For our latest installment of “Battle of the Brands”, we analyzed the social media strategies of two of the biggest players in the file sharing game: WeTransfer vs. Dropbox.
Using Mention’s powerful social monitoring features, we were able to get insights into how these SaaS businesses’ brand positioning affected their share of voice on social media.
Read on for some of the key insights we picked up from spying on these two SaaS giants, with some lessons that you can apply to your SaaS Social Media Marketing strategy.
Table of Contents:
- Player 1 What is Dropbox?
- Player 2 What is WeTransfer?
- Who is their community?
- How does WeTransfer’s & Dropbox’s brand positioning play into their stats?
- Does size always matter?
- How does this reflect on their branding approach?
- Key takeaways
Player 1: What is Dropbox?
Dropbox is one of the world’s most widely-used cloud platforms for file storage and sharing. They offer the ability to share large files with file previews, company branding and watermarking, making file-sharing one of the key features of the Dropbox Professional plan. Offering a plethora of other features like file-storage and productivity tools, Dropbox brands itself as a “smart workspace” multi-usage solution with its mission to “design a more enlightened way of working”.
Player 2: What is WeTransfer?
WeTransfer started off as a simple, no-fuss file transfer service, but with a distinct branding. Over the years, they acquired a suite of creative tools: a presentation creator, inspiration bookmark tool and an online sketchbook. However, their most used product is by far the original file-sharing tool, which is what it’s best known for. Today, WeTransfer brands itself as the heart of the creative community, with its mission to “defend the space for creative work”.
Who is their community?
Figures correct as of February 2021.
While the two players’ client bases aren’t totally comparable, they are both major players in the file-transfer game. Both Dropbox and WeTransfer boast sizeable social armies, but their community’s presence varies across the different social media platforms we observed.
Dropbox leads the way on Twitter with 4.1M followers, around the same size as the population of Moldova, whereas WeTransfer has around 1% of that amount (41.5K followers). As Dropbox has been playing the game for longer, this doesn’t come as a big surprise.
However, the tables turn when we look at Instagram. Despite a much more niche clientele, WeTransfer has a larger Instagram community than Dropbox: 52.1K followers vs. Dropbox’s 49.1K.
How does WeTransfer’s & Dropbox’s brand positioning play into their stats?
Here’s the mention volume each brand accumulated across the entire web:
…versus their volume exclusively on Facebook and Instagram:
Dropbox engulfs WeTransfer’s mention volumes across the web on a whole. This can be explained by their offering of a broad range of products suited for individuals, companies and everyone in-between, giving them more opportunities to be seen and heard amongst multiple audience types. This being said, their social media strategy focuses on reaching out to one key market: working professionals.
However, WeTransfer’s visibility on visual-heavy social media sites like Instagram approaches that of Dropbox, despite its much smaller overall user community. This makes a lot of sense as this is the social media platform of choice for many visual creatives, WeTransfer’s key user base.
Does size always matter?
While Dropbox received a ton more mentions than WeTransfer on both the web and social media, our sentiment analysis showed that WeTransfer’s community had more positive things to say about the brand.
Both brands saw their share of positive mentions increase when we filtered out everything except for Instagram and Facebook. However, WeTransfer took things one step further with an overwhelming majority of happy followers.
The lesson? Unless you’re a subscriber of the “all press is good press” mindset, it may be better to focus on curating a small tribe who all have good things to say about you instead of an army of negative talkers.
How does this reflect on their branding approach?
WeTransfer’s strong stance on being the defender of the creative community is loud and clear through its offer of artsy tools and consistent Instagram aesthetic. By regularly sharing user-generated content on the #MadeWithPaper Instagram hashtag, WeTransfer champions their own users while showing off the capabilities of their line of creative products.
The impact of WeTransfer’s art-filled, content-driven branding shows on the social networks where the communities it’s addressing thrive.
On the other hand, Dropbox focuses on more text-based content on how to boost productivity and work better. This aligns perfectly with their mission statement to “design a more enlightened way of working”. Like WeTransfer, it’s clear that Dropbox have adopted a consistently branded visual aesthetic on Instagram to promote their blog articles with illustrations to accompany their content. However, their articles fit better on a text-based social media like Twitter, which might explain why this channel is more successful.
Key takeaways
- Know your community. Engaging with your tribe in a positive way on social media channels they regularly use will help your brand reputation.
- Pick your niche. As seen with WeTransfer, targeting a niche might give you fewer opportunities, but gives you more chance of making that community happy.
- Tailor your communications. Even if your brand is like Dropbox and has something to offer for everyone, focusing on the audience that matters most to your mission will improve your brand engagement.
- Size doesn’t always matter. The quality of the conversations being had around your brand matters just as much as their frequency.
- Your branding and content strategy goes hand in hand. Create content that supports your brand values and mission statement, and you’ll create a positive image for everyone who crosses your path.
