HSN Increases Brand Awareness Through Social Media Initiatives
By Anna Rose Welch, Editorial & Community Director, Advancing RNA
Through Twitter and Pinterest, the brand has developed a large base of loyal followers
HSN has seen some great success with its Pinterest initiatives this holiday season following the October launch of its “More the Merrier” board. In the past, the company — responsible for several different brands including Ballard Design, Frontgate, TravelSmith, and Garnet Hill — worked on building up separate groups of followers for each brand. However, this Christmas season the company decided to change its approach and set out to tie together its eight brands on Pinterest. The “More the Merrier” board highlighted curated collections of gift ideas from its various brands, which alerted brand followers to HSN’s other, perhaps unfamiliar brands. And it was a huge hit. The Pinterest board began logging in some of the highest numbers of followers HSN had ever seen. As of December 24th, in fact, the brand has more than 7,900 followers and is the brand’s third-most popular board ever.
Read: Taming The Social Media Frontier
According to Maggie Hatfield, HSN’s VP of emerging media marketing, Pinterest was the best place for the company to combine its eight brands in one place. “By strategically working across brands, we’ve been able to tell weekly theme stories,” she says. And these stories seem to be doing a good job engaging customers with HSN’s various brands, considering items features on this board have been repined two or three times more often than other items the brand has pinned.
Storytelling has been an important aspect of the brand for several years, according to HSN VP of advanced services, John McDevitt. He says, “HSN started to evolve it’s marketing strategy four years ago, when our current CEO Mindy Grossman felt it was more important for HSN to become a multichannel retailer that creates a curated shopping experience for its customers across multiple platforms. HSN had to have quality brands and designer with great stories; moreover, we had to have great storytellers to convey those stories to our customers. We don’t just hire hosts, we bring in experts or the designers themselves to tell the stories.”
Besides its Pinterest initiatives, the company has also focused its efforts on Twitter, which was an appealing and important social network for the company because it would alert a new customer base to the HSN brand. As Hatfield says, “We knew that a lot of our customers weren’t on Twitter. But there are plenty of people on Twitter interested in beauty products. We thought we could get those people to consider us in a new way.”
Like the “More the Merrier” board, the company saw great success in using Twitter to draw support for its television program, “Beauty Report,” which began airing in the spring. While the company started out with the campaign slowly, simply featuring a #beautyreport hashtag on TV, Facebook, and on Twitter, the company eventually integrated the television show onto its website, providing users with access to polls and ten-second calls to action to encourage customers to “join the conversation” on Twitter. There have been several times the #beautyreport hashtag has trended on Twitter for more than an hour and a half, making the show, and in turn the brand, one of the most popular topics on the network. Indeed, the number of posts about the brand is 320 times greater than in March when “Beauty Report” first aired. The company will continue to use this channel to generate attention for the brand and plans to reward its loyal and communicative customer base with 2-hour episodes of Beauty Report.
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