adidas v Nike in social media battle! #3

For the last couple of months we have been tracking social media mentions for adidas and Nike, looking at how the brands of a sponsor and a non-sponsor have been affected by the Olympic Games. Our first post examined public awareness before the games; a second asked if being an official sponsor really pays off.

With the dust settling on east London the social media volumes over the last two weeks suggest that Olympic sponsorship has not afforded adidas a significant advantage.

Two weeks ago adidas was at least featured in a greater number of influential tweets if we can judge by the total number of followers reached, but now the Twitter followers to mentions is back in proportion.

However, according to a number of studies adidas was a clear winner among other official sponsors. For example MarketingWeek said that “the positive association of being kit maker for the record-breaking Team GB and the high-profile “Take The Stage” campaign saw Adidas’ brand sentiment increase markedly during the Games’ fortnight the Games took place”. MarketingWeek also states that adidas has “outpaced rival Nike” based on statistics from YouGov’s BrandIndex Buzz score – but it’s not just our data that challenges that claim.

Just today Econsultancy presented Socialbaker data analysing tweets mentioning adidas and Nike, each in conjunction with Olympics, and Nike came out on top. Experian Hitwise data shows that Nike’s Facebook followers grew by 6% whereas adidas’s only grew by 2%, although during the course of the games adidas did gain as their webtraffic went up 44% and Nike’s 10%.

Also note that ‘Olympics’ is among the most frequently occuring words in Nike’s social media in the last two weeks…

…but for adidas it is not.

 Cision Social Media was used to conduct the analysis. Pie chart was created via Cision Social Media. Statistics for UK nationals was taken from CisionPoint‘s news archive.