1-800-Flowers + Moms = Social Media Marketing Conversion

When it comes to building brand recognition through social media, Mom is the ambassador you want on your side. From Walt Disney’s Babble to BlogHer and Dooce, mom-targeted content and community, advertising and social media all vie for the attention and engagement of the first important woman in everyone’s life.

Today few brands do a better job engaging moms and families than 1-800-Flowers.

1-800-Flowers and Facebook Marketing

In a video case study for Facebook Marketing Solutions, President & COO Chris McCann explained that in today’s marketplace, “Every application, every product, everything we do is social by design.”

This Monday, the 1-800-Flowers Facebook page reached the 400,000 fan milestone, and celebrated (how else?) by decorating the page with flowers. Today, just three days later, they are mere inches from 430,000. Whether it’s the race to Mother’s Day or simply an engaging fan page with regular status updates and vibrant images, 1-800-Flowers is doing social media right.

3 ways to increase brand recognition through social media marketing

Here’s how the company is using social media marketing to increase brand awareness, improve customer service, and engage a network that includes about 40 million friends and families:

1. Featuring flowers and gifts, and asking people to Like their favorite products in order to drive merchandising for big holidays like Mother’s Day.
2. Adopting social media platforms to tell customer stories and encourage user-generated content.
3. Using these public forums to improve customer service.

In an exceptionally insightful and creative move, last year a few weeks before Mother’s Day, McCann’s team invited moms to visit the 1-800-Flowers Facebook page and Like their favorite bouquets. Those Likes predicted four of the five best-selling bouquets for the Mother’s Day season. To connect the online and offline 1-800-Flowers experience, the company encourages customers to photograph the moment when 1-800-Flowers came to “deliver a smile” and to share stories. McCann notes these are among the best ways to increase brand awareness and convert users into customers.

Social media marketing is only as good as customer engagement

With Wings 1 and 2 of The Dragonfly Effect nailed down, 1-800-Flowers got Wings 3 and 4 humming by engaging moms and families to share stories, vote on products and otherwise take action. Customers uploaded user-generated content including photos and stories of what motivated them to send flowers.

Says McCann, “Within the past year, we’ve transformed our way of thinking. Now we look at every application and every business function and make sure it has a social element to it… And we measure success by level of user engagement.”

How engaged are your customers? Are they telling stories of their experiences with you and becoming natural brand ambassadors in the process? If they’re not, do you think they might if  you made it fun and easy for them to share?

Let us know how social media marketing is working for you — and let us know if it’s not. We build our community by sharing stories that help people achieve their goals, and we’d love to share yours!