Over the last 18 months Reebok achieved a staggering 8,000% growth on its social media channels, but how exactly did they manage that? The simple answer is: they adopted a “quality over quantity” approach. Reebok revamped its social media strategy to shift focus towards relationship building, and that meant focusing on fewer channels but producing higher quality content. Reebok now focuses heavily on Instagram, along with maintaining its presence on Twitter and Pinterest; and it no longer uses Facebook to produce organic marketing content. This change alone accounted for a 163% increase in Instagram followers for Reebok, placing the brand ahead of its competitors by over 9%.
While shifting its focus heavily onto Instagram, Reebok chose to split the brand into three different accounts –”classic”, “women’s”, and “brand community”, in order to target consumers more specifically. The “classic” and “women’s” channels are very targeted to specific segments – Reebok shoe lovers and women, respectively – while the main “brand community” channel publishes a variety of content that appeals to all, and showcases the brand values. This approach is interesting because by splitting the Instagram channel into three accounts, consumers have the ability to follow one specific account that only publishes certain content – for example shoe lovers will follow the “classic” account and only see shoe images – or all accounts for the full brand experience.
To support Reebok’s narrow focus on engagement and relationship building, the brand has invested in new and creative social media campaigns, and example of which is the #MoreThanTape campaign. Fans were asked to tweet inspiring words they had for Ronda Rousey – mixed martial arts fighter – for a chance to have their words printed on her training hand wraps. This campaign received millions of impressions and was Reebok’s top Instagram post in the last quarter, receiving almost 14,000 likes.
There has been a shift in the way we use social media, from receiving one-way content, to consumers now wanting to engage with brands. Reebok capitalized on this change, and took a big risk by moving away from channels like Facebook and Snapchat, but it paid off. They completely reinvented Reebok’s brand presence on social media in just 18 months by using this narrow approach, and their follower base continues to grow. Now it’ll be interesting to see which of their competitors will adopt this approach next.
Sources:
http://digiday.com/brands/reebok-got-8000-percent-growth-social-media-18-months/
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