How companies generate their revenues using social media – case studies

There are a lot of articles teaching you how digital campaign should be designed, planned or managed. But not so many bloggers are writing about real-life case studies, which show how most experienced companies are using social media to boost their revenues. I decided to gather the information I found and give you some idea on how it works.

First of all, before starting anything you should think how will you define your success and how it will be measured. I know it sounds simple, but it is not so trivial after all. Most people think that success in social media means the biggest amount of followers you can get. WRONG! The followers don’t necessarily bring value to the table, especially now, when people click just to click, or click cause they liked your profile photo. I think a digital business incubator from Tokyo made a great and very to-the-point presentation describing all you should know. They express success metrics in such a way:

Now knowing the matrix we can see how is it applied in real cases.

Starbucks

My Starbucks Idea campaign after a year gathered 70,000 ideas for the company.

The idea here was simple – they gathered a community which tells them what they miss in Starbucks, and the same community votes for the ideas. This is an enormous cut of cost for Starbucks since now without expensive marketing research they have life feedback. They are not only provided with ideas but they also know which idea will be the best to launch, since community is voting for it. This carries no cost for marketing research and no risk for launching undesirable change. Let’s look how this idea could be expressed in terms of success matrix:

Burger King

Whopper Sacrifice campaign

Burger King launched a campaign that allowed Facebook users to sacrifice their friends for Whoopers (“Ditch 10 friends Get free Whooper”). It was a very popular viral. So popular that Facebook intervened, not liking the fact that too many friends where getting “ditched”.

How did it look in success metrics:

I think this gives you the feeling on how you should approach campaign creation with the usage of social media. If you want to see more examples, then you can find them in Yongfook presentation and on HubSpot blog.