Strong & Weak Organizations

Blog #2 – COM0015 – Applied social media in Business

Thinking of organizations that are impressive in their social media usage Amazon and Starbucks come to mind. Fitbit is an organization that needs to work on their social media usage and engagement.  These companies are all successful companies and they are all using social media but when looking at their social media strategies it could be better and change the organization to the better.

Amazon uses all the social media platforms in the strategy to drive awareness and sales to their page and products.  Over the years Amazon has perfected its use of social media to gain the trust and engagement of their audience. They use their platforms to promote their products and their services.  They link product posts straight to their website to purchase the products.  They use Facebook as their main social platform and Twitter as their output for content.  They link to pages with more information or blogs from their Twitter site.  Amazon has positioned themselves as an organization that is helpful, polite and fast on their responses.  If there is a comment, feedback or review left on their social media they respond within 24 hours. Amazon has even developed their own social media platform for communicating about shopping on Amazon called Spark.

Starbucks has a great reputation.  Everyone knows Starbucks and they have mastered the customer service journey with the personalization that each order brings. They write your name on your cup so when your order is ready, they can call you by name.  They are happy to make your order to the specifications that you want.  They are also killing it on their social media platforms.

Starbucks social media statistics:

• 37.2 million Facebook likes
• 11.9 million Twitter followers
• 16 million Instagram fans
• 153K YouTube subscribers

Fitbit on the other hand is using social media but they are missing a few things that I really think that they could do better to up their product.  Fitbit is a brand that is very good at being the first to the new abilities of the fitness activity watches but they have lacked in their engagement and lost customer because of this.   They have many negative comments on their social media platforms and they are not great at responding. 

They are not quick to respond and customers feel like they are not listening.  The negative reviews are met with suggestions that don’t match the feedback and customers are left feeling angry. They need to follow up and be more engaged on their platforms.  They also have posts that are not always clear that the are about Fitbit and sometime the Fitbit is not even in the ad. If Fitbit had a more robust social media plat it could have kept their fitness watch on the top.