FreshNetworks Blog

They’re two of the most iconic department stores in New York, but just how well are Saks Fifth Avenue and Barneys using social media? We used Social Bakers to take a look at these two US retail giants and see whether they are making the most of their brands online.

Despite being a mere ten minute walk down the street from each other, Barneys and Saks are already miles apart when it comes to Facebook fans. Whilst Saks has a healthy 288,000 fans, Barney’s has almost half with 162,000.

But as we all know, it’s not just about how many ‘likes’ you’ve got but what you do with them that counts. In the battle of the department stores, who is really engaging with their customers in social media?

If we take a look at the ‘talking about this’ numbers for the two pages, Barney’s has 3,610 whilst Saks has 3,607, despite the greater number of fans. This suggests that Barneys must have a well thought-out content strategy which engages its audience much more effectively than Saks.

So what is this content strategy and how could Saks learn from it?

Think about when you post your content

First of all, looking at the data from Social Bakers, Barneys gets its best rate of engagement between 8-9am in the morning, whereas Saks gets a good (but not as high) rate around lunchtime.

Barneys also has a nice increase in engagement at around 9pm, whereas engagement on the Saks page has generally tailed off by this time.

This suggests that Barneys are making the most of those pre- and post-work Facebookers by posting earlier in the morning and later in the day. As we all know, social media never sleeps, but it looks like Saks may not have got to grips with this fact as strongly as Barneys has. Even if your staff work 9-5, they should be using the right tools to ensure that the page is pushing out content at the best times for your audience.

Think about what type of content you post

Interestingly, it looks like Barneys almost exclusively post links on their Facebook page. They create a strong call-to-action by posting links to great items in their stores with short, punchy copy such as “Flirty. Feminine. Floral”. It invites the fan to read, agree and hit those ‘like’ buttons, leading to an engagement rate of 0.06% on links compared to Saks’ 0.03% rate.

In contrast, Saks Fifth Avenue posts more varied types of content. Their main focus appears to be photos which are often posted using their ‘Involver’ fanpage tool. These photos don’t appear very big on their timeline, but still seem to get their highest rate of engagement with content on the page with 0.06% of fans interacting with these. However, they still do not manage to outstrip Barneys with any types of content.

It may be that Saks need to look at how their audience is responding to their content. Community management requires constant analysis of how your posts are going down with your audience – if something works well, it makes sense to experiment with posting it more often. Similarly, if something is not working for your fans, it may be worth looking at changing your approach or posting more infrequently.

Keep it short and simple

It is worth taking a moment to look at Barneys’ impressive 0.14% engagement rate on their status updates. Both pages post status updates, so why are fans interacting with Barneys more than with Saks? Have a read of the following updates and think about which one you are more likely to like or comment on…

It’s important to remember that Facebook fans have a notoriously short attention spans, so instead of asking them to try and figure out the sentence and fill in multiple blanks, Saks should be asking more short, simple questions like the one from Barneys.

You may’ve heard that supermarket behemoth Tesco has signed up for Foodie.fm – a service which has been dubbed by its backers as “the Facebook for grocers”.

Launched by technology firm Digital Foodie, Foodie.fm claims to be the first social network to offer a social shopping platform for grocers via a fully integrated checkout with www.tesco.com.

Having purchased social media company BzzAgent back in May last year,Tesco is certainly not shy about using social media as part of its wider business strategy, and their partnership with Foodie.fm looks like another way of embracing multichannel more effectively.

Foodie.fm, available as free app on iPhone, Android and Nokia applications, as well as via the Web and Facebook, enables users to make friends with other food lovers and to swap cooking tips and recipes. Visitors can create an editable shopping list, based around a meal, by clicking on photos of recipes. For example, if a user was to click on the recipe for beef burgers, the shopping list would consist of  mince meat, onions, salt, etc.

The Foodie.fm site then checks availability with Tesco before the order is placed, the customer pays and delivery is arranged.

At the core of Foodie.fm is a recommendation system that learns from a user’s eating and purchasing habits, and suggests recipes and groceries that match his or her ‘taste profile’. The system takes into account personal preferences like food allergies or intolerance, as well as any budgetary restrictions. This enables users to personalise their profile and allows the site to suggest recipes and groceries to match customer profiles. It is this customised shopping list that will help the consumer plan and budget for a week, or even month’s worth of meals, and the shopping that is needed for it, in one go.

Until now, food retailers and consumer packaged goods were somewhat sheltered from the toughening economy, with 40% of people spending more on groceries than 3 months ago (according to Deloitte) – a result not just determined by inflation, but the fact that the tough current economy means that people spending are more time at home cooking for themselves rather than eating out in bars and restaurants.

However, as Deloitte has pointed out in their recent Consumer Review,  40% of the value of all transactions in non-food retail are now digitally influenced, and it’s hard to believe this influence will not impact food and consumer packaged goods too moving forward.

With this in mind, food retailers would do well to explore options like Tesco’s partnership with Foodie.fm. Given the rise of the connected customer, retailers should look at strategies for integrating social and multichannel into their offering, and should look at ways at becoming an agile and fully engaged social business.

A new report by Boston Consulting Group (BCG) claims that China could become the world’s most valuable e-commerce market within four years.

BCG claim that for the foreseeable future another 30 million Chinese people will go online to shop for the first time and by 2015 they will each be spending $1,000 a year—about what Americans spend online now.

BCG has also calculated that e-commerce could rise from 3.3% of China’s retail sales today to 7.4% by 2015. This is not just because the government subsidised high speed internet aids online shopping, but also because China’s has an expensive, inefficient ‘bricks-and-mortar‘ retail ecosystem and so a quarter of Chinese shoppers seek products online because they are not physically available in-store.

The rise in value of  e-commerce in China could also impact the social commerce market as Chinese e-shoppers are big users of social media.

As Chinese shoppers are somewhat reticent to trust sellers or advertising messages they turn to online customer reviews to form their opinions and according to BCG, over 40% of Chinese online shoppers read and post product reviews online. This is twice as likely as American online shoppers and four times as likely as Indians.

So what should retailers do to take advantage of the growing social and e-commerce market space in China?

Aside from considering the value of an e-commerce presence in Chinese, brands would do well to secure their presence on sites like Sina Weibo – a Chinese social networking site with over 200 million registered users – or other Chinese social networking sites like Tencent WeiBo or Ren Ren.

Retailers may also want to think about how to start engaging Chinese audiences online, not just in terms of where to engage them, but how to engage them in the context of a wider brand and social media strategy.

And as China is accountable for a large share of  share of mobile social media revenue at the moment, it seems that China could lead to some interesting new online revenue streams in terms of both e-commere and social commerce, as well as mobile shopping.

You can read the full BCG report here.

Today sees the US-based launch of Mashalot –  a site that has been termed as the “the first online marketplace embedded in social media”.

Launched in beta today in Minneapolis St Paul, the plan is to launch Mashalot nationally in early March 2012 at the South by Southwest festival in Austin, Texas.

Fully integrated with Facebook, Mashalot helps businesses grow their fan base while allowing consumers to leverage their own social networks (Facebook in essence) to save money on products and services.

Aimed at businesses who want to cut their spend on advertising, or small businesses with limited advertising spend but a real need to drive word of mouth to build their customer base, Mashalot works by encouraging consumers (or “Mashers” as they are known) to use their social media influence to gain special pricing from participating Mashalot businesses.  ”Mega-Mashers” are those who gain followers and can greatly influence pricing and promotions within the Mashalot marketplace.

A transaction in the marketplace is called a “Mash”. Mashes can be created by a business transaction that drives specific promotions, or with a consumer-driven price request from an individual or group of Mashers. Mashers may also request a competitive “Mash Your Price” from non-participating businesses; the business will then be contacted by Mashalot who will try to negotiate the transaction.

The Mashalot platform also allows businesses to advertise and each  ad is available for five days. All promotions are pre-approved to meet Mashalot advertising guidelines. Businesses are charged no upfront fee to participate in Mashalot and revenue for the company is 100% commission-based.

Several Minneapolis-St Paul have already signed up to Mashalot, including restaurants, hotels and a local car dealership.

Having had a quick look around the site, it definitely still feels as though Mashalot is still in beta stage, as it’s quite sparse in terms of content and users. As a social commerce platform that claims to be fully integrated with Facebook’s social graph, while also using the group buying and influencers concept of other social media, it will be interesting to see if Mashalot can take off when rolled out nationally and then internationally.

Either way, Mashalot may be of interest, as a concept if nothing else,  for retailers who are trying to use multichannel effectively.

Image courtesy of shutterstock

A new report from Juniper Research has found that an increase in social gaming will push the global market for virtual goods bought from mobile social media services from $3 billion this year to $4.6 billion by 2016.

While this increase is largely attributed to a sharp rise in smartphone adoption, it’s interesting to note is that  sales of virtual goods via mobile platforms are really  flourishing in Japan and China.

This is not really that surprising though, given that  Chinese social gaming companies like  Happy Elements has the ability to raise millions of dollars in funding to not only expand their reach in Asia, but also bring their social games to western markets.

Social gaming can benefit brands in a number of ways and increasing tablet usage is expected to provide further growth in the social gaming market, particularly in the west,  as tablets offer a significantly better user experience for social gaming than smartphones.

However, any brand looking to invest in social virtual goods should be aware of app store payments in the likes of Apple App Store,  Android Market and BlackBerry App World. Any company wishing to sell virtual goods from within their own app risk losing a whopping 30% of the payment value to the app store.

So while virtual goods provide a way of monetising mobile social media and social gaming, brands need to find a way to avoid app stores taking a slice of their revenue.

Other key findings from Juniper’s report include:

• The spend on advertising targeted at tablets is expected to account for almost half of total mobile social media advertising spend by 2016.
• The Far East & China will continue to account for the biggest share of mobile social media revenues, followed by North America.