3 Reasons Why Huggies Excels on Social Media

You would think that being an infant care brand on social media is cakewalk. After all, who can resist those adorable baby pictures and videos? But making the most out of your social media presence is not just about getting a load of ‘awww’s. If you aren’t convinced, take a look at how Huggies carefully plans and skillfully executes its social media strategy.

Using Analyze, I considered how Huggies performed on Twitter and Facebook during the period between 1st October – November 30th 2016.

Twitter

On Twitter, they had over 82,000 Followers. They had a follower growth of 4.6%. They had 26 proactive tweets during the period studied here. These garnered 555 Likes, 218 Replies and 525 Retweets

Content Analysis

I was very surprised to see that Huggies had tweeted 756 times during this period, including Retweets and Replies. Of this, only 26 were Proactive Tweets. Replies made up the major chunk of their Tweets(706). Take a look at the chart below:

It is remarkable that the social media manager has taken extreme care and patience to reply to so many users. 60 of these replies were put out on the 2nd of November. Could it be just because there were more Proactive Tweets on that day? Or did they have a contest? Let us explore why this happened:

Huggies published 7 Proactive Tweets that day. These circled around the Twitter party they organized as part of their #NoBabyUnhugged campaign. The event that took place at 2 P.M. EST involved a specialist Dr. Sears addressing the importance of hugs for newborn babies. The party promised goodies for six winners and one grand prize winner. Tweeple could enter the contest by tweeting out with the hashtags ‘#NoBabyUnhugged’ and ‘#sweeps’. This explains the flood of replies that they received on that day. Even more remarkable is the consistency with which these were replied to by the brand. The amazing thing is, these were not run-of-the-mill replies mindlessly sent out to everyone who Tweeted to them. The brand took care to personalize the replies. For instance, a mother sent a picture of her baby and Huggies replied:

@LesleyNagy He is too adorable, Lesley, and we love his little whale socks! How is the #momlife treating you so far?

— Huggies® (@Huggies) November 30, 2016

Such devotion rarely goes unappreciated.

Another thing that is worthy of note is the way the campaign was executed. They announced the event in advance. The event fit perfectly with the #NoBabyUnhugged campaign strategy. The brand spearheaded the initiative to have hugging volunteers in neo-natal care. The idea that hugs have an impact on the well-being of the new born child is communicated clearly. This cements Huggies diapers’ attempt to be just as caring and nurturing as a hug. This again, flows clearly into their product for preterm babies – Little Snugglers. Preemie babies who are too delicate to be physically hugged can feel warmth and protection with these carefully designed diapers.

While the event was in progress, they declared one of the winners of the contest. Then, Huggies went on to connect this campaign to a bigger issue. According to their tweet, one in three families have to choose between buying diapers and food. They built on this by announcing that they are founding sponsors of the Diaper Network that seeks change in this situation.

The #NoBabyUnhugged campaign was a rousing success. You need only look at the number of user tweets that contained the hashtag:

In addition to the 43 brand tweets that mentioned #NoBabyUnhugged, there were 4,503 user tweets with the same hashtag.

Customer Service

We saw what a terrific job Huggies did with the replies to user tweets. This is not a one-off occurrence. They are definitely a brand that makes full use of Twitter as a customer service tool. Take a quick look at this reply analysis chart:

As I mentioned earlier, they don’t have a standard ‘Please mail customercare@xyz.com’ reply that they use for any and every user Tweet. The problems brought up by users are carefully considered and necessary next steps are suggested. Huggies also had a higher Response Rate (14.3%) than the average Personal Care brand from North America (9.6%).

Consider the Average Reply Time as well:

On average, they reply around 2 hours after the user tweet is registered:

The chart below shows the Average Response Time of Huggies and its top competitors:

Evidently, Huggies beats its competition hands down when it comes to customer care.

Facebook

Huggies has an active presence on Facebook as well. They have over 1.3 million Fans on Facebook and experienced a fan growth of under 1%. They published 14 Posts in all. On the whole, these received close to 19,000 Likes, over 2,000 Comments and 5,644 Shares.

The No Baby Unhugged campaign stood out on their Facebook page as well. Of the 14 Posts, 8 were part of the campaign. The most engaging Post during the two month period was among this too.

While this Post had the lead in Shares, the following Post received the most Likes and Comments:

As you can see, here too, the brand has replied to every user comment. This is a great motivation for users to comment, thereby driving up engagement.

Promotion

Both these Posts had one thing in common: they had money behind it. Promotion allows brands to give their content a little push. This usually has a significant effect on the Reach and Engagement that these Posts receive. Let’s look at their promotion strategy in detail: Huggies promoted 4 Posts in all. Of these three were part of the No Baby Unhugged campaign. The other was a link to a news article about the move to install changing stations in men’s restrooms. The brand utilized their promotion efforts in the best possible way by ensuring that their video content around a key campaign got maximum reach. Videos, especially like the ones that Huggies promoted incur quite a bit of expenditure. It would be a shame if all that effort failed to make it to enough newsfeeds. One of these promoted Posts (which was a Facebook Ad) took the audience to the Huggies website. This is crucial for boosting website traffic and online sales.

Take a look at how the Promoted Posts fared compared to the rest on engagement and reach:

With such rich returns on reach and engagement, brands should chalk out a clear promotion strategy as part of their social media plan.

If you were to analyze the promotion habits of a few of their competitors, it will become quite clear that promotion is necessary to stay on top. Take a look at the percentage of Posts that these diaper brands promoted vis-a-vis the resulting surge in engagement:

This leads us to a simplistic conclusion that the more you promote, the more engagement you get. This is hardly the case. Consider the engagement that the promoted and organic Posts bring in:

Even though Babyganics promoted much more than Huggies, they received lesser engagement over all. Brands should not compromise on the quality of content that they publish. Rather, promotion should help stellar content reach a larger fraction of the audience.

Huggies’ social media strategy, and its campaign execution in particular, is something that all brands can emulate. Great customer service, thought-out content and a streamlined promotion strategy are essential for brands to succeed at social media marketing.

If you are wondering where you stand on these, check out Analyze. Benchmark your performance vis-à-vis the rest of the industry and see where you are missing out.