Scania’s Facebook page is far more popular than its European competitors’ pages. Jack Miles, research manager at Northstar Research Partners examines what it’s doing right
The Scania Group is a Swedish-based manufacturer of commercial vehicles, namely buses, coaches and engines. It also provides aftersales support. Scania has production bases in 10 countries across Africa, Asia and Europe, and distributes its products on a worldwide scale.
Direction
Scania has a strong online communication channel between itself and its target market. Its online hub is the Scania Newsroom, which integrates all of the company’s social media, public relations and digital communication tools. Of these communication arms, the one with the strongest following is the Scania Group Facebook page. This is somewhat against the grain as Facebook as a B2B marketing channel is still very much unproven.
Scania’s Facebook page has a strong foundation, with an amply detailed overview of the company, a detailed historical timeline of the company’s development with key contact information and external links to both product-specific sites and other social media outlets.
In terms of content updates, Scania has clearly taken the time to update Facebook regularly with a wide array of content, using many of Facebook’s capabilities – photos, videos, polls. The subject of Scania’s content is also widely varied, with the Facebook page being used to leverage the company’s extensive heritage, display new products across all its sectors, share follower content, promote sponsored athletes, promote positive PR work and demonstrate its CSR.
Further to this, Scania has also used Facebook to recognise events outside its industry with specific content being uploaded in honour of both Valentine’s Day and International Women’s Day, giving the impression that it is more than a ‘just business’-orientated organisation.
Scania’s approach to Facebook marketing is clearly paying off as it has far greater clout in comparison to other European commercial vehicle manufacturers with Scania’s approximately 205,000 likes dwarfing rivals MAN (25,000), Mercedes-Benz Trucks (23,000) and Volvo Trucks (116,000).
Page: facebook.com/scaniagroup
Number of likes: 210,429
Talking about this: 5395
1: Scania actively encourages users to share images on the page, while promoting its users’ own content.
2: A detailed timeline of Scania’s history shows how brand
heritage can be leveraged for
content marketing.
3: There are numerous links to external content – the Scania Newsroom listed here is the brand’s online hub for customers.
4: The vast quantity of follower content reflects the engaging nature of Scania’s Facebook page.
Engagement
Scania’s content undoubtedly pays dividends in terms of ‘likes’, but the way the company has leveraged it in an engaging manner is something that really makes the page stand out. Scania has been highly active in encouraging its following to participate in the page’s activities. Scania has done this across several mediums. At the core of this is Scania asking its following to post photos of their vehicles, and occasionally using these as the profile picture on the page. Scania has taken this one step further and shared customer stories on the page too, not only showing the company’s ability to be light-hearted but also offering SMEs a valuable PR opportunity.
The result of the engaging nature of the Scania page is that it appears to be an incredibly useful conversational tool for the brand, with many comments on the page – which looks good and shows other visitors the page is engaging. Resultantly, there is a large quantity of people talking about Scania on Facebook – approximately 5000. Similar to the scenario with ‘likes’, this number is notably greater than Scania’s key European commercial vehicle rivals MAN (817) and Mercedes-Benz Trucks (201).
In short, the Scania page has an exciting variety of content and is clearly adept in engaging its visitors, resulting in it having greater clout than the Facebook pages of Scania’s closest competitors.
Overall rating: 10/10