Social Media Case Study

Social media has the power to reach millions of consumers, and marketers are clamoring to use the tactic. But the first step is to identify your objectives, followed by learning how to leverage the medium.

Epsilon used its social listening strategy to help one large retail client gain insight to fuel consumer engagement and other social media conversations around the brand. The Epsilon team performed a social media analysis to assess the retailer's Web presence. Further, it tracked the "tone" of conversations about the retailer on the Web.

After identifying media sources where consumers were "talking" about the retailer, Epsilon appended data for 1 million email records and found the following:

• 77.8% of consumers have active internet profile
• There was an average of 1.6 profiles per guest
• 30% of consumers had a MySpace profile and 21.7% had a public Facebook page.
• About 14.2% of consumers had a LinkedIn page and 5.9% had a Twitter account.

With this knowledge, the retailer revived a contest it designed to persuade fans follow the brand on Twitter. Since the contest didn't elicit much of a response on the company Web site and help the campaign spread virally quickly, the retailer created a catchy subject line and sent an email out to 750,000 of its matched guests. As a result, the brand's Twitter follower base grew 40% in one day following the email.

The Next Steps

Executives understand the importance social media plays in their marketing mix. To be successful, the retailer needs to use that insight to claim a larger stake in the digital world by:

• Enhancing customer profiles through a new stream of data: append data via a third-party and build a method to link social profiles to existing guest records and email addresses.
• Identifying current content streams that play to social sharing; newness, contests and deals.
• Highlighting actionable marketing opportunities for the retailer based on social network activity around the brand.