Monitoring "The Body Shop USA" Conversations

Photo Credit: http://www.gback.co.uk

I am an ardent fan of Body Shop products for two reasons – one the products are made of 100% vegetarian formulas and two because they do not test on animals. Founded in 1976, The Body Shop is no stranger to the beauty world. They produce totally awesome and high quality products; while sticking to the philosophy of ethical sourcing, with no testing on animals and environmentally-friendly production techniques. The Body Shop strives to deliver quality formulas using unique ingredients from around the globe, and they make a point to work directly with fair trade suppliers to help everyone they work with earn a sustainable income. A video showing the world renowned cosmetic brand's stance against animal testing is embedded below.

I have been monitoring the Social Media activities of “The Body Shop USA” for the past few weeks. I must say some results were expected, but others surprised me! The time period considered for my study is from Feb 20, 2012 to Mar 13, 2012.

Through the past few weeks I have used Social Mention, Ice Rocket, Facebook insights, Google Insights, Twitalyzer, Tweetstats to track The Body Shop USA in the groundswell. I have also been looking at “The Body Shop USA’s” Official Website, Facebook, Twitter, Flickr Gallery and YouTube. Like I mentioned before, I am a fan of the Body Shop products, and out of sheer curiosity for the brand - what others feel and talk about the products/company and how is the company faring in the groundswell – I decided to monitor it.

• Presence across various social media platforms, however, visually different

My first observation was that the company has presence across all the popular and relevant platforms for their target audience. However, the look and feel across platforms is pretty different from one another. They are using a green backdrop, the Twitter page uses beautiful imagery and the A to Z campaign, whereas the Facebook,cover image simply has greenery, I couldn't really find a story, expect that its their brand color, the YouTube cover video talks about the company philosophy and promotes their latest product introduction, and the Flickr gallery talks about yet another community campaign (“Stop Sex-Trafficking”) the company is active in. 

• Target Audience

The Body Shop produces beauty products and hence their target audience should be mainly female and the age group of 18-40 yrs. Facebook page insights and Twitalyzer social relationships validate my assumption and analogy. 

• The landing page of “The Body Shop USA” official website

 The Body Shop USA Website’s landing page hosts the current promotion or offer run by the company. The page is definitely eye-catching but very noisy. In the last three weeks, the company offered three different promotions to its customers. 

• Social Mention Analysis

The information I gathered from Social Mention showed an increase in the strength of discussion surrounding The Body Shop USA to 12%. The reach has also increased week on week from 28% to 32%. The passion of discussion increased, dipped and then increased again over the weeks. However, there was reduction in the sentiment around conversations from week one to last. Most of the mentions are either positive or neutral and there isn’t a noticeable negativity around conversations. Another important thing to note is that there is an increase in the average per mention, and the number of unique authors reduced over the weeks. I was surprised by the results, for such a renowned brand, the numbers seemed low compared to what I expected. 

• Increase in Fans and Followers

The number of fans on Facebook has significantly increased over the weeks. In my first observation sometime in the last week of February they had close to 121,000 fans, but the change was even more noticeable in the last two weeks, where there was an increase of almost 1400 fans. However, the number of people talking about The Body Shop USA has reduced from first week to last. A similar trend of increase in the number of followers was observed on Twitter using Tweetstats and The Body Shop USA added about 308 followers.  

While I used Ice Rocket and Google Insights to analyze their blog citations and interest levels, the most interesting things I found was that they were more or less the same, with splurges in blog citations and interest levels. The days when there was an increase, the company had launched their new promotion and hence the heightened level of activity. The reviews for their products were not available at one central place/blog and were pretty scattered.

• The rise in blogs citation and interest levels can be attributed to the introduction of sales promotion/offer that day 

 

On monitoring the facebook and twitter accounts, I realized that company adopts a more ‘corporate’ tone of engagement, with announcements of special offers and posts by consultants organizing or promoting Body Shop events.  Most conversations in twitter centered around the promotions, a simple observation and analysis of conversations on Facebook surprised me. My results and observations are visually represented below: 

• Many negative updates did not receive any response from the company. But, Groundswell never fails to help!     
  

• Positive updates were promptly responded

• Some negative updates did receive a response but after 17 hours and some after more than 27 hours

• All positive updates with immediate business implications received a response 

• Campaigns for the community were embraced by customers

• Many customer engagement posts were related to business

•  Very few customer engagement posts really spoke with the customers

While there is an active engagement from the community on The Body Shop USA’s Facebook Page, the ethical image of the company is not transferred to all the posts of The Body Shop. The main conversation revolves around branding and not customer engagement. I understand that the level of engagement varies from product to product and audience to audience, however, I feel that they can adopt a more personal and conversational approach to increase customer engagement and build/nurture the relationships with their fans.

Over the next few weeks, I will continue to monitor and observe what interests people the most about the Body Shop. I also plan to look at conversations and analyze their tone, topics discussed and so on. Regardless of my observations, I will continue to use Body Shop products, because I am in awe of them, but the real deal is to see if they can increase and sustain with the current level of engagement in the long run.