The Top 50 Fastest-Growing Facebook Retailers

By The Retail Online Integration Staff

5 Tips to Help Retailers Increase Fan Engagement on Facebook

It’s good news that your fan base is growing. Really good news. You grabbed the attention of each of those fans … once. What can you do to catch their eyes again and again? Here are five tips to help you:

1. Learn what excites your fans and put that knowledge into action. You aren’t like any other brand, and your fans aren’t like anyone else’s fans. Showcase who you are by publishing posts full of personality and content that inspires, entertains or otherwise delights your fans. Take AutoZone, for example. AutoZone sells auto parts, but it knows posting about oil filters and retainer clamps isn’t the way to go. Its social niche? Targeting people who have a passion for driving. AutoZone’s posts say, “We get you. We’re car people, too. We can keep you out on the road.” (By the way, master this tip. The four remaining tips are no good without it.)

2. Post photos and images. It’s proven: photos increase Facebook engagement. For some brands, visuals are no-brainers. Is your brand a fashion, jewelry or home decor retailer like Guess or Pier 1 Imports? Beautiful photos of beautiful people and beautiful products. Go! A pet brand like PetSmart? Puppies and kittens. Go! Selling specialty foods like Rocky Mountain Chocolate Factory? Mouth-watering treats. Go! But what if it’s not so easy to match visuals with your brand? Refer to strategy No. 1 and use photos to tap into what’s important and interesting to your fans.

3. Include calls to action. How do you want fans to respond to your posts? Get everyone on board by including calls to action. Dick’s Sporting Goods posts some great photos of athletes as well as images with inspirational text. It boosts engagement further by rallying fans: “LIKE to show your support” (on a photo featuring the U.S. Olympic team) or “Comment: What’s your favorite inspirational sports movie of all time?”

4. Hitch your wagon to a shooting star. Rely on what’s popular at the moment. Pay attention to seasons, holidays, events, trends, etc. and ride the wave of enthusiasm. eBay, for example, conceivably sells everything under the sun and has an extremely diverse customer base. It uses the calendar and pop culture to plan its posts. For example, it wishes J.K. Rowling a happy birthday and mourns the passing of Sally Ride; it laments the end of the weekend and confesses to having a current song (like the one people loved to hate all summer long: “Call Me Maybe”) stuck in its head. Don’t forget to tag other pages in these kinds of posts. When you strike upon a shared passion, you may be able to expand your audience.

5. Show fans you love them. Fans love giveaways, contests, discounts and exclusive content. Keep your personality and your fans’ passions in mind, and they just might go crazy over your promotions like they do for DSW and Green Mountain Coffee. Perhaps more than anyone else, these two brands have a lot of fun tossing free stuff to throngs of adoring fans. — Carolee Sherwood

Despite rumblings that social media is losing its value and cache as a marketing tool (or commerce or customer service tool) for retailers — let the debate rage on — there are plenty of brands that are investing their time and money in the channel. The common refrain that you hear from all of them is that they seek better engagement with their customers and prospects, and social media can play a significant role in helping them accomplish that. In that vein, Retail Online Integration has compiled its second annual ranking of the top 50 fastest-growing Facebook retailers (click on the link in the Related content section below this paragraph for the full list) — with a twist this year.

The list once again compares the number of Facebook Likes (i.e., fans) a brand has from one year to the next (for the purpose of this list, August 2011 to August 2012), with the brand with the highest percentage increase in Likes year-over-year ranked No. 1 and the next 49 brands listed in descending order. What's different about this year's list is we decided to incorporate our list of the 100 fastest-growing cross-channel retailers (check out our May/June issue on RetailOnlineIntegration.com to access that list) into our Facebook rankings. So only brands that made this year's fastest-growing retailers list were considered for the Facebook list. This should provide you with insight into not only which brands are growing their sales, but how they're doing in attracting fans on Facebook as well.

In addition to finding out which 50 companies made this year's Facebook list, make sure to check out Carolee Sherwood's sidebar within this feature for five tips to help your company increase fan engagement on the social media platform. Carolee is the conversation manager at Media Logic, an agency specializing in marketing for a social world, so her insights can help guide your brand's Facebook marketing strategy going forward. — Joe Keenan