Retailers Are Using Twitter and Facebook to Reach Their Target Audience.

Facebook and Twitter have become important tools for brand building and -maintenance for companies and public figures.

McDonalds has over 300.000 Facebook fans and Lacoste and Lacoste Bags have over 2500 followers on Twitter and close to a million fans on Facebook. Karl Lagerfeld has more than 21.000 followers on Twitter which is quite suprising since he’s following back none.  The basic rule on Twitter and other social medias is that when someone becomes your fan or starts following you, you should return the favour. Obviously Karl is so cool (see pic) that he can bend this rule. Generally for a commercial entity it is not a good idea to show disrespect and not to be interested in your fans or followers. Chanel has collected 45.000 fans on Facebook so far, however they missed out on Twitter. The most popular Chanel is ‘chanelwestcoast’ aka c.c. who is a 20 years old “Rapping Receptionist” from Los Angeles with over 18.000 followers.

There are over 9 million visitors on Twitter every month, while Facebook has more than 200 million users worldwide. These sites are serious sites to be at when you are a marketer or advertiser reliant on individual people to buy your stuff.

At first you might think that Facebook is just one more social networking site and Twitter is just a crazy, 140 character micro-blogging platform, but marketing professionals have for some time recognised the capabilities these tools offer for branding and customer loyalty.  One of the key advantages to using social medias for a brand is the engagement with your fans and hence, consumers. You are able to create an important link between your product and your consumer. If you searched “Coca Cola” on Twitter you would have found out that a Spanish guy was drinking Coke with his Doritos 9 minutes ago. Do you think that would be interesting news for the marketing department of the Coca Cola Company? We’ll, it should be. Suprisingly Coca Cola does not have a Twitter presence, however they do have 3.5 million fans on Facebook. Pepsi on the other hand has close to 3000 followers and they even have official Pepsi Max Finland up there! I think I’ll just follow both of them since Pepsi must be the coolest cola drink out there at the moment.

Here’s my advice to all you marketers who are targeting your products or services direct to individual consumers: lock in your Facebook and Twitter names as soon as possible. Don’t think about it, just do it. Later on, when you actually realise the importance of this, it is quite unpleasant to find out that someone else (perhaps even your competitor) has beaten you to it.

Kris Olin
Web Designer | Internet Promotion Strategist
MSc (Econ.)
http://twitter.com/KrisOlin