What Everyone Ought To Know About Nike And Adidas’s Instagram Page

Background Information

Adidas and Nike are both two major apparel brands that specialize in athletics. Although they are both major sports apparel brands they both have a different target market. Nike’s target market is primarily consumers that are between the ages of 15-40 both men and women, and Adidas’s target market is athletes between the ages of 20-29 that are passionate about sports. These two brands might not have the same exact target market but are definitely two huge competitors. In this blog I am going to examine the different ways that the companies market themselves, specifically on Instagram.

Nike Instagram: 101.1 million followers, 763 posts

Adidas Instagram: 25.4 million followers, 760 posts

Nike Mission Statement: To bring inspiration and innovation to every athlete* in the world. *If you have a body, you are an athlete.

Adidas Mission Statement: The Adidas Group strives to be the global leader in the sporting goods industry with brands built on a passion for sports and a sporting lifestyle.

Instagram Best Practices

You should post engaging and high quality photos (sproutsocial.com)
You should strike a balance between promotional and inspirational content (lyfemarketing.com)
Be active when your audience is active (thrivehive.com)
Don’t preach-tell your stories instead (falcon.io)
Post Consistently (falcon.io)

Adidas

Nike

How Does Adidas Use Instagram?

Adidas uses Instagram just like any other company would, to bring awareness to their brand and products. Most of the content that they are posting are promotions of famous athletes repping their product, shoes and clothing. Adidas is one of the first brands to experiment with selling their products on Instagram. According to DIGIDAY.com, “The sportswear brand is one of the first to test Instagram’s checkout feature, announced in March: a way for people to purchase products directly from the app”. Although Instagram may be selling products on instagram, are they following best practices?

Is Adidas Following Best Practices On Instagram?

To run a successful Instagram page for a business you have to follow best practices. Adidas does a good job of following best practice #1. The pictures that they are posting are definitely high-quality and engaging. You can tell by looking at the photos that they post that there are professionals that are editing the photos to make sure that they have the best quality image they can get. Adidas also does a good job of following best practice #2. They do this by posting content of athletes that are inspirational and promote their business at the same time by making sure that the athletes are in Adidas apparel. When people see famous people wearing certain clothing they want to wear what they are, this is great marketing for Adidas. Adidas lacks largely when it comes to best practice #3. Although Adidas is a huge company, it doesn’t mean that they shouldn’t engage with their social media following. If a follower comments on a post with a question or a comment someone on Adidas’s social media team should respond to the follower to keep them involved and make sure that everything they are posting they truly care about. Best practice #4 is important to a brand’s ego, and Adidas does a good job with this. Most of the content that Adidas is posting is inspiring stories about athletes that made it to the big leagues that started with nothing, promoting the saying “you can do anything you set your mind to”. They don’t just preach they act and they do a great job with that. The last best practice I will discuss is #5 and Adidas is doing a terrible job at this. I think that posting consistently is the most important thing to do and Adidas posts at random times, they have even gone weeks without supplying followers with a new post. How can you expect to run a good account if your followers have no clue when you are going to post next. Adidas really needs to fix this.

Nikes Turn, Are They Doing It Right

Now that we have torn Adidas up it is time to see if Nike is doing a better job then them. Nike does a good job of following best practice #1. The posts that Nike puts up are obvious that they went through professional editors to make the content engaging and the best possible quality they could get. Without high quality images Nike would not be able to market any of their products. Nike does not follow best practice number #2 at all. Almost all of their posts (which is not much), is all inspirational not promotional at all. Although inspirational videos are good, Nike needs to focus on posting more promotional content so that Instagram can impact Nike in a more positive way. Best practice #3 is another thing that Nike struggles with. It is pretty obvious Nike struggles with many things when it comes to their Instagram account. Nike needs to be more active when their users are active. Nike is such a big company and the fact that they are never active on Instagram especially when their users are really surprises me. One practice that Nike does do well with is best practice #4. Nike does a good job of telling people’s success stories by posting a good video or a photo with a good caption. The point is that are you trying to make it straight to the point and not complicated to understand. I think many companies struggle with this but Nike does not. Last of all is best practice #5 which Nike could not be any worse at. Nike nevers posts consistently and when they do post it’s like “wow” they actually posted something. Nike has gone as long as two months without posting anything new. No brand or company can be successful on social media specifically on Instagram if they only post as little as Nike does.

Who Is Better?

I think that Adidas is better when it comes to Instagram. Although both of the companies are not that great with keeping up with best practices when it comes to Instagram, Adidas lacks less than Nike does. The content that Adidas posts is of high quality and looks like it is professionally done. They post more than Nike does and do a better job of representing their company on social media. Although Adidas is better on Instagram I think that Nike is a better company and brand overall. Thank you for reading my post! Leave me a comment below and let me know what company you think is better on Instagram.

Sources

Share this:

Related

Leave a comment Cancel reply