Jersey’s in the favor of Reebok.

Please watch this space for more interesting blogs on social media analysis in the weeks to come as we continue to monitor social media events as and when they happen. We would love to have your suggestions / feedback on the above article.

If you are interested in social media monitoring tools from VOZIQ to track and monitor online content for your brand, feel free to request a demo or open an account with VOZIQ.