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Falcon.io Technology Social Media Marketing

How to scale your social strategy with the growth of your company

By Manita Dosanjh, PR and communications executive

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October 24, 2016 | 6 min read

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Flying Tiger Copenhagen has experienced astronomical growth in the past year, and the quirky design brand shows no signs of stopping. Currently expanding globally at a rate of three new stores a week, the Danish retail giant boasts 680 stores in 29 countries, and counting.

Flying Tiger

But when your business is growing this fast, how can you make sure your social strategy (and team) can keep up? Managing a social media operation across multiple markets can raise challenges around brand consistency, customer insights and even simple things like content scheduling. I caught up with Linda Ghabain, the spearhead of Flying Tiger Copenhagen’s social operation, to find out how she manages.

What are the core business challenges you’re trying to address with your social strategy at Flying Tiger Copenhagen?

The main challenge we’re addressing with social is supporting the brand’s impressive global growth. Our social strategy is active in 29 countries, and each of these countries has their own Facebook, Twitter and Instagram account at the very minimum, so it’s a lot of channels to keep track of. I started working here last year, and I immediately saw the need for a social media management platform to help us manage this global effort.

Each of the 29 markets has their own social media manager. When I set up our social strategy last year, one of the requirements was that each market should appoint someone responsible for social to report to me in our headquarters in Copenhagen.

How do you use social to influence sales in-store?

Social is a great way to enhance our offline marketing material. Before a new product range is released in stores, we have a meeting between marketing, PR, the commercial team and visual merchandising to determine the focus products to be featured in the supporting campaign. If the focus products we choose aren’t prominent enough in offline marketing (posters, packaging etc), social is a great way to highlight their benefits for our customers. For example, we can make a video of the product – we’ve seen a consistent trend with video. If we create a social media video of a product where the packaging isn’t optimal, it immediately begins to sell better. We have 300 new items in stores every month so offline marketing isn’t enough to boost sales, we need social to supplement.

With this level of product volume, creating enough social content across all markets could be a challenge, but using a platform helps us run this efficiently. I can schedule content ahead of time and monitor the feedback we get on new products using Falcon.io. If there’s a an issue with a product, or how it’s displayed in store, I’ll know quickly from the social media comments coming in from our followers.

Do your customers tend to use your social channels as a customer service tool?

Yes, and we have a policy of replying to all customer comments within 24 hours. We monitor all incoming comments in real-time, and we respond to everyone, if if they just want to say hi. I manage the official instagram channel for Flying Tiger Copenhagen, and we have a lot of customers engaging with us there. Sometimes they just want to say hello, or show us what they’ve bought from the store. It’s very useful for us to identify trends from these conversations too. so If I see there are a lot of customers asking about a specific product, or colour of a product, I always feed this back to our commercial team.

How do you use social to increase footfall in stores?

Social media data is key to helping us garner learnings about our customers. One of our main goals in marketing to is to drive traffic to our stores, and of course social should help us do that. This begins with the way we build campaigns. In May we collaborated with japanese artist Misaki Kawai to build a line of products. Using the platform, we were able to build a landing page where people could sign up to be notified when the new products were released. This gave us an indication of how interested people would be, and also who to target our social content towards once the campaign went live.

Once the new products were out in stores, we ran a competition linking social with the in-store experience. The premise of the competition was people had to find a product from this collaboration and take a selfie with it, post it to social using a specific hashtag. Falcon helped us track that hashtag, so we could see a specific report on how the campaign was received, and how many people engaged with the competition.

How important are brand ambassadors and influencers for your social strategy?

Our brand ambassadors are extremely important, especially on Instagram. We chose to focus on Instagram last year because we believe it’s the channel that enables us to tell our brand’s story in the best way. We don’t do paid content right now, so relationships with brand ambassadors and influencers, is our main tactic for content amplification. We have a lot of great ambassadors who take a lot of lovely pictures of our products, and when we regram their posts they’re happy and we’re happy. So it’s a great way to amplify our brand’s story in an organic way.

Manita Dosanjh is PR and communications executive at Falcon IO. You can find out more about how Linda has grown Flying Tiger Copenhagen’s social strategy here.

Falcon.io Technology Social Media Marketing

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