Monday 2 July 2012

Subject Line of the Week & the Art of Story Telling


Intrigued?


Of course I was. This is what I found


Of course as the UK's number one supplier of bikes, it makes complete sense for Halfords to tie in with the  start of the Tour de France this weekend.

What I then found to be a smart move by Halfords, is that by clicking on the image, you were not sent to a sales message on the website but sent to their Facebook Cycling Community page


Who is Francis?


Well, to find out if an amateur,Francis, could handle the toughest stages of the world's most famous cycling event, watch this video...if you have 15 minutes


The Art of Story Telling


In a post a few months ago on Twitter and the Art of Storytelling highlighted how the Hero of the Story is often the key difference between a Brand Story that is successful and one that is not. Take the Facebook pages of Dunkin Donuts and Starbucks. At the time the former having fewer fans than Starbucks but more highly engaged ones.

And the main difference was the Hero of the stories being told. In Starbucks' case it was the brand, while with Dunkin Donuts it was the Customer. This makes sense doesn't it? I am more likely to share a story that has me at the centre of it than a Brand.

Looking at the Halfords page and at Facebook's Talking About This metric, you can see that over 47% of the people who like the page have interacted or engaged with the page in some way

That's a pretty impressive figure when you compare to other brands on Facebook.

If you look at the Facebook statistics on brands from Social Bakers you'll see how difficult it is to get that kind of engagement rate.

Here is a list of the Top 25 brands on Facebook..you do the maths..not one gets anywhere near 47%

Top Brands on Facebook and their PTA - People Talking About
Source Social Bakers July 1st 2012
 Now you could argue that the scale of fans between these top brands and those on the Halfords Cycling Community page is a different league.

But that's the whole point isn't it. No one ever said that communities had to be big to be deemed a success. Story telling to the masses can be inherently bland and very Vanilla. But what Halfords are doing should be commended as they are allowing someone from the community to tell their story to people who would be genuinely interested.

Hence the impressive engagement rate.

So get on your bike and start telling stories where you, the brand, aren't the hero.

We're not interested.

No comments:

Post a Comment