Tile Social Media Project Artifact
Social Media Project Artifact
Dhruv Khurana
Ashley Miller
OVERVIEW
Tile is a student start-up that has developed the world’s first customizable backpack, which allows people to share their most important moments with the world through interchangeable photos on their bag, thereby creating a whole new avenue for expression. By allowing users to pull images from social media, Tile hopes to bridge the gap between the online and offline world- which extends users online individuality to their clothing.
Tile is trying to place itself as a brand that more than selling products, wants to promote the idea of leading a life full of large exciting moments- worth ‘tile-ing’. However the challenge for the company lies in this as it has not figured out its online voice yet and how to go about pushing this message while still making sure customers know how to use this product. The company will be launching their website and social media efforts within the next month
AUDIENCE
Tile’s target audience are the millennial generation( more specifically college kids) who have the largest presence on social media with them uploading majority of the 350 million photos uploaded to Facebook every day and being a large portion of the 300 million users spending 21 minutes a day on instagram. We believe that this is the target market because it is a group of individuals who grew up with these social media pages and have very strong holding in the idea of individuality-thereby branding things as their own.
More specifically we plan to target the students who are more creative and openly expressive such as the greek community and artistic students, but later hope for this to be picked up by a number of other groups. The best way to reach these groups is through social media advertisements alongside a more important strong online presence- coupled with putting into a place a brand ambassador program across a number of schools in USA.
As of launching the online social media presence to get pre-launch excitement, these are our facebook analytics for the page. We believe once the website goes live, it’ll be easier to grow and improve our online presence.
CASE STUDY
Herschel Supply Co. is a design-driven brand that manufactures bags, backpacks, travel goods, and accessories. Established in 2009, Herschel has a well-established social media presence on Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, and Pinterest, as well as an active blog. Their goal is to “create a timeless product with fine regard to detail”, a theme which runs across their social media platforms. Through social media, they have been able to launch not only a product, but a brand.
Herschel’s blog includes travel stories, news about partnerships, design spotlights, and the latest information about Herschel’s products. These posts are then publicized on Facebook and Twitter, where nearly every post is accompanied by an image or a short video. Something notable about these posts is that they are not all directly relevant to Herschel products — rather, posts such as beautiful travel images, spotlights on innovative design, and round-ups of their favorite stationary, curate a lifestyle that extend beyond the products themselves. While not every post is about Herschel bags, they are cohesive and consistent with the Herschel brand identity of modernity, design, attention to detail, and a lifestyle of travel. They post frequently, and photographs of Herschel bags in various places are accompanied by captions like “wake up somewhere wonderful”, “motivate your Monday”, and “maintain true to classic design”. With over 38,000 followers on Twitter, 360,000 likes on Facebook, and 702,000 followers on Instagram, Herschel’s posts reach a wide audience. Interestingly, they have the largest following on Instagram, which indicates the power of the visual image. Many photos in Herschel’s Instagram feed are also not obviously corporate, but look they could have been taken by photographers or bloggers, which adds to their appeal.
Herschel provides an excellent example of consistent branding and a business that has extended marketing to a lifestyle, rather than just a product. For Tile, we hope to create a social media presence that is in line with our own brand identity, as Herschel has. Our vision of “Collect Memories. Make Memories” extends beyond the goal of achieving profitability to promote this lifestyle of treasuring memories, as well as seeking out new experiences and making new memories. We want this vision to be apparent in each of our posts on different social media platforms. This strategy is detailed below.
SOCIAL MEDIA PLAN
Our social media efforts are earlier focused around Instagram, Facebook and Twitter, but we later plan on expanding to Snapchat as well. Our campaign focuses on two parts- engaging the duality of the Tile tagline by having content that focuses on both- collecting memories and making memories.
We plan to keep Instagram at the heart of our social media activities as its photo-centric nature aligns with that of Tile’s. We would focus on the idea of collecting memories by getting users to engage and share photos of their tiles and why those moments are important to them. This would also help build a community around Tile as users start submitting their own ‘tile-worthy’ moments under the hashtag which encapsulates our first campaign- #tiletheworld
Our second instagram campaign will focus on the idea of getting outside and making new memories with their Tile backpacks. We will ask people to send photos of where they’ve been with their Tile bag and repost their pictures on instagram. By sharing the photos of other Tile owners, we hope to inspire more people to go out, have adventures, and make memories. In this way, we hope to extend the idea of “collecting memories” to “making memories”. This furthers the promotion of a lifestyle, rather than just a product, while also building the larger Tile community. This kind of content interspersed with content that not only talks about product releases, how to use the product and fun posts with the product, we plan to create an artsy yet homely feel for the brand.
We plan to start by posting once every 2 days and then later increasing it as our userbase increases.
Facebook/ Twitter
Our Facebook would be an extension of our instagram-thereby curating the Tile lifestyle by having a set of posts that go beyond talking about just individual backpacks and stories behind the tiles, but also making sure to talk about amazing adventures people have had with their backpack in places the world over. Twitter, would be a more concise version of the Facebook feed- relying heavily on hashtags that we would be inculcating into our brand such as the previously mentioned #TiletheWorld.
We plan on starting on posts on these platforms by linking the Instagram to the Facebook and Twitter. Later on once the below mentioned blog is in place- we think Facebook and Twitter will become prime places to share that information.
In addition to targeting on social media platforms, we believe it is important that Tile invests in building SEO and investing in advertisements with Google. We plan on building this SEO by creating a blogging page for Tile where users can post their most important moments and we can create content about other cool places to see and things to do that drives users to the website. As the article “Social Media is Not a Business” states, 2 percent of Google users click on advertisement links as opposed to the 0.04% that click on platforms such as Facebook, which would not only economically be very important for Tile but also act as a funnel that pulls individuals into other Tile social media interactions.
Snapchat
Later on we plan to expand to platforms like Snapchat. The unique Snapchat ID has been a massive success and as a large number of our target audience are on Snapchat, they can easily scan the Tile Snapchat unique ID, very easily becoming part of the tile experience. The article “How Do you Market to Millennials” talks about the importance of not just molding Snapchat into a new Twitter but rather recognizing Snapchat for its individual strengths and weaknesses as a platform. We believe that Snapchat would be the ideal way to send out “exclusive” content about Tile that you can’t find anywhere else such as behind the scenes and allowing brand ambassadors to snapstory their ‘tile-worthy’ days, thereby truly creating a narrative which builds into the Tile lifestyle.
Online Conversations
We plan on constantly engaging our social media posts. If there are positive posts we plan to bump them up and thank them, maybe initiating a free Tile gift bag. When users post content about their adventures we hope to include them in our blog and also use them on other social media platforms. If there is a negative experience for a customer, we hope to have instant communication and taking the advice of Megan Baker, move that conversation to a non-social platform immediately-as well as send them a goodie bag to make sure we retain them.
All our efforts and content creation will be based on our offline activities that talk about pop culture posts, new products, how tile works, holiday posts etc- ergo having our online presence very much in tune with not only our offline presence but in touch with things happening in the world around us.
We believe this plan would be successful as it would increase visibility thereby increasing traffic and create content that is engaging with consumers. We have built a social media plan that encapsulates a number of social media platforms and is built on a formula that has been followed many successful companies, while keeping our Tile spin on it the whole time.
