In today's society, a company's social media strategy is as important as ever. You can look at a company's social media profiles and measure a customer's engagement with that company and how the customer responds and interacts with the content. These metrics can be useful when researching a company whose stock you want to buy.
Every company tackles social media in their own way. Some focus their efforts on one social network, while others may go wide on multiple social networks. When comparing two similar companies such as Panera Bread (PNRA, Financial) and Starbucks (SBUX, Financial), the company's social media and its base of followers are even more important. With 1,800 locations, Panera Bread spent $65.5 million on advertising in 2014 while Starbucks, with 21,366 locations, spent $315.5 million, over 5x what Panera spent.
Looking at Panera Bread's Facebook page, we see the company first started on Facebook in 2009 and now has 2,782,567 likes, while Starbucks started on Facebook in 2008 and has 35,955,833 likes. For metrics, I believe the number of visits or check-ins the company has  can be a strong indicator of a company's position. According to Facebook, Panera has 5,308,370 people who have been there and checked in, while Starbucks has 24,796,862 people who have checked in. Follower growth can also play an important role in spotting trends in a company's brand and audience. In the last month, Panera has grown their Facebook fanbase by 21,791 followers, while Starbucks has grown their fanbase by 34,316 fans.
An important metric to look at is where each company's fans are coming from. The vast majority of Panera's Facebook fans are from the U.S. at 97%, and 0.50% comes from Mexico and Canada. In comparison, 47.50% of Starbucks' fans are from the U.S., with the rest coming from Mexico (6.60%), Philippines (6%) and the United Kingdom (3.30%).
The Facebook metric "People Talking About This" can also be an indicator of a company's performance. Looking at Panera, we see 44,327 people are talking about Panera, while 270,244 people are talking about Starbucks on Facebook.
When examining the content, we see that Starbucks' strategy is to post pictures with small amounts of text, while Panera posts a mix of graphics, photos and videos.
To put it into perspective, Starbucks receives over 517 times the number of likes on a Facebook post than a post made by Panera. Still, Starbucks has a Facebook audience that is 12.90 times larger than Panera's and 4.70 times the amount of people have checked into a Starbucks compared to Panera Bread.
I believe that the more a company interacts with its customers, the more engaged its customers are, and Twitter is a great place for doing that.
While Panera tweets crafty images of its food, Starbucks tweets short links with images of employees, crafty seasonal videos of its signature drinks and perfect food pairings that go with their products.
Turning to Instagram, we see that Starbucks has 879 posts, 6.10 million followers, and is following 1,877 users. In comparison Panera has posted 334 times, has 86.4k followers, and is following 103 users. An important thing to keep in mind is that 71% of Panera's instagram audience are female and 29% are male, while 56% of Starbucks's audience are female and 44% are male.
The hashtag #starbucks has been used in 19,828,029 posts on Instagram, while #panera is used in 515,957 posts.Â
Ultimately, looking at what people say about a company on Twitter, Facebook or Instagram can help in understanding the health and performance of a company, and also reveal trending topics.
