FreshNetworks Blog

Earlier this year I wrote about how Chiltern Railways were using twitter for customer service.

Aside from their responsive Twitter account, I was also impressed by the company’s use of foursquare to reward the “mayor” of Marylebone station with the privilege of switching on the Christmas lights –  an innovative way to recognise a loyal customer.

Last year the mayor of the station was approached unexpectedly and asked to turn on the lights, but this year Chiltern Railways adjusted the format, turning it into a competition. So with Christmas approaching, I set myself the target of being the mayor of Marylebone station this year.

As there were more people aware of this special reward this year, the company elected to create a new location on foursquare (in this case, the location was for the tree itself) and promoted the event with signage in the station and on Twitter. This gave a fresh start and level playing field to all customers.

As it turns out, I was successful in my campaign to secure the mayorship, and so on Monday evening I had the rather surreal experience of being introduced by Chad Collins, General Manager South of Chiltern Railways, as the person counting down and switching on the lights at Marylebone.

The whole event was both weird and wonderful, but has definitely left me feeling like a mobilised advocate for Chiltern Railways. I was touched by the effort and arrangements, the official photographer, the PA system (that rivalled the station’s tannoy) and the special signage and music – it was all pretty serious, even if for a minor internet celebrity (at best!).

I’m certainly looking forward to next year, and hope to see other companies using social media to offer this sort of special one-off reward. As well as being fun, I expect that Chiltern Railways may also be able to discover new advocates by identifying those who were really driven to check in multiple times for the mayorship.

Incidentally I came across this fantastic foursquare perk, with an American mall reserving a parking space for the mayor – what a clever idea!

Having already looked at the Facebook engagement and content strategy of two large rival consumer brands (Unilever’s AXE v P&G’s Old Spice) we thought it would be interesting to use social analytics tool Socialbakers to look at the engagement levels for another two rival consumer giants – Coca-Cola and Pepsi.

1. Fans

At face value, Coca-Cola has 29,368,850 more fans than Pepsi. Coca-Cola’s fan total stands at a whopping 35,454,838:

During October Coca-cola’s fans grew by 1,020,439  and Pepsi’s only grew by 188,349.

2. Engagement

We’ve always believed in building real engagement rather than “likes” or fans and so, to us,  the really interesting analysis comes when looking at the activity of Coca-Cola and Pepsi in terms of engagement.

Using Facebook’s “Talking About” metric, during October significantly more people were “Talking about” Coca-Cola instead of Pepsi:

While the people “Talking About” metric  seems to be fairly consistent for Pepsi, the increase and subsequent peak in people “Talking About” for Coca-Cola on 29th October could be because tickets for the Coca-Cola sponsored NASCAR Sprint Cup Series race at Daytona International Speedway  went on sale on Saturday October 29th.

However, even though more people were “Talking About” Coca-cola during October, in terms of other engagement metrics is appears as though Pepsi has the advantage:

Pepsi has an average engagement rate of 0.06% versus Coca-Cola’s 0.04%.  What’s more,  Pepsi has a total of 180,050 interactions (posts and comments) to Coca-Cola’s 117,964, again proving their higher engagement levels. Part of the reason behind this is that Pepsi used a lot of pictures and images to engage with its audience during October, rather than just links and text, thereby helping to generate a lot of interactions with the page.

Also, throughout October, Coca-cola made 21 posts, while Pepsi bordered on almost three times the activity with 53 posts, often posting twice daily. Updating and refreshing content on a regular basis is likely to have helped with Pepsi’s engagement rate.

So it seems that although Coca-cola has the more ‘famous’ Facebook page, with by far the most number of fans, in terms of engagement during October it seems that Pepsi is the winner.

It would be interesting to track this trend over a longer period of time than just a month to get a real understanding of the levels of engagement on each page.

Kabbee is a mobile app-based service on both Android and iOS that allows Londoners (at present, other cities to come soon, as well as black cabs) to book minicabs on their smartphone from wherever they are in the city. It boasts a massive database of over 4000 minicab drivers from 60 fleets, all of who go through a process of being accredited in order to be given access to the users who need transportation, which essentially makes Kabbee a middle-man to get you a minicab that you can trust quickly.

This isn’t, of course, the first time that a minicab service has ventured into the mobile app market. There are similar apps available to people in the USA, and Addison Lee also has a well-known app that allows you access to their (huge) fleet from the comfort of your touch screen.

Kabbee, however, is slightly different to the others. It is a fully serviced suite that allows you (crucially) to pre-load your account with cash so that you can pay for a cab even when you’ve spent all your paper money, as well as compare minicab prices and then rate the journey when you’re done. Not only does it make getting a minicab easier if you’re in a part of London that you don’t know well, but it also introduces an element of healthy competition between the minicab services that was hitherto non existent.

Where’s the ‘social’?

A friend of mine recently asked for some app recommendations for their new iPhone on Twitter, where I then pointed them in the direction of Kabbee. Not too long after this I received the following tweet:

This is impressive for more than one reason; I have used the service to compare prices previously but didn’t actually create an account, so not only have they turned me into a brand evangelist (I really am impressed with their proactive approach here) but they’ve also made me sign up in order to get my reward.

This is a great example of how social media monitoring and small gestures of appreciation to vocal people can grow a pool of evangelists for a brand that is, for all intents and purposes, pretty unknown.

When you’re a new company, this is the kind of work that really helps grow your core audience early on – it’s all about positive word of mouth from the outset.

To celebrate the launch of their new AW11 Collection, Ted Baker recently ran a new social media  campaign entitled ‘It’s Rutting Season’.

Customers were invited to visit the Ted Baker stores in Glasgow, Manchester and London on particular dates in order to have the chance to ‘strut their rutt’ in store. This involved having their photo taken in a magical woodland setting whilst wearing a nicely designed deer mask.

The photos were then uploaded to Ted Baker’s custom-made Facebook app where fans could share them with friends and vote for the “most adorable Doe and dominant Stag from each city’s herd”. The winner was rewarded with a £500 Ted Baker shopping spree.

Successful elements of “It’s Rutting Season” include:

Connecting online with the in-store experience

Ted Baker obviously  put a lot of effort into making sure the “It’s Rutting Season” campaign delivered a fun, in-store experience. The setting, masks and Instagram filters gave customers an easy way to create some highly shareable, magical-looking images.

Creating a dedicated Facebook App

‘It’s Rutting Season’ had its own dedicated tab on the Ted Baker page on Facebook. This made the campaign easy to find, as well as giving  Ted Baker a well-branded space in which to display the photos. Creating their own app also ensured that Ted Baker was operating within Facebook competition guidelines while still giving them the freedom to make the app look and feel on-brand.

Blogger outreach

Any good social media management team will tell you that in order to make a campaign successful you can’t just wait for online coverage to come to you. Ted Baker’s solution to this was to get key fashion bloggers involved by inviting them to be the official in-store photographers for the ‘Rutting Season’ event.

Ted Baker invited  Les Garcon des Glasgow, Sara Luxe and Mademoiselle Robot to participate, which increased their chance of coverage in the fashion blogs. For the London event, Ted Baker invited Mike Kus (who took over Burberry’s Instagram account for London Fashion Week) to take some behind-the-scenes snaps to share with his 124,157 followers on Instagram – a smart move.

So what could have been improved?

Whilst the app was visually attractive and easy to use, it took a long time to load. Participants were invited to claim their photos and share them with their friends in order to generate votes, ensuring a certain amount buzz. However, once in the app, when fans ‘liked’ a photo, this was not shared back into the news feed or ticker on Facebook. This seems like a lost opportunity for reaching a larger audience on Facebook.

After a cursory search on Twitter and various blogs, it would appear that despite their outreach efforts, Ted Baker didn’t achieve an extensive amount of coverage online, so their social media management and outreach programme could probably have been developed further.

Despite these points, this was a fun campaign and it’s great to see brands engaging with online influencers in order to support their social media activity.

Here at FreshNetworks we’ve always argued that engagement is a much more interesting metric than popularity, which is why we’re big fans of Socialbaker’s Engagement Analytics tool, as it provides granular information on a variety of  Facebook related engagement statistics.

We used Socialbakers to compare two large rival Facebook pages (both are approaching 2 million fans) for two similar consumer products – Unilever’s AXE and P&G‘s  Old Spice – in order to test the tool and compare the different strategies employed by each brand during September.

1. Content strategies

A comparison of both AXE and Old Spice Facebook walls show the different content strategies that the brands are using:

AXE’s landing page is their ‘Premature Perspiration’ tab, which plays a video and links to an app, which certainly diverts fans from their wall.

Clicking through to AXE’s wall displays all posts, meaning that a first time visitor is unlikely to see any of the brand’s posted content; this is bound to be detrimental to engagement levels.

Old Spice, on the other hand, give priority to their own posts. This not only means their latest post is always prominent, but so too are older ones, making them “stickier” in the eyes of a visitor. Old Spice have clearly worked with their recognisable tone of voice of the “Old Spice Guy”, which is reflected in the nature of their updates. AXE’s updates are much more eclectic, designed and intended for a specific young, male audience.

Winner: Old Spice

2. Post frequency and variety

Aside from the different ways of displaying their walls, AXE and Old Spice have a pronounced difference in terms of how often they post, and what types of content they share.

Throughout September, Old Spice made 20 posts, while AXE bordered on three times as much activity with 54 posts, often posting twice daily.

In terms of the breakdown of content, Old Spice made 16 text updates, 2 links and 2 videos (Socialbakers analysed all videos for both pages as “links”).

AXE on the other hand, has a much broader approach with 42 photo updates (including albums), followed by 7 videos, 3 links, 1 poll and just 1 text update.

Winner: AXE

3. Engagement

At a first glance, you would imagine the variety of updates posted by AXE to offers deeper engagement, yet this is not reflected in Socialbakers’ calculation as it takes into account the number of posts being made.

By posting less frequently, and drawing more attention to their posts, Old Spice are able to leverage a greater rate of engagement from a lower amount of posts.

Winner: Old Spice

4. Response rates

While Old Spice is able to remain highly engaging, it is significantly weaker than AXE when it comes to responding to fans.  AXE’s two community managers, Dan and Laura, sign off each post personally and even appear in various photos and videos. This gives fans an opportunity for a dialogue with real people, whereas Old Spice posts remain in the tone of voice of the Old Spice Guy and are rarely followed up.

Old Spice are clearly successful with their ongoing use of the Old Spice Guy’s persona, while AXE has two real people acting as the contact point for the fans. It could be argued that Old Spice’s engagement is mostly passive, while AXE has actual interaction between their fans and community managers.

Winner: AXE

Conclusions

It’s  not simple to say that one page is superior to the other.  Old Spice is way ahead of Axe in terms of engagement, but according to Socialbakers’ metrics (in the table to the right) they are not doing anything exceptional.

What is clear, though, is that merely looking at the prominent numbers on a Facebook page will not give much information as to its effectiveness.