Spotlight Products

Learning Outcomes

Use social media to spotlight products

Many of the themes covered in the recent pages are similar: we work to use real, compelling, and authentic narratives to promote interest in our organization or a given product or service, or to increase interaction with and between customers.

The key questions to consider:

  1. Is the message or post authentic?
  2. How easy have they made it to interact?

Netflix

In Figure 1, Netflix leverages their data analytics for viewership to make a tongue-in-cheek exchange:

Note that this single tweet was liked over 450k times, and retweeted/shared over 115k times! This Tempesta Media blog post discusses using humor to drive social media interest. Humor is an effective way to reveal the “story” of your brand, or in other words, the human side of your business.

Netflix also takes advantage of multimedia in this tweet spotlighting their new Facebook service, Recomoji, which sends users recommendations based on the emjois you send.

Kohl’s

Another good example is Kohls’ Instagram feed. In their feed, they highlight outfits of the day (using the #ootd hashtag to up their visibility by non-followers). Not only do they put together a cute look using items that can be found in their stores, but they also use these posts to highlight savings available in stores.

https://www.instagram.com/p/Blax_XrnpNJ/?utm_source=ig_web_copy_link

Beyond their #ootd posts and other product posts, Kohl’s spotlights customers and looks that their customers have purchased at the store, giving followers someone to relate to.

Recall that “the human side” of the business was something recommended in one of our previous pages on authenticity. In years past, advertisers used to argue that a brand should create a fictional “perfect” image. The famous Marlboro Man suggested that those who smoked Marlboro would take on the tough and macho air of the man himself.

The compelling story was not necessarily about being authentic but rather about being delivered from (maybe) a dreary life into something exciting and adventurous. But the Marlboro Man is not subtle or real enough for today’s wiser, media-saturated consumers. They want reality but expressed in engaging and fun ways; in short, they want humor.

The most effective tweets play on a simple and authentic interaction around core pieces of a company’s brand.

Practice Question