Smartphone vendors used to spend a lot of time and money on print and television advertising. One of the reasons Samsung rose to the top of the Android smartphone market is because it outspent everyone else, ensuring its brand was more recognizable than the competition.
The past few years have seen the rise of different marketing strategies, though. Companies like OnePlus and Xiaomi focus on social media and word-of-mouth campaigns instead of ads in print and broadcast. They don’t completely shun legacy media — Xiaomi, for example, has started using out-of-home advertising. But it’s a different dynamic, and we’re starting to see the results play out.
Source: Locowise
According to a report from Locowise, OnePlus dominates Twitter in terms of engagement, while Samsung and LG lag behind. Among seven of the top mobile brands — HTC, Sony Xperia, Huawei Mobile, LG Mobile, Xiaomi, One Plus, and Samsung Mobile — Samsung has the biggest audience with over 12 million followers. But even with about five times more followers than HTC and 11 times the followers of OnePlus, Samsung lags behind in terms of customer engagement, with only 2,449 Twitter interactions (i.e., favorites, retweets, and replies) during the month of January. OnePlus, on the other hand, had 108,300 engagements on Twitter this month, followed by Xiaomi’s 30,225.
Furthermore, the top smartphone marketing campaigns on Twitter in January came from Xiaomi and OnePlus. Xiaomi had eight of the top 12 posts to OnePlus’s four, and the number one photo was a render of the Xiaomi Mi A1, Xiaomi’s first Android One smartphone, which had 2,843 engagements. Locowise reports that the most successful hashtags on Twitter in January were #Oneplus5t, #Xperia, and #Huaweimate10pro,
OnePlus and Xiaomi took the top two spots on Twitter in terms of brand score. The total number of followers across all major smartphone brands was 18,340,027 in January, and Samsung Mobile had a 68 percent share of the audience. But because Samsung didn’t post as frequently as some of its competitors, it only had 3 percent total audience engagement.
Locowise predicts that OnePlus’s Twitter follower count will grow 6.12 percent in February, followed by Xiaomi with 2.4 percent growth and Huawei with 1.4 percent.
Overall, it seems that the mobile industry is getting more competitive when it comes to social media marketing. With new strategies replacing old ones, we’re likely only seeing the tip of the iceberg.