Social Media Monitoring for Sephora #part one

1. Mission:

Nowadays, social media become one of the most vital parts of companies’ digital marketing. And the essential combination of social media is the groundswell. As Li&Bernoff mentioned in Groundswell, “it has been an emblematic” that groundswell in social media owns a huge impact for companies and has the power to reach billions of customers to your companies’ message.

How to help companies manage their social media and positively influence the groundswell can be firstly started from social media monitoring.

In this research, we do social media monitoring to “Sephora,” one of the most popular cosmetics stores around the world. We will mainly concentrate on monitor Sephora’s social media account: Facebook, Twitter, as well as Pinterest to understand their communication to groundswell and their effort to participate in the groundswell. And also pay attention to the conversations that Sephora already happening related to key terms that you search for, such as their brand name, tagline, and product names.

2. Introduction:

In this article, we will monitor Sephora’s social media in the following aspects:

1) Social media management: How regular they post online through social media website including Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest.

2)Social media listening: How the response to the groundswell? The tone, emotions, and implications of social media conversations.

3)Social Media Analytics: Analyze the data using Social Mention, Google Trends.

 Sephora official website

3. Social Media monitoring analyses

1)      Social media management

a.      Facebook

●       Page design:

As we can notice, Sephora’s Facebook page is simple and clear designed to go through.All vital information including online shopping entrance, customers service call number, email address, official website, upcoming event, a community can be easily found on the page.

●       What did they post on Facebook:

Sephora usually put some specific information about the upcoming event or new product release. And also they build up a section called “community” to let people interact with each other.

●       How they regularly post:

By checking their post frequency, we can find out that Sephora will almost give post at least four times a week. They are active on Facebook.

b. Twitter

●       Page design:

Sephora’s Twitter page is simple, clear and colorful. They also provide some related accounts for people to conveniently follow.

●       What did they post:

Sephora post on Twitter is a bit different from Facebook. All the posts are “short and sweet.” They announced new products release and asked for feedback.

           

●       How they regularly post:

Sephora usually posted several tweets in a day on Twitter. They are pretty active on Twitter.

c. Pinterest

●       Page design:

The page design is pretty suitable for Pinterest. They set up a lot of “pins” to let people follow. Those pins are not just about the new product, but also about makeup tutorial or other related topics, which set up a community for people to directly get access to other customers’’ ideas about products.

●       What did they post:

Set up“pins” about new products and related topics.

2)      Social media listening analysis

●       How they respond to comments:

a.       They usually reply in one day. The reply speed is prompt. However, they replied more frequently on Facebook. Almost all the comments will get the reply. But they seldom reply on Twitter.

2. The tone: They replied with respected and sincere tone. Sephora usually “ask” instead of demand. For example, they usually started with “Can you please…”, “if you do not...then please….” And every time, they add a “thank you” at the end of every reply. Also, they apologized first and took the blame by themselves. This action will make customers feel more appreciative and pleasant.
3. The emotions they showed in their reply also be in the positive mood. For example, they replied “Glad you like it” or “We appreciate your patience.”

3) Social Media Analytics

●       Social Mention

According to SocialMention.com, in last month, Sephora owned an almost positive and neutral sentiment. In overall, the website gave a 86% strength to Sephora, 27% of passion and 63% of reach.

The top five keywords are sephora, order, palette, lipstick, and gift. Which is interesting that the most popular products among social media are “palette” and “lipsticks.”

The top five hashtags in last month are sephora, faux filter, hudabeauty, too faced and tarte. The reason that these hashtags were mentioned frequently is that these brands had release new products last month.

The top three source is Photobucket, twitter, and reddit. Twitter was the main source of social media. To our surprise, Photobucket was the top one source of social media.

●       Google Trends

The trend shows the interest over last one year. The trends are stable from Feb 26, 2017, to Nov 2017. It shows a peak among Nov 2017 and Dec 2017.

Why the trends show a peak among Nov. and Dec. 2017?

After research, we can found out that every year November is the 20% off holiday promotion event for Sephora, so people pay more attention at that time. 

The top five interest by country are: France, Canada, Singapore, United States, Romania.

Comparing with Ulta Beauty, one of the biggest  cosmticis company in U.S,

Sephora had a lower interest in past 12 months.

The interest question has brought to our mind: Who is Ulta beauty? Why we never heard before. Most of the customers have already know Sephora, but seldom people know about Ulta Beauty. However, Ulta owned a higher interest in past 12 months. People are getting more and more interesting with Ulta than Sephora.

The same condition for both Sephora and Ulta is that they all met their peak interest around November and December. The reason might be that the cosmetics products are highly demanded in the holiday season at the end of the year, so people pay more interesting to beauty products.   

4. conclusion:

Overall, Sephora did well in communicating with groundswell. They responded to comments quickly and replied pleasantly. We can see that Sephora made a lot of efforts to make a connection with their customers like building a community or set up events every period. 

Sephora remains active on social media brought high attention and a lot of discussions among social media.