Harnessing the Social Network
Published: 23 February, 2011
Shopping centres are waking up to the power of Facebook and Twitter as communications but they need to be handled with care.
When social networking site Facebook was set up in February 2004, few could have predicted just how influential it would turn out to be. Now with more than 500m active users worldwide and nearly 30m in the UK – half of the population – it’s turned into a global phenomenon along with its microblogging counterpart Twitter.
Social Media can be a great way to communicate with customers and the sheer number of users and mind-boggling statistics make it a platform that’s hard to ignore.
People spend over 700bn minutes per month on Facebook – the average person in the UK spent 6 hours and 10 minutes on the site in June 2010 – and it is the second most popular website in the UK after leading search engine Google.
“Social media offers a unique channel to hold a two-way conversation with your customer. Customers get to hear news and views directly from the brand, and the brand gets to gain real time intelligence around a customer’s viewpoint, their concerns and ultimately, their shopping habits,” says Richard Bailey, central marketing manager at Capital Shopping Centres.
A new platform
The newly-launched Facebook Platform enables companies to integrate with Facebook. There are a number of ways to use Facebook to interact with shoppers from creating a profile for your shopping centre, installing a ‘Like’ button onto your website – easily added with just a few lines of HTML - or making use of Recommendations or an Activity Feed, all helping to drive traffic to your website.
The average Facebook user is connected to 80 community pages, groups and events and every month more than 250 million people engage with Facebook via external websites.
Claire Johnson is marketing manager at Savills. She gives The Victoria shopping centre in Southend as an example of how Facebook can bolster a marketing campaign.
The shopping centre runs a student orientated festival, Summer Sessions, designed to encourage musical talent, with acts voted for by The Victoria’s customers. The centre’s Facebook application – designed at a cost of 7 per cent of the annual marketing budget – registered 39,720 votes.
Similarly, the amount of hits on Greenwich Shopping Park’s own website have doubled since its Facebook page was set up to drive traffic to the site.
And Golden Square shopping centre in Warrington has also used Facebook to drive traffic to Go-Style, its own dedicated fashion website. The website launched Google and Facebook campaigns in the run-up to the Christmas trading period and the results were dramatic – there was a 600 per cent increase in visitors to the site and a 280 per cent increase in database captures.
CSC is also integrating its marketing communications across social media platforms with Facebook or Twitter accounts set up for nine of the centres – Lakeside has 64,922 Facebook fans – and plans to roll out accounts for the remaining centres by Spring 2011.
“We know from customer research, and comments being posted up on our Facebook pages, that shoppers want to hear about ‘inside scoops’,” says Bailey. “These could be a new store coming to a shopping centre near them, some great promotional savings or high-interest and celebrity-led promotional activity in a centre.”
Once your Facebook application is set up there are a number of ways to draw people in including advertising offers, promotions and events and posting photos.
According to Johnson it’s all about building awareness.
“You can put the Facebook symbol on your literature and encourage people to sign up by running a competition,” she says. “It might be that the 100th person to join gets a prize.”
But she warns: “People are still getting used to social networking and older people may not understand how to use it, so you can’t rely on it as the only means of communication. It should be seen as an added tool and complement the existing marketing strategy.”
Monitoring
Another difficulty is monitoring. Often, there’s little or nothing to stop people posting adverse comments on a shopping centre’s Facebook page.
“A negative message can spread very quickly but it is also worth remembering that social media can help a business identify an issue quickly and be able to react in the moment,” says Bailey. “Brands that actually listen to customer feedback and demonstrate a desire to resolve issues will showcase their integrity and commitment to offer quality of service that in the long term will enable them to stand out from the competition.”
According to Savills’ Johnson, there has to be an immediate response.
“There’s an on-going argument of whether you use an external PR company to monitor the comments or whether you do it in-house. The advantage with in-house is that they have 24/7 access because if the page isn’t monitored over the weekend there could be ten negative comments by Monday. That’s the risk factor and it’s one of the main constraints - you have to be consistent and on the ball.”
There are ways around this, for example it’s possible to have comments set-up to go straight through to a mobile phone or email address where it can be viewed and either confirmed and sent to the web page or declined and deleted.
“You also have to be careful to post the right things at the right times to avoid saturation,” advises Johnson. “You have to be creative about it and decide how often is suitable - should it be done once an hour or once a day?”
Bailey admits it takes some fine-tuning. adding: “We know customers want a steady feed of news updates but this needs to be of value - if you bombard them, shoppers will soon stop following you.”
“Facebook has got everybody hooked and I don’t think social networking sites are going to go anywhere,” Johnson concludes. “But there are no rules so it’s a case of trial and error.”
