Social Success Stories - Amazon Web Services

Social Success Stories
Marketing Lessons from Industry Leaders
INTRODUCTION
When it comes to social marketing, some brands seem to have an innate knack for doing it right.
Don’t be fooled; this success did not happen overnight. As the social landscape evolves, the best
brands dedicate time and resources to their social presence. And we know there’s always something
to learn from the best.
To help you optimize your social experience, Awareness Inc. analyzed the top social brands in retail,
services and sports to identify and share their best-in-class strategies for success. We reviewed
their social presence and analyzed the content strategies used by social marketing leaders such as
Converse, Whole Foods, NBA, ESPN, Farmers Insurance, and American Express, on the two most
popular social networks, Facebook and Twitter. We left no strategy unturned – and we share the
answers to the following questions: What do these successful brands post? How often? What kind of
imagery supports their brand? What content makes their audience tune in and take action?
Based on this analysis, we have distilled our findings into actionable best practices that every brand
and marketer can follow to improve their company’s social efforts. After reading this paper, marketers
will be equipped with a new arsenal of best practices to help them achieve and sustain meaningful
relationships with their audience.
BACKGROUND
To crack the code to the leading brands’ social media success, Awareness consulted the rankings
of the most popular brands on The Fan Page List, dubbed as the social media directory of official
accounts of your favorite brands, celebrities, movies, TV shows and sports teams. We focused on
three industry sectors - retail, services and sports - and reviewed the top ten brands in each of those
categories on Facebook and Twitter, using the size of their fan base as a starting point. We then dove
into some of top leaders’ engagement metrics and strategies. For the retail sector we focused on
Converse and Whole Foods, for sports – NBA and ESPN, and for services – Farmers Insurance and
American Express.
When analyzing the engagement for each of the leaders in our three categories, we used two types of
metrics:
Facebook Engagement Ratio:
This is a point in time metric, as the number of people talking about a brand frequently fluctuates.
Twitter Engagement Ratio:
# of people talking about a brand
Total # fans of that brand
Total # of Tweets
Total # followers of that brand
Our analysis for each industry sector starts with a top 10 chart of the most popular brands, with their
total number of fans at the time of this report’s publication, and their engagement ratio for Facebook
and Twitter. We then dig deeper into the marketing practices of specific market leaders by category to
showcase how they use their social profiles, what content they post, and how well they integrate their
social and digital presences.
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