Last semester, my Internet marketing students completed a social media project. They were asked to follow three social media channels by a company of their choice, and then write up their experience about it. Together, we observed 30+ companies’ social media practices, ranging from lesser-known brands to major players in the social media arena such as Starbucks and Best Buy. In this blog, I would like to share some qualitative conclusions from those observations.
Photo by Flickr User Widjaya Ivan | CC 2.0
What Works
Polls and questions: Asking consumers easy questions that are tangentially related to the product seems to receive good reactions from consumers, and many do respond. A key to this practice is to time the questions based on what’s on consumers’ mind at the moment (e.g., holiday, economy, etc.).
Contests and submissions: It may seem like a lot of companies are running contests nowadays. But in our observation, it still seems to work quite well among consumers. Visibility of winning is important. An example is ESPN’s use of fan-submitted photos as its profile picture. This is updated every week so that the chance of winning is pretty frequent.
Continue reading “Social Media Lessons from Thirty Brands”
