“Wayfair, you’ve got just what I need!”
That little jingle is hard to get out of your head isn’t it? Wayfair is one of the largest online home furnishings, décor, home improvement, housewares, shopping sites in the world! The company was founded in 2002 by two college students that met while they were in high school while attending a summer program at Cornell. What started out as a project for an entrepreneurship class in college, evolved to what is now an $8.6 billion company.
I decided to do my social listening analysis on Wayfair because I am in the process of building a new home. Wayfair has been the go-to site for all things new-home related for my family so I thought it would be interesting to see what was being said about the company. But first, what is social listening?
Hootsuite defines social listening as a two-step process that involves monitoring social media channels for mentions of your brand and then analyzing that information and taking action on what you have learned. The “taking action” part is what makes social listening different than just monitoring.
I utilized Mentionlytics to listen and monitor the activity associated with the following mention trackers: key word Wayfair and Wayfair.com, social media sites including their Facebook page, Twitter, and YouTube channel. The site can also monitor additional owned media and competitor analysis but, I was unable to add those with the free version I was utilizing.
Social Reach
Looking at November 1–7, 2019, Wayfair had a social reach of 38 million: 845,000 on twitter, 37 million on Facebook, and 301,000 on YouTube. As you can see from the circular graph below, the majority of the reach was positive.

Social Engagement
Wayfair had 4,000 total engagements during the said time period. The engagement per channel were 804 on Instagram, 1,113 on Facebook, 1,618 on YouTube. Of those engagements 1,348 were negative and 1,016 were positive. That is an interesting number and worth diving into to help understand why there was such a high number of negative engagements. You want to recognize there is a problem or the potential for a problem before it becomes a disaster.

Total Mentions

The last piece I looked at was Wayfair’s mentions. They had a total of 146 mentions during Nov 1–7. That was broken down to 136 social mentions from 87 users and 10 web mentions on two sites. The mentions on social came from mostly Twitter. Of all the mentions 52 were positive and 10 were negative. Below are some examples of what those mentions looked like.

You can see that there are some negative mentions in a couple of Tweets as shown by the red-faced icon in the Twitter mentions column. If the mention was positive it is indicated by a green-smiling face. If the comment or response is neutral, then there is no face icon showing.
I believe this is a wonderful tool to utilize to monitor and listen to see what is being discussed on social media. The great thing about this tool is that one can easily click on the post and it will take you directly to the post in the social media application so that you can respond quickly to any arising problems. I clicked on the Tweet from Gemma Stock who appears to be an unhappy customer; here is that thread which demonstrates just how quickly Wayfair responds, almost immediately:

Overall, it appears that Wayfair does a great job of listening, monitoring and responding to their social media feeds. I believe the reason they have a high percentage of positive mentions is due to the fact they are listening and monitoring their social media sites to ensure that customer needs are met in a timely fashion. When they see a negative post, they respond to it quickly and try to resolve the issue in a timely fashion. This definitely helps me feel at easy purchasing some of my home goods for my new home from Wayfair!
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