The Column
Ann Summers is experiencing massive growth on social media platforms and here Katie Byrne, the company’s PR & social media manager, provides a little insight into how this has been achieved...
Social media and erotica
Social Media and Sex. Talking about this outside of the industry is always challenging and within the past year we have continued to test water - focusing on our key social media platforms: Facebook and Twitter. Let’s face it; these are the two powerhouses when it comes to talking to your customer, shaping your brand and engaging with key opinion formers in a domain that actually works for the consumer. With a combined force of more than 900m users on Facebook and 140m on Twitter, social media is a storm that doesn’t look like slowing down anytime soon. So where does that leave us?
For Ann Summers, our Facebook fans are highly engaged, extremely passionate and very keen to talk about everything - from what is in the news, to relationships and how they spent their weekend. But how do we measure and define what makes our social media engagement successful? The number of likes? The responses per post? Page shares? Sales?
With the content we want to discuss we faced a number of challenges: focusing on a male and female audience, engaging all age groups - we have a wide customer base and how far we can push the boundaries of conversation on our posts. Discussing cock rings is a no-go area - both with Facebook and our customer - anything too overtly product focused turns our audience away and we have found that topical debate, news stories and asking opinions on certain subjects really get the crowd going. The “Samantha Brick” conversation riled our fans so much that it gained one of the highest spikes in engagement and shares for the month. But is it considered ‘on brand?’
Integrated marketing campaigns and well-thought out conversation to spark debate is definitely the way forward - not only for us but for other brands looking to grow within the social media market. An independent digital strategy analysis* highlights the social media power brands ‘top 20’ annually and as expected, Topshop, ASOS, Tesco and Marks and Spencer are within the top 10. However, for the first time in 2012, Ann Summers leapt 36 places and came in at number 18.
Our percentage growth for followers and 56
engagement was a huge 1203% - leading us to the top of the growth table and outstripping the next place who stood at 672%. Our objectives for success are clear: keep it simple. We don’t bombard our fans with posts; we change the content between Twitter and Facebook; we rarely link to product or promotions and we stick to a format of topical, brand and reactive messaging. So far, so good. However, with engagement comes opinion and we are not without issues surrounding users who will target our pages in a negative way - it does happen and it is our job, as a responsible retailer, to respond swiftly. We have a responsibility as a brand and to our customers to ensure we subscribe to best practice and exert the authority the customer expects from us. Our brand and industry can often polarise opinion and actually, we wouldn’t have it any other way. However, when encouraging conversations and enforcing Facebook and Ann Summers rules/codes of conduct, it can limit our capacity for conversation. We are still learning and testing what works and measuring these results in a number of different ways is motivating us to do better for our consumer. We have a very high level of trust from our customers and they expect nothing less - especially when they are coming to us for advice and expertise on sex toys. With social media more accessible than ever and our levels of engagement increasing week on week, we are on the journey with our customer and building on this brand advocacy via every medium is crucial to the continued success of social media for our brand.
The Social Media Benchmark results are a great way for us to learn and understand what works - it also helps us to understand how other multi-channel retailers function in an area which is being considered a channel within its own right more and more. As a brand we are keen to add to our social media networks and test out other platforms - Tumblr, Pinterest, Google+ and we will keep you posted. Want to discuss this - well what better way than @AnnSummersPR?
*Results extracted from the April 2012 report by Digital Strategy Consulting
Erotic Trade Only June 2012
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