Adidas, Puma – Online Presence in Social Media

With over 3.4 billion internet users worldwide in 2016 (Statista, 2016), online presence is more than vital to a company´s existence if you don’t want to go down like Blockbuster. Furthermore with an ever growing social media presence on the internet, you need to continuously adapt and explore new areas that are available to reach out to potential customers. Once the first step is done and you reached out to the customer and got his attention, he or she starts exploring the product which eventually leads them to buying it.

With 1.71bn active Facebook, 500 million Instagram and 317 million Twitter users worldwide, social media has been one of the biggest platforms to reach out to people online. The US Facebook users spend an average of 16 minutes per hour hooked up to the internet. “Seventy per cent of consumers now learn about brands through their online articles rather than traditional forms of broadcast and print advertising” (Dibb et al., 2016).

Adidas

Adidas is just doing right. They are booming and successful when it comes to social media and selling their brand. With millions of followers on each of the three big social media platforms Adidas just proves that they did not miss to catch the online wave.

Twitter

@adidas has 2.9 million followers on Twitter and posts mostly to promote their already on going advertisements, retweets post from other Adidas brand channels or uploads pictures and hash-tagges athletes that use Adidas equipment at real live events like the UEFA Champions League Final.

Facebook

With 25 million likes on their Adidas Originals site and 20 million on both Adidas and Adidas Football, the sports company is rocking it on Facebook. Also on Facebook has Adidas separated its market segments to reach out to more specific target groups. Similar with Twitter, Adidas is promoting its brand image rather than its products. One of the ongoing brand images is Adidas being a creator and furthermore creative including an ad with Basketball legend James Harden. Adidas tries to resemble a life style on its social media platforms.

Another point why Adidas is so successful on this platform is because they are linking their accounts to others like teams they are sponsoring or that of athletes that Adidas is equipping. This way their network continuously increases.

Instagram

With the very successful Yeezy Boost line by Kanye West Adidas Originals jumped up to 78.8 million likes on its Instagram account in 2015 thus making it the most popular sneaker brand on the social media platform. This is astonishing considering that Vans and Nike only have half the amount of likes.

Puma

Puma´s online presence in the social media is impressive but unfortunately does not come near to that of Adidas. With 16 million likes on Facebook it definitely outruns several other sport enterprises but is far behind that of Nike with 27 million and the 25 million of Adidas. Furthermore Puma has only half as many followers as Adidas on Twitter and 3.2 million followers on Instagram.

What differs from Adidas is mainly that Puma is promoting its brand image as well, but with a focus on their products as well.

One reason why Adidas scores in this category way better than its brother is because it uses these social platforms to represent a lifestyle rather than trying to sell a product. Most social platform users don’t want to be persuaded to buy a product when using social media and Adidas does this on a rather subconscious level.