tweet a coffee campaign

Social Media Campaign Realities

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You may have heard about the new data released by IBM, suggesting that social media barely drives 1% of e-commerce sales. It’s disheartening, but not necessarily an indication of the medium’s merit. Perhaps it’s an indication of the measurement system & social media campaign strategies being used at large?
Let’s take for example the recent Starbucks tweet-a-coffee campaign. The campaign embraces several key factors:

  1. Sharing; You can’t directly benefit, but your friends can, (you may benefit reciprocally) providing a strong incentive to share.
  2. Customer behaviour; Whilst there’s always a portion of people that buy just the one coffee and leave, most people buy other products too. The campaign doesn’t force cross & up-sells, but takes advantage of the broad understanding of client behaviour.
  3. Altruism; giving things away is perceived as a good thing to do, especially when it’s tied in to a cause. As Richard Branson writes “quote here on brand value”, you are your brand, and you need constant positive brand reinforcement.

Tweet A Coffee   Starbucks Coffee Company

 

It’s a social media based strategy, that positively benefits your branding and provides trackable (account creation & spend) results. Whilst I’m not privy to the success of the strategy, I’m confident more than a few people have been sending their friends coupons.

The “inherently social” or “designed to share” component is what makes the campaign successful on Social Media. If you have an app or a product that provides any type of interesting data, allow your users to share it! It makes your product more valuable to them, and is a great way for you to promote yourself.

Nobody’s interested in sharing a Starbucks app, or a Starbucks website, but they’re more than happy to share a $5 coupon. Ensure that whatever’s valuable to your users, is easy for them to share (preferably via a social medium).