Social Media Monitoring of Vegan Ben & Jerry's- Part 1

For my Social Media Monitoring project I've been taking a look at Vermont based company Ben & Jerry's. I've been focusing on their new line of vegan products. The company has been up and running since 1978 always keeping with a theme of being creative as well as environmentally and health conscious. So this February it made a lot of sense when they announced their first non-dairy, vegan flavors.

Platforms
Ben & Jerry's is interactive with their customers mainly on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram. On these platforms they post photos, release news and respond to customers.

B&J's Facebook page has  8,089,916 followers. Posts are pretty frequent, ranging from multiple a day to at least one every day or so. The content is mainly focused on the ice cream but they also post a fair amount about current events and politics. There is also an area for visitor comments and company response.

Twitter is home to lots of customer interaction and content. Their Twitter has just 301,000 followers but they post very frequently (up to five times a day) and the content is more diluted with current events and politics than the Facebook content.

B&J's also utilizes Instagram to share photos to their 614,000 followers. Instagram is mainly used to share pictures of their treats and promote the product.

Throughout all of their platforms they are quick to acknowledge feedback, concerns and complaints showing that they care and are interested in their customers input.




Looking at Trends
Google Trends
I chose to look at Vegan Ben & Jerry's over the past 90 day's (comparing it to the company's trends over the same time period) and then to look closer at Vegan Ben & Jerry's over just the past 30 days.

The product release caused a spike followed by a slow decline which is mirrored at a larger scale by the whole company. There was a quick drop off after the 14th of Feb, which I believe was due to a lull in social media posting over the following days. Interest peaked and dropped off again on the 27th. The company remains much more buzzed about than the vegan line alone- but we can see that spikes in attention to the product line do impact the brand.

Meltwater IceRocket
Meltwater, a similar tool tells us about mentions over time within the blogosphere and on Twitter. The patterns on Meltwater seem to follow along with the patterns from Google Trends so no huge surprises here.



Social Mention

Social Mention allows us to look at the various aspects of the posts that we've been tracking. Here I've compared the whole month, week, and day to get a comprehensive picture of what is happening.

 

We can see from these metrics that most posts are neutral, meaning they are not strongly negative or positive. Reach, strength and passion are all relatively low. But as this is a new product, perhaps they haven't had time to build a great reputation for this line of treats yet. 

Feedback
It seems that frequent posting is the first step to popularity- but it's not enough on its own. As they are marketing toward very health conscious consumers they need to be careful and thorough about the content in the messages they're sending. They can't just focus on how delicious the flavors are like they would with a normal new release- they need to keep promoting the honorable origins of the ingredients as well flavor. They need to pay close attention to customer comments and stay on top of making changes to the products as needed. Every new release is bound to have some kinks that need to be worked out!