Social media strategy
Published: 19 January, 2012
For many shopping centres, particularly smaller centres that don’t have the resource to dedicate a full-time member of staff to it, social media can seem like a minefield, but with a little knowhow it can provide endless possibilities
Over the next 12 months, Shopping Centre will be publishing a series of articles on various aspects of social media and how best to use them, outlining the options from Facebook, Twitter, Linkedin, Foursquare, Google+ and Tumblr to Smartphone apps, websites, email marketing, text marketing and e-commerce.
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 and its social media counterparts are becoming more and more difficult to ignore. As Socialnomics founder, Eric Qualman said: “We don’t have a choice on whether we do social media, the question is how well we do it.”
A 60-page report published by BCSC in December 2011 entitled Social Media: Do We Really Know What We Are Doing? – based on an online survey of 505 consumers and 84 shopping centre managers – found that many malls are struggling to embrace social media and need to re-examine their approach.
The report shows that shoppers have a low tolerance for brands that put out repetitive sales-led messages on social media and will quickly block or unfollow them. Conversely the vast majority – 86 per cent – of centres’ social media content is promotional material for themselves or retailers. BCSC chief executive Michael Green says: “What this report tells us is we need to take a step back and re-examine our approach to social media. There is a chasm between what kind of messages many of us are putting out there and what people actually want from us.”
The report questions whether enough emphasis is being placed on social media to help shopping centres cement their place in the community and address customer comments and complaints by having an open and honest dialogue with them.
“Be careful not to ignore issues,” Westfield’s digital content manager, Anna Krahn, said at the launch of the report in December. “Responding is one of the most important ways to engage with social media users. It’s as much about customer service and answering shoppers questions as anything.
“Ask people what they want to see,” she advises. “Put on an event and keep the conversation going by sharing videos and photos. The more people share the more engaged they are – look at the amount of people who are talking about something, and if they’re not talking, ask yourself why? You’re not just marketing to them but learning from them. In the past measurement was very much based on the number of ‘likes’. Now, it’s based on sentiment.”
Rhoda Joseph, centre director at the Cascades shopping centre in Portsmouth, agrees: “You’ve got to be able to second guess everything that a customer in a negative frame of mind might do – you have to be listening, watching and responding, a consistent response is highly desirable.”
Despite the pitfalls social media tools can create a real marketing buzz if done properly. “Social media is the fastest way to communicate, and to market your retailers,” said Krahn. “You’re talking to the people who want to hear from and you doing it in their space, rather on relying on them clicking on the website – it’s a way of learning about consumers and telling them things and it’s the future.”
