80 percent of social media users prefer to connect with brands through Facebook, with 42% of brands asserting that Facebook is critical to their marketing strategy. (source:Hubspot)
These numbers shouldn’t shock you, it’s the way business is being done today.
It is clear that Facebook is still continuing to grow their reach and expand their borders as a preferred marketing vehicle for brands online, but with so many social networks, and hundreds of thousands of blogs telling you to “post relative content on Facebook” how do you possibly attempt to keep coming up with fresh ideas with a connection to your own brand?
For the past few weeks we have looked at a number of brands doing a great job to break through the noise on Facebook to illustrate the way many brands are breaking through the clutter. This week we have three more posts to examine. It is our goal that through these examples, you can extract the little nuances which illuminate these brands, and apply them to your own marketing.
Social Fresh uses Expion to monitor the most engaging posts from the past week on Facebook. Out of all the big brands we monitor, we call out at least three Fresh Facebook Posts to feature here.
1. Saks Fifth Avenue
As the winter months hit, Saks has clearly put themselves in the mind of their customer. While the snow begins to fall on the East Coast, nothing invokes warm, fuzzy thoughts, like some warm, fuzzy boots and a hot cocoa. Using seasonality to connect with your customers is definitely a meaningful way to build relationships online, especially on Facebook.
It’s easy to throw up a photo of snowflakes, snowmen, snowglobes…really snow anything…but it takes a lot more effort to actually think about the types of fashions your customers are wearing, or even deeper, the actions they take while discovering your products (hence, the cocoa).
The last thing to note about this post is that Saks has included their logo in the top-left corner to maximize the branded impact of impressions they achieve as a result of sharing.
2. Target
Target is all about integrating into pop culture for their marketing. With so many brands, there are many ways they can go to illustrate their one-stop shopping experience for folks, especially during the holiday season.
Going back as far as I can remember when I think Target, I see their dog Bullseye exploring a magical world of different brands from TV commercials. Bringing that into Facebook, this week they have tapped the Christmas story, The Elf on the Shelf, to highlight their holiday decorating this week.
In case you have been living under a ton of humbug, the Elf on the Shelf is a popular children’s story where one of Santa’s elves causes mischief during Christmas. By tapping into this story, they’re inviting families (read: moms) into sharing their own stories about the book, but also encouraging them to create new experiences with their family by discovering the story themselves.
3. Jeep
Sometimes your community is the best source of content. In this case we’ll look at the Jeepnation.
I lived in Daytona Beach for a while and had the privilege to see a “Jeep Beach” event, a massive gathering of thousands of Jeep enthusiasts hanging out together, partying on the beach and comparing their rides. Their loyalty to the product is insane, and Jeep has realized this over time by creating more and more resources for Jeep lovers to come together and celebrate this shared attitude.
Creating a “Mod Monday” event on Facebook offers people the chance to see fan photos from around the globe, compare them to their own cars, in addition to creating a reason for people to come back week after week.
If you’re just a casual fan, you’ll want to check out the crazy modifications Jeep owners have done to their vehicles (as seen above). If you’re an owner, you’re going to want to submit a photo to test your moxy against your fellow hardcore Jeep modder.
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Maybe there’s an underlying community your brand can tap into, maybe it’s a special event people attach to your brand once a year. Any way you slice it, the most effective Facebook posts are relevant to both the season, and the brand identity, as you can see in the posts above.
Dive into your people, not your posts, and pull out those personality traits of your audience that really exemplify the brand spirit. Create reasons to highlight those more often and you begin to establish a more pure connection with your customers.
Data provided by Expion, a social software company. Expion provides scalable enterprise-grade software to listen, content plan, publish, moderate, analyze, govern and share content on Facebook and other social channels across thousands of users.