Which companies are doing the best job of leveraging social media to reach customers, boost their brands and sell stuff? The answers—based on data from Austin, Texas-based consultancy Dachis Group—may surprise you.
With recipe websites in English and Spanish, a presence on Facebook, Twitter and YouTube, and more than 70 product lines inspiring conversations across the Internet, Kraft comes in at No. 1 on Crain’s ranking of Chicago’s most effective social-media marketers.
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1. Kraft Foods Inc.
3 Lakes Drive, Northfield 60093; (847) 646-2000; KraftFoodsCompany.com
From the Tuesday before Thanksgiving through the evening of the holiday, Kraft Foods’ culinary staff were available to answer questions about meal preparation posted on the company’s Facebook page.
It’s one of the ways the Northfield food products giant combines cooking and social media to engage consumers, says Katie Williams, senior director of consumer relationship marketing at Kraft.
Ms. Williams, 38, oversees KraftRecipes.com, which contains 30,000 recipes and received about 80 million total visits last year, and the Kraft Foods Facebook page, where more than 770,000 fans can swap recipes, photos and cooking tips.
“When they want recipes, they go to the website. When they want to share their passion, they go to Facebook,” says Ms. Williams, who also is responsible for Kraft’s Twitter feed, which has about 27,000 followers.
Kraft has social-media platforms for more than 70 product lines such as the Oreo cookie brand (which had 23.6 million “likes” on Facebook as of Nov. 15, the date Crain’s data was collected) and macaroni and cheese (with 564,000 “likes”). The company maintains a YouTube channel with cooking demonstrations that have received more than 7.2 million total views since June 2007.
A Spanish language Facebook site, Comida Kraft, has enjoyed an uptick in activity since the company launched its “Share Your Latin Flavor” campaign last May. Mexican celebrity chef Alfredo Oropeza posted five recipes a month to ComidaKraft.com and answered questions about them during a live Twitter exchange.
“Consumers could access them and share stories (on Comida Kraft’s Facebook page) about how they incorporate Latin culture and share tradition with their families,” Ms. Williams says. She credits the campaign with helping increase traffic to the Facebook page in November by 100% from the previous year.
Comida Kraft also has a high engagement rate, which Kraft measures as the ratio of the number of people liking a Facebook page or posting to the number of fans. “We try to ensure we’re maintaining a level of at least one interaction per 1,000 fans,” Ms. Williams says. “Some of our sites blow away that benchmark.”