Seminar paper from the year 2017 in the subject Business economics - Offline Marketing and Online Marketing, grade: 1,7, Linneaus University (School of Business and Economics), course: E-Business Management, language: English, abstract: Social media (SM) strategies have gained major importance for the retailers in the last decade. The effective use of SM channels for marketing purposes leads to valuable information and insights about markets. However, many managers still fail to understand the importance of the possibilities of SM usage for strengthening brand perception. This might be due to the lack of commonly agreed SM success factors in academic research. The purpose of this paper is to discuss SM success factors and to evaluate how the two world leading sports brands NIKE and adidas follow the application of the discussed success factors. Based on a literature review, the authors summarized the most commonly discussed SM success factors. Data collection was conducted in a consecutive, two step approach, first extracting relevant data from the annual reports, and then withdrawing data from the companies SM channels through text mining. The data was then analysed according to the success factors summarized from academic literature. Also NIKE's and adidas' accomplishments in achieving their goals set in the annual reports on SM were examined. adidas achieves a higher success rate than NIKE in laying out their SM strategy. Both adidas and NIKE cannot entirely live up to their ambitions, underperforming on SM in practice.