Saturday, October 10, 2015

Starbucks: Expect More Than Coffee ------Social Media Monitoring 1


I am a big fan of Starbucks. I love the brewed coffee, special cups, other relevant products, and especially the comfort and relax environment in every store. However, I never thought why Starbucks is so successful to attract people gathering in the stores. This assignment pushed me to explore more about Starbucks’ marketing strategy.

1. INTRODUCTION
There are thousands of coffee shops in the world, but no one, like Starbucks, has been so successful. As we know, Starbucks is an American coffee company and coffeehouse chain. It is the largest coffeehouse company in the world. As of September 2015, Starbucks has 22,766 stores in 65 countries and territories, including 12,802 in the United States, 1,930 inChina, 1,409 in Canada, 1,121 in Japan and 825 in the United Kingdom. Today, Starbucks is no doubt a famous brand all over the world.
More about the history...
Though it is the largest coffeehouse company in the world, Starbucks is still a young company for 46 years, compared to other fast food giants (McDonald’s 60 years, KFC 85 years, and Dunkin' Donuts 65 years).
Starbucks began in 1971. Three students at the University of San Francisco were inspired to sell high-quality coffee beans and equipment by coffee roasting entrepreneur Alfred Peet after he taught them his style of roasting beans. (Pendergrast, pp. 252–53) In the early time, Starbucks only sold roasted whole coffee in 1912 Pike Place Market in Seattle, Washington. Until in 1987, Howard Schultz became the CEO of Starbucks, who rebranded Starbucks and quickly began to expand new markets and products. Between 1987 and 2007, Starbucks opened on average two new stores every day. Today, Starbucks has more than 22,000 retail stores all over the world, serving millions of customers with various products, more than coffee.
This video can guid us to see the company's history, concept and culture.

2. MARKETING STRATEGY
What makes Starbucks so special? Their success cannot live without the unique marketing strategy. According to the information on Starbucks official website, some of their best marketing strategies are outlined below.
  Perfect Cup of Coffee – Starbucks places a huge emphasis on product quality.
  Third Place – Starbucks focuses on creating a “third place” between home and work, a unique and relaxing “experience” and “atmosphere” for people.
  Customer Satisfaction – Customer satisfaction is a very important issue with Starbucks.
  Creating a Starbucks Community The Starbucks creates a community around their brand.
  Innovation – Starbucks thinks up creative and innovative ideas to add to their products or services.
  Brand Marketing – Starbucks always focuses on “word-of-mouth” advertising and letting the high quality products and services speak for themselves.
Target market:
    Starbucks opens stores in main big cities.
    Target consumers: 18-45 year olds; youngsters who want to gather with their friends; Office workers and students who need to catch up with their work; Those who feel that drinking coffee is “cool”; People who are adventurous, willing to try new things.

3. SOCIAL MEDIA OVERVIEW
I was shocked when I look at the social media of Starbucks. It is crushing social media! Let’s look at these numbers:
   35.94 million Facebook likes
   10.2 million Twitter followers
   6 million Instagram followers
   216.3K Pinterest followers
   83K YouTube subscribers
   4.21 million Google+ followers
   6.14 million Linkedin followers
Amazing job! Those numbers are staggering but well-earned. How do they do it? Let’s take a look.

a. Website
Starbucks website
Starbucks has a rather strong web presence, utilizing many different platforms in order to reach their consumers and provide information in various ways. On it’s main website, Starbucks continually changes the landing page to coincide with a current promotion that they might be offering. In fact, right now the landing page is about the campaign “One treefor Every Bag”.
Starbucks shop online web page
Besides, from the main Starbucks website, consumers can choose “Shop” which directs them to the online store.

b. Facebook



Interestingly, the Starbucks doesn’t post Facebook updates all that often. When they do, however, they’re usually eye-catching. The posts strike a good balance between fun contests, helpful tips for the java-loving crowd, and subtle sales messages to its customers. The recent post was released on October 9. As of Oct. 12, 229,885 people like this, 3162 people share this.

Incredibly, Starbucks replied every comment including positive and negative.










c. Twitter
Starbucks doesn’t update Twitter all the time, but they do post unique content. Checking out Starbucks’ Twitter page, it’s visible that most of the tweets are directed at users. They use Twitter as a service to reach out to customers talking about their in-store or product experiences.

For example, one follower named Sophie tweeted her disappointment with the coffee shop after she got a cup with the name “Sue”. Starbucks replied, “‪@Sophs_Ritchie‪ Sorry about that, Sophie!

In fact, many of their tweets start with “sorry about that!” or “sorry to hear!,” offering dismayed customers solutions to their problems. Instead of losing disgruntled customers, Starbucks directly responds, solving the issues and making sure that customers are, in the end, satisfied! Because people want their voices to be heard.

d. Pinterest and Instagram
Starbucks really shines on visually-oriented social sites like Pinterest and Instagram, where they can post appealing photos to attract eyeballs.
The company maintains 20 Pinboards featuring coffee recipes, tea recipes, Starbucks reserve, flavored coffee creations, pumpkin spice latte, Frappuccino, food, Starbucks cup art, store design .... The boards are full of fantastic images that are almost entirely sourced from third-party sites. I think this is an important part creating a successful Pinterest strategy.
Instagram is an assortment of cool images related to the coffee culture. Same as Pinterest, Starbucks’ Instagram also lets its followers primarily control the content. The vast majority of the images on Starbucks’ account are fan-submitted images from locations around the globe. Starbucks encourage followers to post their own Starbucks photos, along with a campaign-focused hashtag to connect the visual content back to the brand.

e. Others: YouTube, Google+, Linkedin


YouTube

There are 265 videos on Starbucks YouTube Channel. The videos are classified in different contents, such as Starbucks partners, Starbucks jobs, spots, giving back, Frappuccino, tea, coffee Q&A, music … Over 83k people subscribe to Starbucks YouTube Channel.




Google+
On Starbucks Google+ pages, Starbucks have more than four million followers. All of the posts content is taken from Starbucks’ Facebook page and Twitter feed, though there’s nothing drastically wrong with this tactic.




Linkedin

Starbucks also have Linkedin. We can see lots of information about the company, culture and job posted. There are more than 6.14 million followers. Some are employees, and some are those who are just interested in the jobs or company.






Whatever social media platforms Starbucks use, the messages they posted are positive, creative, funny, personalized. And the tone is widely from funny to heartwarming to quirky to artsy, but always reflects their brand personality. What mostly impressed me is the high frequency of interaction between the company and followers. On Facebook, Starbucks replied every comment! On Twitter, they also have lots of interaction to followers.

4. CURRENT METRICS

a. Social Mention



Judging from the data on the Social Mention anytime, it is good to see the strength (the likelihood that the brand is being discussed in social media) is 66%, which indicates most people are talking about Starbucks on the social media. And the sentiment (the ratio of positive to negative) is positive and neutral, and the reach (a measure of the range of influence) is 50%.



People can use many key words to find Starbucks, but the most common word is the name Starbucks. According to the listed sources, Starbucks appears in many different kinds of social media, the famous social media is Photobucket and Twitter. Moreover, this brand will be mentioned every 40 seconds in the Internet. That’s really a hot word.


b.  Google Trends

According to Google Trends, we can see that the interest of Starbucks is increasing gradually during the past ten years. The growth is very stable in a big picture.

 Starbucks is very popular in its homeland---United States. It is also popular in Singapore, Canada, Philippines and Hong Kong, because Starbucks stores are mainly located at big cities in developed districts.

c. Meltwater IceRocket


This graph from Ice Rocket shows the Daily Blogs Citation Trend of the term "Starbucks" in the last month. Clearly, the term Starbucks is a hot word, having averages 312.13 posts per day.

5.  CONCLUSION
Above all, I can see that Starbucks is not only a coffee company giant, but also a social media giant. Starbucks has a presence on most of the major social media sites including Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, Instagram, YouTube, Google Plus and Linkedin. In addition to these well-known social media, Starbucks has special marketing campaigns, its own online community – My Starbucks Idea, and even mobile applications. (I’m going to explore more about that in monitoring 2)  I can say that Starbucks has fully embraced the power that social media technologies have provided businesses.

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