Whole Foods Customer Engagement Using Social Media

Does your business have a strategy for building customer relationships and customer engagement? Is it based on natural customer engagement? Whole Foods’ customer engagement is the basis for its strategy of growing customer relationships. Check them out to learn from them.

When choosing to learn from others’ social media strategies, it is always helpful to choose the best of the best. Whole Foods’ marketing strategy is one of those. They have been successfully executing their customer engagement using social media for over 7 years, and their strategies have played a significant role in their growth.

If you’re not familiar with Whole Foods, it’s a leading natural and organic food store with nearly 300 locations in North America and the United Kingdom. A large enterprise.

Their social media strategy is built around their company website and 6 additional social platforms, including Twitter, Facebook, Flickr, their blog, and recent additions of Foursquare and Pinterest.

Related: Social Media Marketing Lessons to Learn From the New Pros in Town.

Yes, Whole Foods has developed an incredible brand presence wherever it has chosen to set up shop–across the country, on the web, and in just about every social media venue on the internet, including Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and even via internally “owned” properties such as local websites. Their ability to engage the community and foster customer loyalty is nearly unmatched.

Here are some philosophical precepts that drive the company’s customer engagement efforts from its social media platforms:

Customer conversation

Whole Foods’ social media centers on letting customer engagement and conversation occur as naturally as possible.  They listen, observe, and apply new ideas from what they learn.

It’s about building customer relationships, not marketing

Building meaningful relationships is key. Whole Foods’ marketing efforts focus less on traditional marketing and more on giving texture to the brand in fun, engaging formats.

Social media fits within a larger digital strategy

At Whole Foods, social media is not a separate and distinct entity. Various stores collaborate online and offline to develop and implement plans designed to fully engage the community.

One such effort was a special film series … ‘The Do Something Reel Film Festival’. This extensive 6-month series was a celebration of people who understand that small ideas can create big change. The festival’s objectives were to connect the brand with food and environmental issues and to inspire people to make a difference.

Local social media elements

Whole Foods, while a large, international company, puts priority on the local component of its strategy. There is a community manager assigned at every store, who manages their customer engagement through multiple platform accounts. They focus on being where the customers are.

They maintain very loose control from corporate headquarters. They assist and collaborate, but the local stores maintain lots of freedom of initiative. Local. An important component of their strategy.

Make it clear where to start

Whole Foods believes you need to focus on where customers start so people know where to find you on various social media venues. For each vertical (jobs, deals, and so on), Whole Foods launches a separate account, such as Twitter.com/wholefoodsrecipes, which focuses exclusively on generating ideas for new and different recipes at Whole Foods.

Platform integration

All of the efforts are continually focused on improving the relevancy of customer engagement. They are not afraid to experiment to see what works and what doesn’t.

Each social media platform has its primary objectives … with some flexibility and adaptability maintained.

The strategy sets a goal of linking and losing integration of all the platform efforts.

Look around the corners

Whole Foods may be full of surprises, but the company does not like to be surprised. They like to look around the corner to attend to all the little details and address any issues that may arise. The company looks ahead to see how customers will reach the page, how they will navigate the site, and how a customer’s experience may change five months from now. It also tries to anticipate and plan for incidents in which someone doesn’t like a particular product or project and takes them to task for it. In other words, the company plans for all scenarios.

Be authentic

Rule No. 1 in social media is to be genuine and transparent, so this precept is not breaking any new ground. What is crucial here specifically for Whole Foods is that they remain true to the brand–they started with their food culture, so each social media team is expected to be centered around food when engaging through social media.

Build coalitions

Internal, collaboration is key in inventing, planning, and executing any projects or campaigns. Every department–including legal, the call center, communications, PR, managers, and executives–must be on board. The magic of social media is that you can recognize the opportunity quickly. The challenge is in responding just as quickly. Without a coordinated effort and buy-in, you quickly lose momentum.

Make Twitter a key platform

To see what’s going on with your brand in real-time, plug into Twitter, where things tend to go viral fastest. Real-time monitoring increases your response time to what people are saying about your brand, negative or positive. In addition, it provides early notice of any opportunities that arise–any given second, any given day.

Their Twitter accounts are used primarily as a customer service tool … responding to individual customer questions and requests. They have several niche Twitter accounts for such special topics as wine and cheese, as well as accounts for most of the local stores.

Focus on the four response message strategies

Whenever Whole Foods identifies a problem or opportunity, it responds in one or more of the following four ways:

Amplify: As trends are identified, or something its customers seem to like, Whole Foods amplifies whatever it is to help bring it to the surface and increase visibility and enthusiasm.

Context-of: By context-ifying its messages, Whole Foods makes sure customers fully understand.

Change: If it’s broken, fix it. Whole Foods likes to actively solicit constructive criticism and ideas to improve its business and gather suggestions for products, services, and projects. They are not afraid of adaptation or change.

Ignore: You gotta respond? No, sometimes it’s best to ignore, especially when it appears you’re being provoked into a response or fight. It’s easier to ignore things when you can put them into their proper context. For example, if your primary critics are a Facebook Group with 150 members out of the 400 million-plus Facebook accounts, you have little to worry about.

Take chances, but “be mostly right”

All of Whole Foods’ social media teams were scrappy, savvy, and confident from the very beginning. They succeeded by asking for forgiveness, not permission, and by “being mostly right.” If you’re transparent and do mostly right, the social media space is very forgiving.