Marketing with Twitter and Facebook should be less about selling a product, and more about selling your brand. Some companies don’t understand this and that’s why they believe social media isn’t valuable, because when you only use it to showcase sales, it isn’t. Other brands have a firm grasp on why people use social media and they enjoy stellar success as a result. Today, we want to take a look at one such comapany: Red Bull.

Go to Red Bull’s Facebook page and just start scrolling down. Do you notice anything a little odd? At the time of this writing (and this is true almost always) you can’t find a single can of Red Bull anywhere on the company’s feed. Not a one. In fact, many of the pictures don’t have any Red Bull branding at all, and some of the ones that do are pretty obfuscated. Still, the energy drink juggernaut has over 35 MILLION likes.

The lack of cans on Redbulls Facebook and Twitter is exactly why they do so well on social media. They aren’t selling a product, they’re selling their brand. By constantly posting pictures of action sports and sponsoring events like the now-infamous space jump, they have become synonymous with extreme events. This garners them a following exponentially larger than the one they would have gotten by just posting about their sugar-caffein-soda. Also note that every post (seen by some large amount of that 35 mil) does contain the words “Red Bull”, so while the advertising isn’t overt, it’s by no means hidden either.

Consider using Red Bull as an example of how to cultivate an image. Now, your business probably isn’t going to use extreme sports, but there should be some community you can appeal to. If nothing else, use Red Bull to prove to others in your company that, done right, you can have wild success without ever posting a picture of your physical product.

Original post about Red Bull Marketing can be found on Wikimotive's blog titled, "Wikimotive Case Study: Red Bull" by Abner Cavalcanti.