By Tasha Cunningham
In my column in today’s Miami Herald, we learned a lot about how to avoid the social media mistakes of major brands. While learning from their mistakes is great, we can also learn a great deal from their successes. Here are 3 things major brands did right with their social media that you can use for inspiration!
**1.**Don’t offer blanket discounts using social media. Take a lesson from Starbucks and only offer discounts on products that you want to feature in an effort to improve sales. In 2010, the coffee giant offered free pastries and other goodies for on Tax Day, promoted them through tweets and on Facebook and also offered mayorship deals on Foursquare. The free pastry promotion generated sales for their non-coffee products and the mayorship deals, which were essentially discounts on new products that didn’t have a strong sales track record yet, brought foot traffic in the door to get people to try them.
2. Let customers test drive your products now and tweet about it later. Getting feedback from customers is a critical part of any business. Social media is one of the best ways to communicate with your customers and hear what they think. When you add a new product to your inventory, why not let your customers try it out and document their experience on social media? That’s what Ford did last month when it offered bloggers, social media influencers and customers the opportunity to
test drive the 2014 Fiesta free of charge for six months. One hundred people in all are taking part in the campaign. In return for use of the car, each recipient agrees to produce various types of social media content such as tweets, Facebook posts and videos documenting their experience with the car. As a small business, you can do this on a much smaller scale. For example, if you sell purses, you could let a few lucky customers try out a purse for a month and document their experience on social media.
3. Don’t spam your followers and fans. Take a lesson from Toyota. Their social media strategists learned the hard way that it’s not cool to overwhelm fans and followers with the same message over and over again. During last year’s Super Bowl, Toyota wanted to promote their “Camry Effect a Friend Giveway” on Twitter so instead of simply sending out a message from their established account, they
created multiple accounts such as @CamryEffect and @CamryEffect1. They began using these accounts to spam anyone who added a Super Bowl hashtag to their tweet. Toyota quickly realized
the error of their social media ways and corrected the problem.
MISSED MONDAY'S COLUMN on 5 lessons to heed from social media mistakes? Read it here.