So far, we’ve looked at the top five and top 10 snack brands on Facebook and we’ve drawn some great insights and best practices. Today, let’s see what numbers eleven through fifteen – Hershey’s, Life Savers Gummies, Snickers, Trident Chewing Gum, and the Cadbury Creme Egg – are doing right on Facebook. To catch up, major takeaways from the top ten brands have included capturing the visitor right away with compelling landing tabs, clearly defining and communicating the user objectives for custom social campaigns within the environment, and setting the tone for the page both for communications from the brand to its fans and vice versa.
Here are the top 20 snack brands on Facebook, based on size of owned media (again, data collected on 4/4/11) with 11 through 15 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
Let’s take a look at how some of these brands are creatively utilizing some of the default tabs and functionality, and how they could improve. Hershey’s has made a clear effort to modify the picture rail to drive users to their social good campaign, Together Counts. This is an easy, low friction method of creating some additional creative space within your owned media to drive users through your action funnel. Experiment with tying the photo rail to various campaigns, both on the wall and within custom experiences.
In January, Snickers executed a campaign that leveraged the stock Ustream application, and featured former NFL safety, Rodney Harrison. Snickers definitely gets points for incorporating new media channels, like Ustream, however the campaign has been dormant for about three months – too long to keep an application live that is so closely tied to calendar events, like the Super Bowl.
Life Savers Gummies recently experimented with Facebook’s new Questions feature for crowdsourcing – they wanted to know their fans favorite flavor of gummy. With nearly 6,000 answers – 0.3% of their fan-base – the test should be viewed as a success because of the low-cost use of native Facebook functionality to engage users in a new way. Brands that aren’t using Questions to converse with their fans are missing out on some very valuable user data.
On the Trident page, they are consistently using Events for their sampling tours; another creative use of native functionality to engage, entertain, and inform users. Whenever a brand can tie the online experience to the real world, it’s a huge win. The more frequently and more diverse the interactions, the tighter the bond between the consumer and the brand; therefore, Events should be in any brand’s Facebook tactical toolkit, when relevant to the product.
Cadbury uses Videos to show off creative spots for the Cadbury Creme Egg. Some of the videos were TV commercials, others are exclusive to the Facebook fan-base. If you can expose your consumers to rich, and exclusive video content, you absolutely should. A monitoring strategy must also be in place when including lots of rich media, because lots of comments may follow, and you’ll need to engage in conversation after you’ve offered up that juicy piece of content.
Take Aways: Experiment with native Facebook functionality, and get creative in the ways that you engage your users. It’s not enough to do wall posts when you air a new TV spot or launch a new product or deal; you need to vary the engagement to keep things fresh and fun. Users are listening; are you engaging?
Coming next, the final countdown; pages sixteen to twenty…
Did we miss one of your top 20 snack brands? Let us know in the comments!
