Sirisha Pochiraju

Long before the digital age conventional way of advertising a product into the market is through newspapers, radio, magazines, word of mouth or television. A local-social strategy by Walmart to make more accessible to their communities is by launching store level Facebook page.  

The recent advent of social media has created a platform for companies to market their products.  However, there are various social media presently in the market. Wal-Mart chooses face book as a media to market its products because face book has 165 million users and it is considered to be the best platform for advertising.

Walmart has committed for a social local strategy to attract online customers. It has launched thousands of face book pages.  Facebook timeline provides the online opportunity to interact with customers and to the nearest Walmart stores.  The users can enter a zip code in the Facebook page and this would direct to the nearest Walmart stores. This strategy would help lower the advertising expenditures and more engagement with customers.  Walmart gets about 150 million shoppers monthly whereas Facebook has 160 million users.  Walmart found a great potential to reach such a large volume of Facebook users and thus launched a Facebook page. They realized that having a local Facebook page is better strategy for marketing.    Now, they have about 9.4 million fans on Walmart local Face book pages. It lets users to find deals, coupons promotions online, and black Friday-discounted merchandise in the local stores.  

Designated store employees who have received special training on social media are responsible for maintaining the face book pages, respond to customer’s questions and issues in timely fashion, and evaluate their social media marketing based on social media metrics. The analytics is done by several different ways:

•      Likes/dislikes, Shares and Comments  about  particular  products  in a page

•      How far the content is reaching the community?

•      Responding  to the positive and negative conversations accordingly

•      Measuring popular impressions.

Social media is enabling Walmart to go back to the future by providing an authentic customer service. They outreached the local communities by sharing targeted local promotions, and discussing town news or events.

As technology continues to shape the retail experience, the “My Local Walmart” Facebook application now allows shoppers to use social media to track exactly what’s in their Walmart stores and when including:

·         New Products: From the latest LED-TV to organic dog food, customers can now get updates on products available in their local Walmart.

·         Rollbacks: Fans will be notified of additional savings on already everyday low prices for items ranging from popular hair care products to favorite cereals.

·         In-Store Events: Information will be shared for family-friendly events and product demonstrations. For example, in the next few weeks, customers planning their holiday shopping for one of the busiest shopping days of the season – the day-after-Thanksgiving – will be able to print their store map via the “My Local Walmart” application.

Apart from Facebook, Walmart uses integrated marketing communications tools to ensure that all users in different social media such as twitter, youtube, and google plus can also be reached.

Walmart continues to put people at the center of their marketing, in this case by bringing relationships to life locally. This could be one of the reasons that Facebook Walmart Page is generating more popularity than the corporate pages.

Given a choice, do you prefer Walmart Facebook page or the corporate page?

Link to the article: http://adage.com/article/digital/walmart-local-facebook-store-level-messaging/230327/