Retail Goes Social, Should You?

The easy answer is yes. Social Media isn't really optional.

It doesn’t matter what the demographics of your customers are. It doesn’t matter what industry you’re in. Your customers and prospects are talking about you online. Your company needs to be part of that conversation. Today.

eMarketer has yet another interesting report that shows the top 30 retailers in the US and where they're maintaining pages on social sites. Facebook is the most popular with Myspace and YouTube not far behind.

A quote from Adam Cohen from Rosetta:

“It’s important that retailers don’t just slap up a page because everyone is talking about Facebook. An effective presence requires that you carefully consider what your customers are looking for, what you would like to communicate, and what role a fan page should play in your overall online strategy.”

I would suggest really focusing on the first two items.

1. What are your customers looking for?
   
2. What are you trying to communicate?
   

I think those will then help to answer the role that a Facebook Fan page will play in your online strategy, if at all. Check out what some of the retailers listed below are doing on Facebook:


I checked out the Ambercrombie & Fitch page. You'll see that 4 different results come up. I have no idea which is the offical page, if any are even an offical page. None of them particularly say anything about the company. Amazon uses it as a blog aggregator. MTV is also another one that's kind of hard to tell which is the official fan page. Though once you click through you can find where they've added RSS feeds of their shows and added music vides (wait, music videos on MTV?!) None of these seems to answer the two questions clearly.

Ok so who's doing it right? Take a look at American Eagle's page. Right now there's a 20% off coupon. What are their customers looking for? Clothes. How can you communicate that? By offering a coupon to get them to come into the store or go online and purchase. And the role of the fan page? To provide a way for 113,739 people interested in American Eagle products to easily access discounts and information their clothing line.

I think Cohen is really right though. With social media you can't just slap something up there anymore just because everyone else is. At the same time there's a challenge to not overthink social media. "It’s not about the tools, it’s about what the tools allow you to do, which is share and connect." As Lisa quotes from Mack Collier. How can your message connect with others whether it's potential candidates or consumers?

Oh and Facebook isn't the only way to connect. Check out this amazing list of different companies and their social media presence online to give you ideas. (hat tip Rachel Happe) And how to measure success? Well, it just depends on what you want to accomplish. But for an example, here's how Carnival Cruises measured their social media success. (Hat tip Lyell Peterson)