The other week, we took a look at the top five snack brands on Facebook and identified some things that the biggest pages were doing right. This week, let’s look at what the next five brands are doing, and what they might improve on. People love connecting with their favorite brands on Facebook, and snack foods can be some of the nearest and dearest to our hearts. Therefore, we need to make sure that our fans love interacting with our Page as much as they love unwrapping a pack of M&Ms. What are Reese’s, 5 Gum, Kit Kat, Lay’s, and M&Ms doing well today, and what’s the main takeaway from these five brands that we can implement in our social strategy and presence management.
Here are the top 20 snack brands on Facebook, based on size of owned media (again, data collected on 4/4/11) with 6 through 10 highlighted:
- Oreo – 18.9 million
- Skittles – 16.3
- Pringles – 12.6
- Nutella – 9.6
- Starburst – 8.4
- Reese’s – 6.9
- 5 Gum – 4.6
- Kit Kat – 3.5
- Lay’s – 2.5
- M&M’s – 2.1
- Hershey’s – 2.0
- Life Savers Gummies – 1.8
- Snickers – 1.8
- Trident Chewing Gum – 1.8
- Cadbury Creme Egg – 1.7
- Sour Patch Kids – 1.7
- Twix – 1.6
- Doritos – 1.6
- Cheez-It – 1.6
- Tic Tac – 1.6
Right away, we can see that Reese’s, Kit Kat, and M&M’s all have landing tabs; Reese’s is an educational piece about a new product, Kit Kat shows us a directory of their global Pages, and M&M’s simply asks us to like the Page. Three different tactics, three different objectives: Reese’s is looking for new product awareness, while Kit Kat wants to expand its owned media to include the family of Pages around the world, and M&M’s is looking to acquire owned media on it’s USA Page.
While all Pages – except Lay’s – have custom tabs, the objectives behind some of them seem to be foggy. Reese’s has a tab called REESE’S Home, which asks you to become a fan in order to gain access to awesome apps, product news, videos etc., but when you click Like, the only creative refresh then directs you to the website and to YouTube. While this is tied directly to an objective (acquisition), its execution is shallow and leads the user out of Facebook to another web property.
M&M’s has two relatively rich experiences with clear objectives. One, M&M’S Pretzel let’s you search for and add stores that sell M&M’s Pretzel in a map interface, which allows for increased awareness in a limited-release product. The other, Wall Candy, allows you to create personalized M&M’s (although it’s a bit clunky), share them on friends’ walls, and takes you directly into a shopping experience on the webstore.
Kit Kat has seven custom tabs live, which may fracture the user experience, and two are near-identical quizzes, which may quickly result in engagement exhaustion. You want to design the overarching userflow of your Page the same way you would design the user flow of a large-scale custom experience – with a social action funnel.
Another common element to four of the five Pages is the presence of some form of terms & conditions. Reese’s and Kit Kat have separate custom tabs that explicitly state what can and can’t be posted on the Page, while M&M’s clearly states their “dos” and “don’ts” on the Info tab; these three have almost no spam in their Photos section. 5 Gum has an unformatted and jargon-filled terms & conditions on the Info tab under the Products section, and Lay’s has no Page rules anywhere; no surprise that these two Pages have a large amount of spam in their Photos tab. This is not to say that, unwaveringly, if you have a clear “house rules” or “terms” section, that users will read it and abide by it. These results, from a small but powerful sample set, simply show that certain brands put an emphasis on Page content, and are clearly monitoring and curating user-generated content.
Take Aways: Ensure that your custom experiences are clearly defined and tie directly back to a business objective in social (i.e. acquisition, engagement, awareness, etc.). Also, set the tone for your Page, and create a set of guidelines for users to follow – then remove content that isn’t up to your brand’s standards.
Coming next; more take aways from pages eleven through fifteen…
Did we miss one of your top 20 snack brands? Let us know in the comments!
