Organization Name: DAVIDsTEA
Industry: Food & Beverage
Name of Contact: Youri Hollier, Social Media Manager, DAVIDsTEA
Web references: http://www.davidstea.com/
DAVIDsTEA was founded in 2008 in Canada by cousins David and Herschel Segal. Today the brand has more than 120 locations across North America and more than 150 tea varieties. After water, tea is the second most consumed beverage in the world. With this in mind, David and Herschel embarked on an iconic brand that brought tea-lovers together to ignite their senses, good conversation and healthy living.
Loose-leaf tea struck a chord with North Americans. It became the new ‘it’ phenomenon and brought tea to a whole new level beyond Earl Grey and Camomile. To keep the momentum going, the company created a social media campaign – using Facebook, Twitter and Instagram to connect and interact with their loyal customers about new store openings, flavours of the month, store contests, and much more.
Social Media Tracking – Keeping the Brand Alive
DAVIDsTEA has cultivated a brand around tea-lovers and it has worked! The company uses Hootsuite to keep track of customer conversations; re-tweets; sharing of information, links and photos; and much more. However, getting there wasn’t easy….
“Our biggest problem that we faced as a company with regard to social media was capturing every single tweet discussing our brand. We would miss entire blocks of conversations. Once we integrated Hootsuite into our workflow, we haven’t looked back since. Hootsuite allows us to set up streams and lists to ensure that everyone is responded to and conversations continue on Twitter. In terms of content, we speak the language of our customer and aren’t afraid to take risks with our responses or tweets.”
Youri Hollier, Hootsuite Success Story: DAVIDsTEA
Now DAVIDsTEA has a robust social media platform. So much so, that they have developed a successful local media strategy that involves postings of local events, partnerships and single store initiatives. They also target their content to each recipient when possible. For example, when Oprah Winfrey was in town in Montreal in 2013, the company provided her with an assortment of DAVIDsTEA products. Oprah, a tea-lover herself, called the company rep personally to ‘thank’ them and tweeted about the product of course!! DAVIDsTEA was also featured in O Magazine as one of her ‘favourite things’.
A colleague of mine, who is our company digital media guru, had a few things to say about social media metrics and why it’s useful.
https://soundcloud.com/user101-7/social-media-metrics-1
Lessons for others:
Social media metrics help with the following:
- Keeping track of what is being said, shared and tweeted about a brand, service or event/initiative
- Responding and engaging with customers in real-time, anytime and anywhere
- The creation of a customer personal information database to help businesses market new products and services based on customer location, preferences and reactions
- Competitive advantage
Other Resources:
Hootsuite (case story)
Hootsuite (blog)
Submitted By: Rosanna D’Alessandro
To contact the author of this entry please email at: rosanna.dalessandro@gmail.com
If you have concerns as to the accuracy of anything posted on this site please send your concerns to Peter Carr, Programme Director, Social Media for Business Performance.