How Can Companies Thrive on Social Media?

As an owned channel, social media is both the greatest opportunity and the greatest challenge for a brand. You control what you want to put out into the universe—your message, your story, and how you want to tell it. The great part is there are no guardrails: you can do whatever you want. That’s also the scary part.

At Illumina, we took an audience-first strategy, looking at every channel and its individual characteristics. It’s really about finding your audience and your voice. X is where the data scientists are, and as a genomics and health-tech company, we had a lot of white papers with advanced science coming out and being presented at conferences, so we highlighted research there. Our LinkedIn channel showcased the culture of Illumina, with our big, beautiful office in La Jolla, where it was sunny all the time and we had a diverse group of employees doing great stuff. For TikTok, we were working with the highest levels of brand story and understanding, creating videos about hair color and height that provided an entry into what DNA is.

When we made the choice to work with several influencers on TikTok, including a popular science teacher and a genetic counselor, we faced friction from some really smart people at Illumina who didn’t want to see the brand “dumbed down.” But these influencers were people who understood genomics and could talk authentically while at the same time reinforcing our brand messaging. It was an opportunity to send the message that we are a leader in genomics because we can spread the word about the industry as a whole. We built a viewer base of 25,000 people overnight and started getting emails from colleagues around the company saying, “My kids saw this on TikTok.” All of a sudden, family members were taking interest in their work who had never done so before. People saw the power of how fast word can spread on social media.

Sometimes leaders will get caught up on one post or comment, and fixate on the negative. In those instances, my challenge was to show the whole picture. I would produce the engagement metrics for executives, where a negative tweet about the company was liked by only four people and a positive one about the company was retweeted by 100 people, but it’s always going to be a battle when leaders think the organization’s reputation is at stake. In most cases, it isn’t worth it to respond to negative posts publicly. We have a customer service team for a reason, and I would work to make sure the correct salesperson or territory manager could see what was sent so they could manage that relationship appropriately. But you never want to go toe-to-toe in public with someone about a claim: they are always going to get the last word.

More than retweets and engagement rates, the most important metric I looked at was share of voice. When you navigate to the hashtag #genomics, how much of the conversation are you included in? You want to make sure that you are outperforming your competitors. Our social posts tried to hammer home three or four messages and get people to comment or repost them. You can tweet until you’re blue in the face, but if you are not coming through on those messages, you are not meeting your business objectives. It’s not how many people “like” your message but how well and how far it travels. That’s how you know you are effective.

The interesting thing for me about social media is that it can be a real equalizer. Marketing is a customer journey of people becoming aware of your brand, trying it out, purchasing it again, and becoming loyal to it. Traditionally, there has been a lot of inertia—brands that were launched over a hundred years ago still have the same market share today. I’ve done a lot of research on entry barriers for firms, and when we look at the data, the big takeaway is how stable brands can be: it’s hard for new companies to break in and for established companies to reset the clock.

If you look at examples like Warby Parker and Dollar Shave Club, however, these are brands that no one knew about a decade and a half ago—but they’ve been able to create a massive presence through social media.

In the case of Dollar Shave Club, it was a viral video on YouTube that introduced the brand to the masses using a central customer concern—that is, the amount of shaving we do, and the fact that Gillette had a monopoly in the market. Warby Parker did something interesting by harnessing the power of Instagram and our love of taking selfies. The company tapped into the fact that we love to look good and try different things and share them and get feedback from people. That’s the opportunity that Warby harnessed from social media—and that social media creates for small companies.

One important thing we teach in our classes is that marketing is about mutually beneficial exchanges with your consumer, and social media is a great way to get feedback from the customer in real time. If I can target my loyal users with announcements of products and show visuals with captions, they can interact with me and post comments about how much they liked or didn’t like something. I can even have someone present to chat with them.

In the past, large consumer packaged goods companies might have launched a new product in a huge test market before rolling it out, but today, social media allows them to test the waters and innovate incrementally. They don’t have to play their whole hand or put it all out there at once.

I’ve seen social media used in a smart way to launch products. Take the example of a plumbing company that came up with a new technology for joining two pipes together. A lot of plumbers are set in their ways and averse to trying something and failing. This company was able to get the product into the hands of some plumbers on the most active Facebook groups. When those plumbers found that the product cut down on the time it took to do a job, they were sold. The company organized a whole loyalty program around it.

So if you understand your customers’ habits, you can create an organic movement.

For bigger, more established companies, social media can be a way to do things differently with new markets and reinvent themselves. I’ve seen a major consumer packaged goods company use social media with the Hispanic market, targeting younger people who want to make food like Mom’s cooking but don’t have the time or may not even have the skills. Social media allowed the company to create a connection by showing customers how to cook like Mom.

However you use social media, you need to realize that it is a big investment. It’s got so many components, you need to make sure that you have someone assigned to the role of driving it so you don’t confuse consumers—that’s the big danger. People may think that digital marketing and social media cost less, but to do it right, you’ve got to invest in people to be responsive to customers. You need to create cohesive campaigns that connect the social media team to marketing people and salespeople so you are truly responding to customer concerns. You need to transmit the true brand message and follow through on any promises you make—it takes a lot of people.

Starbucks has an enormous community of customers. Our brand is about the coffee and the coffeehouse experience, but it’s also about the connections our partners have with our customers. An experience with Starbucks might be someone’s first interaction of the day—or maybe even their only interaction that day. We want to make sure that customers leave feeling uplifted and cared for, both through the product they are buying and through the experience they have—and that extends online as well.

Our goal on social media is to engage in an authentic way by channel. On Facebook, we might do things like ask you to vote for your favorite beverage. On TikTok, we’ll make short videos and work with a group of brand ambassadors serving as influencers within their communities. We choose these ambassadors based on their love of our brand, their values, and the message of joy they share—major components of our brand profile—and we nurture our relationships with them through regular immersions at the Starbucks Support Center, giving them an understanding of everything from our partner benefits to coffee origins.

As other companies have found, we know there’s a risk whether you have a presence or not, whether you say something or you don’t. People can read just as much into silence as into a message. So we try to have a presence in the right channels, the right spaces, and the right communities to deliver the message that feels authentic to us. When people come to us with criticisms, in general we try not to go down any rabbit holes. If it’s a valid complaint, or a recommendation or suggestion about their experience, we have all the time in the world for them. But if it’s something out of our control and negative, we choose not to spend our time responding. Often we let online communities start a movement organically, and then we will engage, but not in a heavy-handed way.

On social, we love to fuel the genuine love that our customers have for us. Take the Leaf Rakers, who are passionate about Starbucks in the fall. They share around pumpkin spice lattes, exchanging recipes and planning meetups, so the social media space transcends into the physical space. We’ll make comments and share release dates for our seasonal beverages or information about fall food items, but we do it with a light touch and let them mobilize for themselves.

We do quantitative analysis to make sure that our messages are resonating, such as the typical number of likes and shares, and time spent watching videos. If there’s a specific offer, we go deep to understand whether it was successful—and, if it wasn’t, what a customer bought instead. We also have a customer engagement team that uses deep social-listening capabilities to constantly monitor our channels to see if there are themes, recommendations, or suggestions.

One of our most popular social media messages ever was a post during COVID: a simple heart with a cup that said something along the lines of, “Take care of yourself. You can’t pour from an empty cup.” Starbucks could deliver a message like that during the pandemic because it was one of the few places people could go and leave their homes and just see another human being. It was an authentic message from Starbucks to our customers, and it was exactly the message they needed at the time.