Turning the Unsexy into Sexy

There are many brands out there who will just say “people don’t care about talking to our company and as long as our products work, we are fine.” In translation, they are saying “we don’t care about social media because our product is unsexy and why waste our time."

One brand that refuses to buy into this losing behavior is Tide. Yes, I said Tide, the laundry detergent. Despite being a staple in households around the world, Tide is taking the home care brands to cleaners (well, maybe not the cleaners) when it comes to social media engagement. As my friends at Unmetric noted last week here, Tide has increased their Twitter followers by 43.5% in the last two months. Second on the list was Purex at 29.7%.

However, as any semi-educated social media professional knows, those Like and Follower numbers mean very little if people are not interacting with your content. Well, Tide understands that. Over 50% of their tweets are replies to their fans. That, my friends, is a product not caring about selling, but pleasing their fans.

The next question that should fall off your tongue is how do they scale it? As a big brand like Tide, how long does it take to respond to their fans? Tide cleans it up.

Tide is able to respond to about 60% of their tweets within 15 minutes. When the shelf life of a tweet is four minutes, that response time moves up in significance. Widening the gap, they respond to 80% within one hour. Whether it’s a premium listening program or a massive social team, they make it happen.

So what does this all mean? Does any of this activity lead to additional sales?

To be honest, we outside of Tide headquarters will never know. But let’s ask an obvious question. If it wasn’t, would they keep investing so much time into it? My answer is a resounding NO.

Unsexy does not give brands the excuse to back off online engagement. Unsexy does not give brands the excuse to not look into new ways of encouraging fans to spread their message. Unsexy brands, just like unsexy clothes, have the ability to turn their reputation around. All you need is a little bit of creativity and devotion to get the job done.

And yes, I made that reference with laundry. You can tell it is not my strong suit.