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When it comes to posting on your brands social pages, you have a wide choice of content types, including photos, updates, video, and links. Each has its own strengthsand a proper place in your arsenal. Regardless of what type of content you post, there are certain messaging strategies that consistently prove to increase fan engagement across social networks. Weve repeatedly seen specic content strategies work over many different brand pagesboth to trigger instant engagement and to inspire fans to keep coming back for more. In this paper, we take a look at these seven strategies, using real life examples from companies that do a fantastic job of engaging their fan communities.
Benefit Cosmetics Benet Cosmetics shares regular updates with its community about its makeup products: news about upcoming product lines, pictures of makeup, and tips and tricks. In addition to being product centric, however, Benet injects a healthy dose of personality-driven appeals to its fan community for example, in recognition of the fact that everyone has down days, Benet prompts users to let them know when that feeling happens, so that the brand can respond with an instant Beauty Boost compliment to brighten users days.
H&M H&M understands its fans love for fashion. Instead of trying to replicate the experience of shopping in the store or on the website, its page supplies a steady stream of interactive content tailored specically to its social audiences. On Google+, H&M publishes a range of follower-only exclusive collection previews, contests, and behindthe-scenes footage, like that of a Vogue editor preparing for an H&M photo shoot. Their most popular posts are the ones for their top collections with Beckham, Versace and Marni.
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Photos or video media are incredibly engaging when attached to messaging updates. In just the rst 100 days of the network, over 3.4 billion photos had already been shared on Google+1. On Facebook, posts including a photo album, a picture or a video generate about 180%, 120%, and 100% more engagement than the average text post, respectively 2.
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Google, Q3 2011 earnings call Facebook, Best Practices for your Page and Media Strategy, 2012 3
VEVO VEVO, a top music video website, shares a lot of videos and artist news with its followers. Every once in a while, however, to shake things up and keep the messaging light and fun, it balances the dialogue with a simple question. In the example below, VEVO welcomes the weekend by sharing a funny e-card image with the prompt, TGIF! Whats your weekend jam?
TIMBERLAND Timberland, the outdoor clothing, hiking boots, and active sports product company, incorporates images of its product line into the majority of posts. To freshen the mix of messaging tied to the product images, Timberland regularly includes style or image related closed questions. These messages pack a double punch the products still get featured visually in a way that is relevant to the messaging, and the question prompts a response.
Facebook, Best Practices for your Page and Media Strategy, 2012
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Question posts and ll in the blank posts generate about 90% more engagement than the average text post 3.
Steve Madden Steve Madden tweets its followers a variety of fashionfabulous content, but when it has a specic action it wants readers to take, the instruction to watch couldnt be clearer.
The Washington Redskins The Washington Redskins regularly gives its fans opportunities to engage in VIP, exclusive events. For example, the Redskins host a monthly live Google+ Hangout on Air with a rotating selection of players. Every month the Redskins give fans the opportunity to be one of the nine live attendees of the hangout (while the rest of the community watches the video stream live, and later via recording.) The Redskins get their social communities excited about upcoming Hangouts via an active messaging schedule, alerting fans to the next athletes scheduled to appear in hangouts and how fans can sign up to be one of the exclusive nine that get to chat with them live.
Dunkin Donuts Dunkin Donuts does a great job using the Facebook VIP strategy. Every week, the company encourages its fans to submit photos of themselves with Dunkin Donuts products. And each week, one lucky fan is chosen as the Fan of the Week, an honor which includes having their picture featured on the Dunkin Donuts Facebook page. For giving fans a chance at Facebook fame, Dunkin receives week after week of quality engagement.
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Be seasonable and timely with the content youre posting. Fans are more likely to engage with topics that are already top of mind, such as current events, holidays or news. For example, posts mentioning Independence Day on July 4th generated about 90% more engagement than all posts published on that day.4
Annies Homegrown Annies Homegrown takes the time to respond to every customer post with helpful information, gratitude for the fans loyalty or, at the very least, a like. Annies often uses the fans name in replies to personalize the conversation and make the fan feel heard and appreciated, like in the tweet and Facebook post depicted here.
Facebook, Best Practices for your Page and Media Strategy, 2012
Timberland Timberland again demonstrates a high attention to fan engagement by celebrating individual fan photo uploads. Each photo uploaded by a fan is a visual endorsement, not to mention valuable earned media, so there is a high value to encouraging fan photo uploads. For example, Timberland posted an update informing the community that, in celebration of its page reaching over one million fans, it would collect and re-post favorite fan photos, giving each chosen fan the enticement of boosted exposure.
Here is an example of fan feedback we received after posting that we would review any fan page that left its link in the comments of a message. We promised just a simple 10-second test, but we delivered for every single fan page that participated. Many fans were pleasantly surprised and gratefuland they let us know about it.
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The same is true of the post to our Google+ community on the right, which showed an amusing effort by some women at Wildre to join in on Mens Health Awareness Month activities by donning mustaches for Movember. The follow-up commentary from readers demonstrates their appreciation for the levity and entertainment value of the post.
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Bannon, Deirdre, State of the Media: The Social Media Report 2012, http://www.nielsen.com/us/en/ insights/reports-downloads/2012/state-of-the-media-the-social-media-report-2012.html Rao, Leena, Most of the Page Views on Facebook Contain Social Ad Formats, http://techcrunch. com/2011/09/14/most-of-the-page-views-on-facebook-contain-social-ad-formats/ Google Ads, Social Extensions http://www.google.com/ads/innovations/socialextensions.html
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So, now that youre armed with seven actionable strategies for improving engagement, be sure to explore and test which strategies work best for your brands various social communities.
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