Social media is the top Internet activity, with customers spending more time on social media each month than on any other online activity, a recent study by Business Insider found. On average, Facebook attracts seven times more user engagement than Twitter. Collectively, users spend 114 billion minutes each month on Facebook, 8 million minutes a month on Instagram, and 5.3 million minutes a month on Twitter. By maintaining an active presence on these networks, your brand can engage and convert customers, increasing sales. Learn from the best to master each channel.
Upscale grocer Whole Foods maintains a large Pinterest presence, with 178,403 followers and pin boards covering seasonal recipes, products, and health and wellness. Beyond offering customers useful ides for recipes they can make with Whole Foods products, the brand's Pinterest page aims to reflect its core values and communicate the essence of Whole Foods to consumers. These core values include:
- Promoting healthy eating
- Offering organic and natural foods of the highest quality
- Caring for the environment
- Mutually benefiting their suppliers
Browsing the images on Whole Foods' Pinterest page, you will not see many products that Whole Foods sells. The grocery chain isn't actively promoting its products in its pins, as you might expect a brand to do. Instead, Whole Foods is trying to influence the user with lifestyle choices as varied as upcycling furniture, composting food waste, growing organic veggies, baking with whole grains, and so on. Users who follow Whole Foods on Pinterest will want to mimic the lifestyle represented in the pin, which naturally means buying at Whole Foods.
Twitter allows businesses to promote their products and services to users, but brands who do too much promoting can seem spammy. Business best practices for Twitter include interacting with users, actively listening to tweets and tweeting several times a day to retain top of mind awareness. They also include using the platform to show off new deals, make customers aware of promotions, and host contests and giveaways. Home goods retailer Joss and Main maintains an active presence on Twitter and demonstrates many of these best practices on its Joss and Main Twitter feed. The brand tweets helpful design blog posts, complete with images, gives advance warning of sales and promotions, and retweets designers and bloggers who mention the brand. Joss and Main followers receive a regular dose of inspiration and ways to take action and purchase some of their J&M favorites for less.
Beloved snack cookie Oreo celebrated its 100th birthday recently, and posted to Facebook 100 times in 100 days to celebrate. In 100 days, the brand gained 1 million followers. Oreo cultivates unusual content that celebrates current events, from Gay Pride and Elvis Presley's birthday to the landing of the Mars Rover. The lesson here for brands is, adding a side of fun to social media pages can help a brand go from good to great. During the 100 Days campaign, Oreo's Facebook interactions increased by 195 percent, as Facebook users liked and shared the brand content. The creative campaign was a net win for Oreo, which gained momentum and increased brand awareness around its milestone birthday.