Tesco Facebook

Introduction

Nowadays, most of the large companies are directing more and more attention to their social media pages, using them to monitor weak sectors of the firm as well as ones in high demand through customer engagement, promoting company’s attention to corporate social responsibility, and product promotion.

The aim of this case study is to critically analyse Tesco’s way of using social media marketing though the use of different platforms, evaluating their achievements and points which could be improved by comparison to competitors.

I will be looking more specifically at Tesco’s Facebook page, how the firm’s social media strengths and weaknesses differ on Twitter and Instagram, and after ward, comparing Tesco’s use of these online platforms to other retailers, making improvement recommendations at the end.

Part 1) Evaluate Tesco’s use of Facebook and critically comment on the relative strengths and weaknesses of Tesco’s use of this form of social media.

In 2006, Facebook became a social network available to anybody around the globe, and has since attracted millions of users (Kowanda, et al. 2009). It is hard to find a company, which does not use Facebook as a means of communicating with their customers in one way or another, and Tesco, is no different.

Throughout evaluating Tesco’s Facebook page, it could be seen that the company’s posts focus are on recipes, home wear and furniture, charity campaigns, and special offers, merging all services that the company provides into one convenient online page. Their topics of talk are likely to focus on festive dates giving costumers recipe ideas for special occasions, along with showing some offers on a particular product.

Different from some companies, Tesco does not seem to promote pricing of its products within its Facebook posts, as they have a more intense sales activity via other social networks such as Twitter.

The company seem to use Facebook more to share recipes or ideas of what to eat or share with family, often along with various products to buy, which consumers can then just click on a provided link, and be redirected to Tesco’s main webpage. This easy access for consumers allows for a recipe idea seen on social media to be easily transformed into reality with a few click. The function of redirecting to another webpage, also allows Tesco to use the action to measure how relevant and interesting the content of the post was, by monitoring the customer’s time spent on their page and how many people clicked on various links. Moreover, this can also be seen as a positive idea, which allows the firm to see which segments of the company are in higher demand. If links are not being used, this information, taken into account can help prevent over promotion of a certain segment such as Tesco Mobile, Beauty at Tesco, or other such examples.

An additional positive point noticed was the campaign called “liked by this page.” This is where the company can try to enforce a good reputation from a corporate social responsibility perspective. By liking pages of foundation charities such as Fairtrade Foundation, Cancer Research and the Alzheimer's Society, all of which, consequently, can be seen by Tesco’s consumer base.

The use Facebook is more likely to be efficient for building business-to-consumer relationships and as it is the most incorporating social vehicle in terms of gender and age compared with the others, practices made by the company can affect in how liked they are by the public. People that support such charities can be warmer towards to the brand and have a better vision of the company.

With over 1.5 million followers, Tesco’s Facebook page can be considered one of UK leader pages (Tesco, 2014). Studies have also shown, that from a customer’s point of view, by liking a particular page on a social media channel such as Facebook, you can help companies to be alert and change their strategies among prospective costumers, consequently attracting then new costumers (Edward et al. 2013).

Part 2) Comment critically on how Tesco can evaluate the success of their use of social media marketing (using all forms of social media, not just Facebook)

With the variety of social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest, LinkedIn, YouTube, Flickr, etc., companies can choose and test which systems work better to promote their activities, products, and additionally, measure level of customer’s satisfaction, through monitoring, comments, shares, and/or followers.

With a visible improvement on communication between customers and businesses recently, it has become easier to understand consumers wants through social media scores and possible public engagement.

Dana Howard, a social media marketing manager of Murray State University, explained all the platforms used by the university highlighting the more efficient ones and how they are used to measure and monitor the success of the university’s goals. Dana Howard highlighted the use of Instagram as a promotion to capitalise on the excitement and Twitter to monitor what people say about the university. Dana strongly believes that social media marketing gives you the ability to see the effects your message - in most of the cases, by looking from an analytical perspective (Howard, 2014).

Although BuyaPowa clams that 66 % of the retailer’s use social media only for broadcasting, which can also be seen true for Tesco and the use of Facebook in the discussion above, this could also be seen also as bridge to build relationship with customers, increasing trust and loyalty, therefore generating an opportunity to improve profits.

In reality, by monitoring Tesco’s activities, it could be noticed that the company concentrates the most on Instagram, Printerest, Goggle+, Twitter and Facebook. The most popular is still proving to be Twitter, although its estimated that Facebook has 750 million visitors per month, whilst Twitter has 250 million visitors per month (eBizMBA, 2013). Twitter is used to promote not only recipes like on Facebook, but is separated into different accounts for different segments of the firm such as Tesco Opticians, Tesco Living, and Tesco Food. Each discloses prices of products, promotions and various products to their own targeted followers, who are interested in that particular service of the company. As this split up the consumers into groups, better communication can be seen between brand and consumer.

On Instagram, Tesco is also separated into different social media accounts for each provided service. Although this creates for better market