How eye-wear opened my eyes with Social Media
As you can tell from my photos I wear glasses. Getting glasses can be a real struggle. So, not only do I want to tell you about the glasses and how to procure a pair of these super amazing glasses yourself; I want to tell you how this taught me some things about social media and marketing.
Warby Parker isn’t like other eyeglasses retailers. Why is that? A group of students from the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania decided that the old-school way of purchasing glasses was, oh, so passe‘ and decided to do something different. In doing so they found that it was not without its challenges. Their model focused on the online purchasing movement but it encountered some snags, customers were unsure of purchasing eyeglasses online. Can you just hear it? “What?! Eyewear online… We would never get what we wanted.”
Social Media to the rescue
You may wonder how all this relates to the social media thing. As many know I am the HBIC of a number of Author groups on social media and I am forever saying, “engage!” How do we encourage our readers to follow us? How do we get them to want to continue to visit our group? Engage! Warby Parker’s example of ways to encourage transactional communication by consistently communicating with, and responding to, customer comments on their social media platforms. Regularly prompting customers to participate with not only their content but user-generated content… asking for photos of themselves wearing the glasses on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram (Mahoney, Tang, 2017). Encouraging user-generated content helped to dissuade the dissonance customers may have. Likewise, any social media marketing effort would do as well with it. Effective use of social media provides us with the opportunity to reach out to our customers (aka readers), offer an alternative to just the reviews they see on good ole’ Amazon. Warby Parker’s model allows new customers to hear about the product through an already trusted source, rather through the same ole tired self-promotion. Check out Warby Parker and see what their social presence tells you!