In which countries does IKEA have the best online reputation? For the following analysis of the Swedish furniture store’s presence on the web, media and text analytics company Neticle looked at the past three months’ results in the DACH region and found some unexpected differences.
From the beginning of July to the end of September, IKEA on the German web had more than 132 thousand mentions, which dwarfs the numbers in Austria and Switzerland. Of course, the latter two markets are smaller, so this doesn’t mean that Ikea is unpopular there, and in fact there is a steady flow of mentions in all three countries.
In Germany, both of IKEA’s largest mention peaks were due to their own Facebook page’s activity. On the 10th of July they made a funny post about their typical customer’s shopping habits, which had over 3000 comments and 300 shares. Then on the 11th of August, another funny post about cuddling in winter or summer had a similarly great response.
Ikea in Germany gets two thousand mentions per day on average
In Austria, the store’s largest mention peak was caused by a COVID-related Facebook post in September, reminding customers to wear masks again. The second largest peak was the result of a giveaway. Over the summer, the announcement of a new line of dinosaur plushies was the one that generated a flood of comments.
In Switzerland, the only real mention peak was on the 2nd of September, and it was due to several frontpage news reports on the Bruno Manser Fund accusing IKEA Switzerland of systematically violating the wood declaration requirement.
A battle of platforms
Even though the source of the largest mention peaks was usually Facebook, the general share of mentions is different in each country: in Switzerland, the largest portion of the mentions came from Twitter (61%), in Germany, Pinterest is the most dominant (57%), and only in Austria was Facebook the most important source (48%).
Another major difference is that in Switzerland, article and frontpage mentions together accounted for almost 27% of the mentions (which were really insignificant sources in the other two countries), however, Facebook mentions were practically non-existent.
With the large amount of Twitter mentions seen above, Ikea in Switzerland had a huge peak in the number of potentially reached users – it was due to a funny pandemic-related story one of the users tweeted that took place in an IKEA store, and it had a large number of retweets.
Ikea reached over a million people on several days in Germany, but there was a large Swiss peak of over 3 million
After seeing the distribution of mentions among the different platforms, it is perhaps not a surprise that Pinterest was also the prominent platform when it came to interaction (likes, comments, shares) peaks in Germany. Kitchen makeovers were popular and the nice results got tons of repins. The large interaction peak in the Swiss numbers was due to Twitter: a cute tweet by an English user Toni Bee had many retweets.
Pinterest was the ruling factor behind interaction numbers
Collecting ideas and eating green
What were the most important topics for the three countries? In Germany, the furniture for children’s rooms dominated the internet, these kinds of pictures were especially popular on Pinterest as enthusiastic moms are always collecting home improvement ideas. The appearance of “Rückkopplung” (feedback) also shows how inspired customers were with Ikea furniture: they shared tons of ideas on what one can do with a certain piece, for example this one.
In Austria and Switzerland, “Team” is on the top of the key topics list because IKEA Österreich’s Facebook team is very active, and they reply to a ton of questions users send through the platform. Another major difference compared to Germany is the appearance of “Fleisch” (meat) and “vegan” because in September, it was announced that the popular meatballs’ vegan version would become available in the future. The giveaway mentioned earlier was also a green themed one: lucky users could win a vegetarian meal at one of Ikea’s restaurants.
What’s next?
The data of the last three months has showed us how popular IKEA is in the DACH region, and it also suggests some directions that could be beneficial for the brand’s communication strategy: for example, IKEA Schweiz could take the reins and generate more interaction on their own Twitter page by incorporating some of the popular topics we’ve seen, and there’s quite a bit of untapped potential in the insane amount of Pinterest pins in Germany. In Austria, Facebook clearly indicates what kinds of posts work, so they could try and communicate those messages in other platforms as well.
