Starbucks on Facebook

As a brand, Starbucks is using Facebook to their full advantage in order to effectively reach their target audience and build a relationship with their consumers. Starbucks has many tabs within their Facebook page. The home page is currently advertising their Starbucks Card, which allows the customer to put money on it and use it like a credit card at Starbucks locations. Starbucks tied the card into Facebook by letting users manage their Starbucks Card balances and giving friends money on their Starbucks Cards right on Facebook.

Not only does Starbucks on Facebook have the normal Wall, where fans can post all about how much they love Starbucks, but any time a user on Facebook makes a complaint via a comment or picture on Facebook, a representative from Starbucks comments back, apologizing for their bad experience and encouraging them to talk to the Starbucks Customer Relations team.
Another page offered on Starbucks’ Facebook is “Starbucks Around The World,” which allows fans to see the other Facebook pages that Starbucks has in different countries such as Hong Kong, Russia, Spain, Australia, Brazil, and Puerto Rico among many others. The idea is that coffee is a global passion and now Starbucks community members across the globe can interact with each other, hopefully discussing their love of Starbucks.

Like many other companies on Facebook, Starbucks also uses the site to share events, photos, new products, new flavors, etc. According to fans, one important aspect of Starbucks’ presence on Facebook is that they effectively use status updates. The statuses provide two-way communication between company and fan, keeps the page current and entertaining, while giving the fans a reason to continue returning to the page. They post pictures from travels where to countries that produce the free-trade coffee that they use. They also use Facebook as a way to direct consumers to mystarbucksidea.force.com, which is a website Starbucks created to collect ideas from Starbucks customers in order to improve the Starbucks experience. This gives consumers the chance to voice their opinions and possibly have an impact on the company that they have a bond with.

The effectiveness of Starbucks on Facebook is proven by the 19,617,606 people that “liked” the page by noon on February 16th, 2011, and the numbers are still growing. While a large number of fans is never a bad thing, the key to effectiveness on Facebook is engagement. Many people on Facebook “like” and never visit it again after. By consistently offering new and interesting content, updating statuses, adding videos and photos, etc., the company can stay in the online lives of users, get them to interact with the company and with other like-minded consumers, and hopefully get them to purchase more from Starbucks.
According to a research report featured on AdAge, Starbucks meets many of the aspects needed to make an ideal viral channel (Rohrs, 14). They lead a conversation with content that keeps consumers coming back for more, engaging them in the product, experience, and overall Starbucks lifestyle. Starbucks allows their consumers to sell to other consumers instead of pushing their product onto their fans, taing advantage of their motivated audience to promote the brand across their network of friends (Rohrs, 14).  They also play it cool and instead of pushing product at their fans, they offer new and engaging pages different from other companies who use Facebook for simple promotion and coupons (Rohrs, 14). 

Sources:
http://adage.com/digitalalist10/article?article_id=142202
www.facebook.com/starbucks
Rohrs, Jeff., Stewert, Morgan (2010). Subscribers, Fans and Followers: Facebook X-Factors. Exact Target.