I often talk about how important having a solid social media presence is. Today, I’m going to prove it. We’re going to look at one of our clients, a book retailer, to see how a successful social media strategy has improved their presence. This client has store locations across the country and wanted to create a unified corporate presence on Facebook. All locations have their own Facebook page run by individual store managers, but they wanted to bring a more united front to their company. That’s where we came in.
Through Store Locations, we connected all individual stores to the primary corporate page. For those unfamiliar with Store Locations, this functionality allows an Admin on the main page to access all connected pages. This is useful when store managers leave and a new admin needs to be added, or when boosting a post for a flash sale on a specific page. Since we have access at the corporate level, we can also control anything on the individual pages.
Before we took over social media for this client, they posted once every few months. We publish three times weekly, showing off great displays from stores, honing in on every applicable national day, and giving shoutouts to stores and specific employees. Their organic reach increased dramatically, with organic views at more than 50,000 people.
When we started working with this client in October 2020, they had over 1,500 followers. Today, they have 2,321 – that is a 48% increase. While we know that followers aren’t everything today, they are significant. The larger your following, the more people you reach – it’s that simple. As a retailer, a more extensive reach means more customers, and more customers indicate more sales. Showing a follower increase of nearly 50% in just over one year is a real accomplishment.
On top of the follower increase, we also saw incredible reach, impressions, engagements, reactions, and shares. Their engagements increased by 4,783% in the last year alone. In 2022, engagements are considered a more effective metric than followers. Again, followers are important, but knowing that your followers are engaging with your brand is what makes it successful. We count engagements as anything that makes the customer engage with your brand (hence the name) – this can be a comment, like, love or other reaction, or a share. These metrics are essential because the more you see these, particularly shares and comments, the more your post spreads to your followers’ friends and followers, too.
As social media is not a one size fits all type of marketing, it’s so important to know how to appeal to your target audience. This piece of the puzzle is critical for a successful social media strategy. This client, in particular, has seen massive growth on social media. Their unified presence has helped create a cohesive brand instead of each store posing as a separate identity. Our unified social media strategy enabled us to take this company into 2022, and we can’t wait to see where they go from here.
