October 1, 2012
Walmart’s Local Facebook Approach Not Cutting It
At least when it comes to Facebook, local businesses are significantly better at engaging with customers than is Walmart, according to a new study by social media metrics firm Recommend.ly.
In October 2011, Walmart partnered with Facebook to create 3,500 Facebook Pages for its local stores across the U.S. The goal of "My Local Walmart" was to drive its more than nine million Facebook fans at the time to its local store pages and build brand loyalty with "enhanced local interaction at an unprecedented scale."
Nearly a year later, however, Recommend.ly found that Walmart’s local Facebook Pages are faring poorly on key fan engagement metrics.
Of the 2,800 Walmart stores that have their own fan pages, only four percent have more than 1,000 fans. The store pages posted an average of only 1.24 updates per day, and 85 percent of Walmart’s local store pages didn’t respond to any fan comments during the 30 days of the study. On average, the Walmart local store pages had an average of 563 fans, 5.2 percent of them active in some way during the 30 days of the study.
By contrast, a sample of just under 1,900 local business pages on Facebook found that 22 percent had more than 1,000 fans. Local businesses had an average of 4,207 fans, 12.2 percent of them active.
Speaking to allfacebook.com, Recommend.ly’s CEO Venkat Ramna gave Walmart credit for trying to start conversations through shared photos and other efforts, but said Walmart’s local pages don’t ask enough questions, provide much call-to-action, and seem to be too controlled by a central team. Recommendations included empowering store managers to generate local content, including local promotions or responses to nearby events, activities or weather.
"In Walmart San Francisco, maybe a guy sitting in San Francisco could be expecting some kind of content relating to San Francisco, not a generic discount that you have anyway on the Walmart page," said Mr. Ramna. "There’s nothing unique about local pages that Walmart is doing currently, and if you look at the responsiveness of the page owners when it comes to the main pages and the local pages, the local pages really don’t give any feedback or response."
On the brighter side, Walmart’s flagship Facebook Page leads the retail industry with nearly 22 million fans and scores high, according to Recommend.ly’s analysis, across content sharing, content virality and page responsiveness.
Outside of Barnes & Noble, which has localized pages serving key college campuses, Walmart is reportedly the only national chain with Facebook pages for individual stores.
In a statement provided to Advertising Age, a Walmart spokeswoman said the chain is encouraging store managers to post to their pages. It also gave local store ‘fans’ early access to the holiday layaway program to drive local engagement. She said the effort is "still in their very early stages," and "we’re proud to be the only retailer to have launched this kind of innovative social-media effort."
- New Report from Recommend.ly Finds Local Businesses Are Outperforming Walmart on Facebook – Recommend.ly
- Walmart on Facebook – Is Local Market Engagement working? – Recommend.ly
- Mom & Pops Beat Walmart on Facebook – Advertising Age
- Why Walmart’s Local Facebook Experiment Hasn’t Worked So Far – allfacebook.com
- Walmart Goes All Local with Facebook Deal – RetailWire
- Walmart Wins on Facebook but Target Triumphs on Twitter as Clothing Retailers’ Social Media Results Are Revealed in New Report From Unmetric – Unmetric
BrainTrust
Recent Discussions
Discussion Questions
Should national chains have local Facebook pages for individual stores? Do mom & pops have a sizeable advantage in driving social media engagement at the local level versus national chains such as Walmart? What steps should Walmart be taking to drive engagement at its local store pages?
Poll
I’m not quite sure why anyone is surprised that Walmart’s local pages aren’t doing that well. After all, no one is paying the store employees to keep their page up to date, they’re probably working on a really tight payroll budget, and no one quite has time. Plus…I still just don’t see Walmart’s target employees and customers as hard core Facebook users. Maybe that’s some kind of odd stereotypical prejudice, but I don’t.
As for local businesses, it’s not an “advantage” – it just gives them a slightly less tipped playing field (it still isn’t level…just less angled). And local businesses have the commitment to do what works.
“…encouraging store managers to post to their pages….”
I am not sure what “encourage” entails, but if any store wants a local following then they need to invest enough to drive local content and local engagement.
I am more interested in which stores have shown measured success and how they achieved it, than in the average results, for less than a year, across 3,500 stores.
It’s difficult and expensive for national chains to have individual pages for stores, and it might not be necessary. Where local mom & pops need FB to provide low cost marketing/advertising/promotion, the national chains have the clout of advertising.
Are national chains willing to pay an employee at each store to be their social media rep? In order to be successful for individual stores, national chains would need custom offers for each store and the means to engage in local conversation. I don’t see this as a priority for most national stores.
National chains should not try to initiate Facebook pages of their own for local stores unless they have something “local” and relevant to say. Otherwise, consumers completely realize that Walmart, Target, Walgreens, CVS, etc. are national chains and that most of what they do, is “national.”
At this point, most retailers view social media like early web pages. They are up and they are available. Many retailers have learned central buying can be deadly (Food Lion), yet all retailing is local. Each retailer must continually access where their target customers are in social media. If it is important and achieving results, then it needs to be supported. To put the responsibility on the store manager is a mistake, as they come in all sizes and shapes. A better approach is a national and regional support structure with trained social media associates.
National chains seem best off to keep their FB page at a top level (global) and localize their web sites for the shopper. It helps me to know if my local Home Depot has certain tools in stock (localized web site). I do not see the same value in a local FB site.
Use your BIG FACE on FB and your local face on your website.
There is no absolute answer here. It all depends on how you use your pages.
If local branches of a chain have unique promotions, merchandise, etc., then the answer may be, “Yes.” If, on the other hand, there is one face to all customers, the answer is most likely, “No.”
The key to any social media success is frequent, consistent and totally transparent interaction. In the case of Walmart, that may just be too hard to deliver on a local, store-by-store basis.
The most significant detail from the Recommend.ly study is that Walmart’s stores are not only not posting local content, but they are ignoring local shopper comments, questions and complaints. If retail social media has taught us nothing else, it’s clear that asking for comments and complaints and then ignoring them is far worse than not soliciting them at all. If a customer has a problem, they may be angry at you, but this allows that anger to bloom into full-blown fury. (We did a full piece on this study’s implications about 12 days ago.)
It appears Walmart’s FB strategy was developed in isolation: without an overall approach to local, in store experience and differentiation. I “liked” my local Walmart months ago to see what would happen: so far I haven’t seen anything there except a bunch of specials. There’s nothing that ties to the local community or gives me a reason to come into “my” store vs. any other store.
Local Facebook pages need to be part of an overall content and conversation plan where a brand knows what they want to say and how they’re going to find the time to say it. The advantage of a local mom and pop is they have a clear local point of difference. I don’t think Walmart really has reasons why one store is different from another and that lack of differentiation makes it extremely difficult for them to justify a local social effort.
Should national chains have local pages? Certainly, IF they post local information often, provide updated information often, and engage in conversations. If local managers do not know how to engage their consumers, do not post information often, and do not provide local information, engagement will be elusive.
It’s a great social media marketing plan for national stores to have local pages for individual stores. A national Facebook page is not as personal to the shoppers as a local page could be. Mom and pops have the advantage to connect and interact with their customer base through social media because they respond to postings that are related to the area and of interest to their followers.
Walmart, or any national chain for that matter, should have someone locally handling the social media for each particular store or area. Even if the basic messaging is passed down from HQ, it will provide more of a personalized feel to the consumers if there are retailer responses posted on the local pages.
Why do local, mom and pop operations have more fans than national chains that create local store pages? Simple answer is the local store operator is connected to the community they serve and the large chain, despite its best efforts, is not.
Why national chains launch programs in the social sphere and clearly appear to be both clueless and without a plan is beyond me. Oh yeah, great idea — encourage the store manager to post to their page. You think there wouldn’t be this type of gap, and more. The entire calendar is right there before you and your store is a central shopping magnet, plus you want your comp performance to beat prior year — leverage all tools available to you. Block and tackle tactics are not the strong suit of a national chain, especially when the demand is for relevant content worth following.
So the question is, does the store manager care about Facebook or other social tools? The answer is no, not in relation to all other wildly important goals like training employees, dealing with human resources issues, logistics, loss prevention and merchandising.
Get involved with the community. Post events of interest. Profile employees to make a personal connection. Inform about new featured merchandise and unique savings opportunities (not repeats of what is on the global site).
Whole Foods Market is doing this quite successfully, with local Facebook pages and many thousands of fans for each of its stores. Granted, it has far fewer stores than Walmart, but its stores have much more going on at the local level to talk about — and there’s an individual at each store tasked specifically with maintaining the Facebook page.
The drawbacks to Walmart’s approach is that it’s reduced to “encouraging store managers to post,” as opposed to requiring it or hiring someone to do it. Plus, there’s not much different between one Walmart and the next, in the way Whole Foods aim to be localized and customized to their communities. Walmart has learned there’s a lot more to getting local fans with local Facebook pages than the “build it and they will come” approach.
It would seem to me that we have to check out the value equation: What value is there in a customer connecting with a retailer’s local page? In a well managed company, there probably isn’t much. The best deals come nationally and retailers are working against themselves if they try to fragment their deals too much on a local basis.
The place that might make sense would be some localized customer service. But to execute that takes resources away from other endeavors.
My bottom line: It doesn’t appear to me that there’s good value to the retailer or the customer if the retailer dedicates resources to these local efforts.
Anecdotally, I’ve found it frustrating trying to find things out when searches turn up large numbers of local pages. It become nearly impossible on the search engines to find what I need. Unless local fragmentation of the search engines can be avoided, then it may hurt your business to establish local pages.
I agree, for the most part, with all the contributed suggestions/comments: social media expertise (or at least some training) will be essential for successful local Facebook implementation, true local content is required to successfully participate in local marketing, and it is mandatory to respond back to consumer postings/comments/complaints.
But, I think what is most important is for national brands to have a strategy that clearly defines objectives for various media platforms and who owns managing those efforts — there is not one correct way to skin this marketing cat. I also commend Walmart for being one of the first national brands to try this on a large scale. There are certainly things to learn, but Walmart is now ahead of the curve (they actually have pages set up and some processes in place) and can work on improving their initiative and making it valuable for their corporate brand, their local stores and their local consumers.
I’ll repeat my mantra: I don’t think a business (that has a web site) needs ANY type of FB page…and if it doesn’t have a web site, it should have one.
Similarly, it’s logical that “mom & pop’s have an advantage in social media, since it’s “social” media as opposed to “business” media, and many small businesses operate more like a personal relationship than a business; and this obviously gives then a disadvantage in everything else useful for success, from buying clout to getting their taxes done properly (and everything in between).
I am not sure in this case it makes sense. Part of the image of a national chain is the trust on the brand that comes with its size and reach. When I go to a Walmart or McDonald’s in another city, I expect them to be very similar. I think local store pages are only useful if there is the investment in personnel bandwidth and unique content, or in a local language.
It seems the early execution of a good idea failed to deliver for Walmart. The goals of “empowering store managers to generate local content, including local promotions or responses to nearby events, activities or weather” makes sense. Whether too much “command and control” derailed the project is subject to debate.
It could also be that technology staff was asked to engage the conversations on FB pages rather than giving marketing folks a spin of the wheel. We may not know the answer to that question any time soon.
One easy critique is that Walmart could customize by region rather than store. In doing so, it could aggregate interest of more consumers rather than slicing the audience too thin. As many of us can understand, people tend to patronize 1, 2 or 3 locations of a chain within their daily routines.
Delighted to see our study sparking off this interesting discussion!
Mom-n-pops are doing better on Facebook because they are genetically social businesses. Being a part of the local community is the only way they know to get business.
National chains like Walmart, whose biggest value proposition is ‘low price’, need social presence only to build exit barriers for customer loyalty in the long run. Evidently, this hasn’t been a priority when it came to resource allocation so far. Facebook/social media is the greatest opportunity national chains have seen so far to achieve an effective social presence without spending a lot of time or money. Walmart realized that early, but stumbled in execution.
Walmart can make its local store pages relevant, only when the local stores own the local pages. Community building can be done only by people, not process. That means, the store managers should control the content and response on the Pages. It may take some time to achieve this for all stores, but that’s the only way Walmart can achieve its stated objective — ‘creating a deeper relationship with people in the communities it serves’.
That is what Walmart should be doing — empowering local stores to own their communities so that the store can serve the community better. Facebook can’t be run any other way!
We got so excited with this topic again, we actually put up a 900 word blog on the points of discussion. Do visit and let us know what you think!
Answering Paul R Schottmiller’s (@RetailForesight) point – following are the (relatively) better Facebook pages among Walmart’s local stores, scoring over 40 on Conversation Score:
Walmart Kodiak
Walmart Supercenter Oxford – Commons Dr
Walmart Bend
Walmart Supercenter Bennettsville
Walmart Martinsburg – Hammonds Mill Rd
More Discussions
How Timely Is the Planned Lowe’s Website Renovation Focusing on Personalization?
Is Lowe’s being timely with its website reno, and is it right to be placed as…Should Costco Be Opening Members-Only Gas Stations?
Is this the right move for the warehouse club?As Boomers ‘Age Out of Peak Purchasing,’ How Can National Brands Retain Interest With Gen Z?
According to a recent First Insight study titled “Is Gen Z Still Choosing Your Brand,” while…
I’m not quite sure why anyone is surprised that Walmart’s local pages aren’t doing that well. After all, no one is paying the store employees to keep their page up to date, they’re probably working on a really tight payroll budget, and no one quite has time. Plus…I still just don’t see Walmart’s target employees and customers as hard core Facebook users. Maybe that’s some kind of odd stereotypical prejudice, but I don’t.
As for local businesses, it’s not an “advantage” – it just gives them a slightly less tipped playing field (it still isn’t level…just less angled). And local businesses have the commitment to do what works.
“…encouraging store managers to post to their pages….”
I am not sure what “encourage” entails, but if any store wants a local following then they need to invest enough to drive local content and local engagement.
I am more interested in which stores have shown measured success and how they achieved it, than in the average results, for less than a year, across 3,500 stores.
It’s difficult and expensive for national chains to have individual pages for stores, and it might not be necessary. Where local mom & pops need FB to provide low cost marketing/advertising/promotion, the national chains have the clout of advertising.
Are national chains willing to pay an employee at each store to be their social media rep? In order to be successful for individual stores, national chains would need custom offers for each store and the means to engage in local conversation. I don’t see this as a priority for most national stores.
National chains should not try to initiate Facebook pages of their own for local stores unless they have something “local” and relevant to say. Otherwise, consumers completely realize that Walmart, Target, Walgreens, CVS, etc. are national chains and that most of what they do, is “national.”
At this point, most retailers view social media like early web pages. They are up and they are available. Many retailers have learned central buying can be deadly (Food Lion), yet all retailing is local. Each retailer must continually access where their target customers are in social media. If it is important and achieving results, then it needs to be supported. To put the responsibility on the store manager is a mistake, as they come in all sizes and shapes. A better approach is a national and regional support structure with trained social media associates.
National chains seem best off to keep their FB page at a top level (global) and localize their web sites for the shopper. It helps me to know if my local Home Depot has certain tools in stock (localized web site). I do not see the same value in a local FB site.
Use your BIG FACE on FB and your local face on your website.
There is no absolute answer here. It all depends on how you use your pages.
If local branches of a chain have unique promotions, merchandise, etc., then the answer may be, “Yes.” If, on the other hand, there is one face to all customers, the answer is most likely, “No.”
The key to any social media success is frequent, consistent and totally transparent interaction. In the case of Walmart, that may just be too hard to deliver on a local, store-by-store basis.
The most significant detail from the Recommend.ly study is that Walmart’s stores are not only not posting local content, but they are ignoring local shopper comments, questions and complaints. If retail social media has taught us nothing else, it’s clear that asking for comments and complaints and then ignoring them is far worse than not soliciting them at all. If a customer has a problem, they may be angry at you, but this allows that anger to bloom into full-blown fury. (We did a full piece on this study’s implications about 12 days ago.)
It appears Walmart’s FB strategy was developed in isolation: without an overall approach to local, in store experience and differentiation. I “liked” my local Walmart months ago to see what would happen: so far I haven’t seen anything there except a bunch of specials. There’s nothing that ties to the local community or gives me a reason to come into “my” store vs. any other store.
Local Facebook pages need to be part of an overall content and conversation plan where a brand knows what they want to say and how they’re going to find the time to say it. The advantage of a local mom and pop is they have a clear local point of difference. I don’t think Walmart really has reasons why one store is different from another and that lack of differentiation makes it extremely difficult for them to justify a local social effort.
Should national chains have local pages? Certainly, IF they post local information often, provide updated information often, and engage in conversations. If local managers do not know how to engage their consumers, do not post information often, and do not provide local information, engagement will be elusive.
It’s a great social media marketing plan for national stores to have local pages for individual stores. A national Facebook page is not as personal to the shoppers as a local page could be. Mom and pops have the advantage to connect and interact with their customer base through social media because they respond to postings that are related to the area and of interest to their followers.
Walmart, or any national chain for that matter, should have someone locally handling the social media for each particular store or area. Even if the basic messaging is passed down from HQ, it will provide more of a personalized feel to the consumers if there are retailer responses posted on the local pages.
Why do local, mom and pop operations have more fans than national chains that create local store pages? Simple answer is the local store operator is connected to the community they serve and the large chain, despite its best efforts, is not.
Why national chains launch programs in the social sphere and clearly appear to be both clueless and without a plan is beyond me. Oh yeah, great idea — encourage the store manager to post to their page. You think there wouldn’t be this type of gap, and more. The entire calendar is right there before you and your store is a central shopping magnet, plus you want your comp performance to beat prior year — leverage all tools available to you. Block and tackle tactics are not the strong suit of a national chain, especially when the demand is for relevant content worth following.
So the question is, does the store manager care about Facebook or other social tools? The answer is no, not in relation to all other wildly important goals like training employees, dealing with human resources issues, logistics, loss prevention and merchandising.
Get involved with the community. Post events of interest. Profile employees to make a personal connection. Inform about new featured merchandise and unique savings opportunities (not repeats of what is on the global site).
Whole Foods Market is doing this quite successfully, with local Facebook pages and many thousands of fans for each of its stores. Granted, it has far fewer stores than Walmart, but its stores have much more going on at the local level to talk about — and there’s an individual at each store tasked specifically with maintaining the Facebook page.
The drawbacks to Walmart’s approach is that it’s reduced to “encouraging store managers to post,” as opposed to requiring it or hiring someone to do it. Plus, there’s not much different between one Walmart and the next, in the way Whole Foods aim to be localized and customized to their communities. Walmart has learned there’s a lot more to getting local fans with local Facebook pages than the “build it and they will come” approach.
It would seem to me that we have to check out the value equation: What value is there in a customer connecting with a retailer’s local page? In a well managed company, there probably isn’t much. The best deals come nationally and retailers are working against themselves if they try to fragment their deals too much on a local basis.
The place that might make sense would be some localized customer service. But to execute that takes resources away from other endeavors.
My bottom line: It doesn’t appear to me that there’s good value to the retailer or the customer if the retailer dedicates resources to these local efforts.
Anecdotally, I’ve found it frustrating trying to find things out when searches turn up large numbers of local pages. It become nearly impossible on the search engines to find what I need. Unless local fragmentation of the search engines can be avoided, then it may hurt your business to establish local pages.
I agree, for the most part, with all the contributed suggestions/comments: social media expertise (or at least some training) will be essential for successful local Facebook implementation, true local content is required to successfully participate in local marketing, and it is mandatory to respond back to consumer postings/comments/complaints.
But, I think what is most important is for national brands to have a strategy that clearly defines objectives for various media platforms and who owns managing those efforts — there is not one correct way to skin this marketing cat. I also commend Walmart for being one of the first national brands to try this on a large scale. There are certainly things to learn, but Walmart is now ahead of the curve (they actually have pages set up and some processes in place) and can work on improving their initiative and making it valuable for their corporate brand, their local stores and their local consumers.
I’ll repeat my mantra: I don’t think a business (that has a web site) needs ANY type of FB page…and if it doesn’t have a web site, it should have one.
Similarly, it’s logical that “mom & pop’s have an advantage in social media, since it’s “social” media as opposed to “business” media, and many small businesses operate more like a personal relationship than a business; and this obviously gives then a disadvantage in everything else useful for success, from buying clout to getting their taxes done properly (and everything in between).
I am not sure in this case it makes sense. Part of the image of a national chain is the trust on the brand that comes with its size and reach. When I go to a Walmart or McDonald’s in another city, I expect them to be very similar. I think local store pages are only useful if there is the investment in personnel bandwidth and unique content, or in a local language.
It seems the early execution of a good idea failed to deliver for Walmart. The goals of “empowering store managers to generate local content, including local promotions or responses to nearby events, activities or weather” makes sense. Whether too much “command and control” derailed the project is subject to debate.
It could also be that technology staff was asked to engage the conversations on FB pages rather than giving marketing folks a spin of the wheel. We may not know the answer to that question any time soon.
One easy critique is that Walmart could customize by region rather than store. In doing so, it could aggregate interest of more consumers rather than slicing the audience too thin. As many of us can understand, people tend to patronize 1, 2 or 3 locations of a chain within their daily routines.
Delighted to see our study sparking off this interesting discussion!
Mom-n-pops are doing better on Facebook because they are genetically social businesses. Being a part of the local community is the only way they know to get business.
National chains like Walmart, whose biggest value proposition is ‘low price’, need social presence only to build exit barriers for customer loyalty in the long run. Evidently, this hasn’t been a priority when it came to resource allocation so far. Facebook/social media is the greatest opportunity national chains have seen so far to achieve an effective social presence without spending a lot of time or money. Walmart realized that early, but stumbled in execution.
Walmart can make its local store pages relevant, only when the local stores own the local pages. Community building can be done only by people, not process. That means, the store managers should control the content and response on the Pages. It may take some time to achieve this for all stores, but that’s the only way Walmart can achieve its stated objective — ‘creating a deeper relationship with people in the communities it serves’.
That is what Walmart should be doing — empowering local stores to own their communities so that the store can serve the community better. Facebook can’t be run any other way!
We got so excited with this topic again, we actually put up a 900 word blog on the points of discussion. Do visit and let us know what you think!
Answering Paul R Schottmiller’s (@RetailForesight) point – following are the (relatively) better Facebook pages among Walmart’s local stores, scoring over 40 on Conversation Score:
Walmart Kodiak
Walmart Supercenter Oxford – Commons Dr
Walmart Bend
Walmart Supercenter Bennettsville
Walmart Martinsburg – Hammonds Mill Rd