Walmart Rules Back to School, Earns Most Mentions on Facebook & Twitter

Social media mar­ket­ing is an increas­ing­ly impor­tant part of con­sumer pur­chase fun­nels, and can be a pow­er­ful way to raise aware­ness dur­ing cru­cial sea­sons of the mar­ket­ing cal­en­dar. A new Engagor study has exam­ined the per­for­mance of a num­ber of brands on...

Pat Hong By Pat Hong from Linkdex. Join the discussion » 0 comments

Social media mar­ket­ing is an increas­ing­ly impor­tant part of con­sumer pur­chase fun­nels, and can be a pow­er­ful way to raise aware­ness dur­ing cru­cial sea­sons of the mar­ket­ing cal­en­dar. A new Engagor study has exam­ined the per­for­mance of a num­ber of brands on social media dur­ing the ‘back to school’ sea­son. How are the best brands con­duct­ing cam­paigns to raise aware­ness about their prod­ucts on social media?


An increas­ing­ly impor­tant part of the sum­mer mar­ket­ing cal­en­dar is August’s ‘Back to School’ con­tent and social media ini­tia­tives. Accord­ing to the Nation­al Retail Fed­er­a­tion, fam­i­lies are expect­ed to spend $74.9 bil­lion on back to school sup­plies and equip­ment in 2014, a fig­ure that rep­re­sents a 5 per­cent rise from 2013 spend­ing. This year, the aver­age fam­i­ly with chil­dren in grades K‑12 is expect­ed to spend $669.28, on appar­el, shoes, sup­plies, and elec­tron­ics.

Social media mar­ket­ing has proved to be a valu­able part of sea­son­al brand cam­paigns and a new study from social media ana­lyt­ics plat­form Engagor has revealed that Wal­mart was the best per­form­ing brand on social media for the lat­est back to school peri­od. With 232,210 men­tions, the U.S. retail giant led the social chat­ter fol­lowed close­ly by Kohl’s, with 200,899 men­tions. Tar­get, JCPen­ney, Sta­ples, Old Navy, and Office Depot also co-ordi­nat­ed suc­cess­ful cam­paigns.

As well as this, Wal­mart was also the most engaged retail­er of the brands includ­ed in Engagor’s study, respond­ing to com­ments 2,625 times, and the quick­est to respond, tak­ing an aver­age of 33 min­utes to answer con­sumer ques­tions.

You can see a visu­al rep­re­sen­ta­tion of the key find­ings of Engagor’s study in the info­graph­ic below:

The Merits of Social Media Marketing

An impor­tant aspect of social media mar­ket­ing, par­tic­u­lar in rela­tion to back to school cam­paigns, is the sus­tained lev­el of engage­ment that con­sumers expe­ri­ence as they view brand­ed posts and browse updates and offers in their feeds.

Con­sumers today are extreme­ly savvy in the way of dis­cov­er­ing avail­able offers, and are pre­pared to stag­ger their spend­ing await­ing the best pos­si­ble deals. As report­ed on Retail Touch­Points, Pam Good­fel­low, Prin­ci­pal Ana­lyst and Con­sumer Insights Direc­tor at Pros­per Insights & Ana­lyt­ics spoke of how “there’s not a mind­set now where con­sumers feel the need to make one giant pur­chase… It’s eas­i­er for them to buy a few things dur­ing back-to-school and then pur­chase more items through­out the year. Con­sumers also know dis­counts are com­ing and there’s no incen­tive to spend more [now].”

Saman­tha Polak, writ­ing in the the same arti­cle, went on to explain that “retail­ers can get in front of back-to-school shop­pers through­out the extend­ed sea­son by break­ing it down into seg­ments and tai­lor­ing mes­sages based on what par­ents and stu­dents are think­ing about at each stage”.

In many ways, social media mar­ket­ing offers a per­fect oppor­tu­ni­ty for brands to main­tain a con­sis­tent, per­son­al­ized lev­el of mes­sag­ing which goes some way to explain the suc­cess of back to school cam­paigns on the chan­nel.

This arti­cle first appeared on the Linkdex blog.


Have you seen any great exam­ples of brands doing social media mar­ket­ing?

Pat Hong

Written by Pat Hong

Editor at Linkdex/Inked, Linkdex

Pat covers the SEO industry, digital marketing trends, and anything and everything around Linkdex. He also authors Linkdex's data analysis and reports, analysing the state of search in various industries.

Inked is published by Linkdex, the SEO platform of choice for professional marketers.

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