The Sweet Side of Social Media: Using Research and ROI to Guide a Chocolatier

Photo of Lagusta Yearwod by Matt Petricone (Schaerlaeckens, 2016).  

For a marketing communications professional, social media can make you feel like a kid in a candy shop. So many platforms, and within them so many features and trends to use for content, and on the backend so many tools to integrate with your website and spin out data for analytics. However, overindulgence in social media is a real problem, and though you may not get a stomachache from overeating bon-bons, you can overspend in both time and budget. 

When marketing for a business, starting off by understanding the business’s goals, its competition (and general industry trends), and the merits of each social media platform, a marketer can select a small handful of platforms on which to focus their energy and their dollar. To stay with the candy shop theme, the example business in this post is Lagusta’s Luscious, a vegan chocolatier that has a few retail shops in New York and does vigorous online shipping business—especially around chocolate-centric holidays like Valentine’s Day.

In short (spoiler alert), I believe that most companies can benefit from more than one strategically managed social media outlet, though that math may falter with certain industries, including B2B companies. 

Identify KPIs based on business goals

Here is where it gets tough: I believe that to start out on a strong footing with social media, you should begin with clearly defined metrics of success that lead up to specific business goals. In my experience in the nonprofit world, company leaders want to begin (or amp up) social media right now and not wait around for some paper-pushing marketing plan. 

Unless you’re at a brand-new startup or company, it’s likely that you’ll have some social media accounts in existence and therefore some numbers to review. Karl at Dreamgrow (2018) mentioned the importance of setting a “baseline” of how social media is doing right now, so you can measure the “rate of change” moving forward as you take over the channels. These rates should focus on key performance indicators, or KPIs. These can be almost any figure you choose to track, though there are some that are likely to be more meaningful in general and others that will be pertinent for your specific company and its goals. As Karl (2018) explained, simply counting reach (by followers or impressions) or even clicks and likes on a specific post can be misleading. One example is particularly illuminating, explaining that a post with a high reach might have a lower engagement rate if you look at how many users who saw it interacted with it (see fig. 1).

Figure 1: Counting only the link clicks from two Facebook posts fails to show which had a more efficient and effective performance (Karl, 2018). 

Karl (2018) suggested measuring KPIs that fall into a few different categories: potential (as in, potential reach or distribution), engagement and interaction, influence, and the rubber-hits-the-road metrics related to action, results, and ROI. (Note: This list excludes Karl’s internal KPIs that measure the effectiveness of the social media team itself.) Lagusta’s Luscious has an e-commerce website and accounts on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter, plus a presence on Yelp for its upstate New York storefront in New Paltz. The company also owns a vegan café in New Paltz and a pop-up-style shop in Manhattan that each have their own social media accounts and basic informational websites. 

Content vs. conversation

From the outside, there are a few ways to see how the company is trying to go after meaningful ROI and engaging with both its loyal fans and its potential customers. One qualitative measurement is to see how much the Lagusta’s Luscious brand and the social platform users interact. This boils down to the argument of content vs. conversation, where the adage about “content is king” (Greenberg, 2009) collides with the updated take that “Conversation is king, content is just something to talk about” (Novak, 2010). 

The conflict is a bit more nuanced than that, since content that allows the visitor to learn or do something independent of social media may impart value that isn’t apparent through digital interaction. However, as our online selves increasingly become more entwined with our “real” lives, it’s good to find ways to measure any content provided to check for some kind of conversation. For white papers—or in the case of Lagusta’s, printable recipe cards—a metric checking on file downloads or print commands can be as useful as checking to see if a user has shared or commented on an Instagram post. At the same time, artificially inflated metrics can be misleading, such as Instagram contests that require comments and tagging friends to be entered, which Lagusta’s has done several times (see fig. 2). 

Figure 2: A chocolate skull giveaway on Instagram had more than 1,300 comments, far more than the typical figure, due to contest rules (Lagusta's Luscious, 2022). 

While the comments encouraged fans to tag others, the reach of an Instagram contest depends on advanced planning and the clever use of UGC (user-generated content) to spread the word significantly beyond the brand’s own account and followers. This particular contest required only page likes and comments for entry, which HubSpot author Bethany Cartwright (2020) might have said lacks that conversation element. Cartwright suggests more interactive approaches, such as photo contests and hashtags. An even more targeted contest, one which could be leveraged with a modest ad buy on Instagram, could focus on conversions through a Facebook pixel or app event (Whitney, 2021), perhaps one that asks users to enter their Instagram handle and their zip code or some other small piece of information that could be leveraged for current and future analytics usage.

Suggestions for sweetening Lagusta’s social media optimization

A few opportunities immediately present themselves for Lagusta’s Luscious. One is the above-referenced opportunity to create more engaging Instagram contests and promotions. The nature of a chocolatier’s business, especially a gourmet one with beautiful products, lends itself very well to the visual focus of Instagram, so leveraging that platform above others makes strategic sense. The brand also has a solid following on its Facebook page, so creating ads that could work across platforms could save the marketing team time and effort. 

I would also strongly recommend replies to customer reviews, both positive and negative, on the flagship store’s Yelp page. As of now, the company seems disengaged from that site, which is an untapped resource since the average star rating is nearly five out of five (Lagusta’s, n.d.). The one platform I might suggest minimizing (though probably not abandoning) is Twitter, since its following is much more modest there, with around 1,500 followers compared to 22,000 on Instagram and 8,400-plus on Facebook. Twitter is still important to monitor for feedback and important issues, especially since Lagusta’s is a socially conscious business that cares about animal welfare, Black Lives Matter issues, and LGBTQIA+ civil rights, but those conversations move so fast and furious on Twitter that it may be simpler to stick with the brand’s stronger platforms and reinforce their long-held beliefs in support of these movements there.  

What is your take on how to balance social media, especially for a small business? And do you want chocolate now? I certainly do… 

References

Cartwright, B. (2020, Nov. 17). How to run an Instagram contest: A 10-step guide. HubSpot Blog. Retrieved from https://blog.hubspot.com/marketing/instagram-contest-guide  

Cvetkovic, A. (2018, Sept. 11). The ultimate guide to responding to positive and negative Yelp reviews (with examples). HubSpot Blog. Retrieved from https://blog.hubspot.com/service/how-to-respond-yelp-reviews

Greenberg, M. (2009, Oct. 20). Content is king of social marketing. Multichannel Merchant. Retrieved from https://multichannelmerchant.com/marketing/content-is-king-of-social-marketing/ 

Karl. (2018, July 11). 48 social media KPIs you need to know (key performance indicators). Dreamgrow. Retrieved from: https://www.dreamgrow.com/48-social-media-kpis-key-performance-indicators/ 

Lagusta’s Luscious New Paltz. (n.d.). Yelp review page. Retrieved Feb. 7, 2022 from https://www.yelp.com/biz/lagustas-luscious-new-paltz 

Lagusta’s Luscious [@lagustasluscious]. (2022). Posts [Instagram page]. Retrieved Feb. 7, 2022 from https://www.instagram.com/lagustasluscious/?hl=en 

Novak, C. (2010, July 27). Why conversation, not content, is king. Social Media Today. Retrieved from https://www.socialmediatoday.com/content/why-conversation-not-content-king  

Schaerlaeckens, L. (2016). Lagusta Yearwood—chocolatier. Upstarter Magazine. Retrieved Feb. 7, 2022 from https://upstater.com/lagusta-yearwood-vegan-chocolatier/ 

Reed College of Media at West Virginia University. (2022). Week 4 lesson: Social media analytics & advertising channels. IMC 642: Web Metrics and SEO. Retrieved from https://ecampus.wvu.edu/webapps/blackboard/execute/displayLearningUnit?course_id=_174310_1&content_id=_8900880_1&framesetWrapped=true 

Whitney, M. (2021, Nov. 24). The complete guide to advertising on Instagram. WordStream. Retrieved from https://www.wordstream.com/blog/ws/2017/11/20/instagram-advertising