For Wayfair, one of the largest online destinations for the home, it was important in 2017 that we continued to build and strengthen our online presence through social media, illustrate Wayfair as the best place to shop for all things home, and build brand affinity with our existing and new customers. Social media's influence and impact on a business is clear, and we set ambitious goals for our Facebook, Instagram and Twitter profiles to set ourselves up for a successful 2017.
Our goal on Facebook was to expand the reach of our organic posts, a strategy which included a heavy emphasis on video content. For Instagram, the objective was simple: drastically grow the following for our branded profile. And for Twitter, we wanted to decrease the negative sentiments shared in our replies, and find solutions to customer's problems.
On Facebook, we utilized original video content to help expand our reach and better understand our customer. We built an in-house team of specialists, who conceptualized, produced and edited content tailored to our Facebook followers and their interests. Publishing content that resonates with an audience requires a lot of testing and we successfully tested various video concepts until determining the winning formula. Videos highlighting innovative and fun furniture and décor products, such as the Murphy bed cabinet and portable trailer hitch hammock were some of our biggest wins of the year. Once we identified what worked, our in-house team scaled and produced a steady stream of video assets that our audience loves to see. This "winning" content was highly engaging with fans and as a result weighted more heavily in Facebook's algorithm. The combination helped us accomplish our goal of increasing reach on the platform by 409% YoY.
To increase our Instagram audience, we knew we had to diversify our content mix and engage with the Instagram community in new and unique ways that feel native the platform. One effective avenue we explored was an increase in partnerships with Instagram influencers and celebrities, such as Sean and Catherine Lowe, to spread the word about Wayfair and help drive traffic to our page. Another key to our Instagram's 2017 success was the focus on user generated content, through the promotion of the hashtag #wayfairathome, as well as photo contests involving Wayfair Registry and the holiday season. These campaigns and diverse content types helped drive a 774% increase in traffic to our Instagram profile and wayfair.com.
We receive ample customer outreach on Twitter, so for this platform we have focused on creating a comfortable and transparent online presence in hopes to moderate and solve e-commerce's biggest pain point: customer dissatisfaction. We built a best-in-class social moderation team that consisted of customer service specialists in order to improve our response time and attentiveness to our consumers. At Wayfair, our focus is always on the customer, and building a communication line between the business and those that support us is pivotal to long-term success. We are happy to report that negative sentiment on the platform decreased by 20% YoY in 2017, and we are looking forward to continuing our online dialogue with our followers and customers.
Facebook: Increased reach by 409% Year-Over-Year (YoY)
Instagram: Increased audience by 114% YoY
Twitter: Negative sentiment decreased by 20% YoY
We have successfully built up audience bases across social with followers who enjoy our content and in return, reward us with positive engagement. Real-time analytics have allowed us to test and optimize content at a very fast pace.
In 2018 we will be implementing learnings from each platform across channels. Our strategic goals across Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter revealed valuable insights that will help us deliver the best customer experience possible to every Wayfair social fan.
So, what does 2018 look like for the Wayfair social fans? Each day they will enjoy fresh content that makes shopping for furniture more fun than ever before. They will be able to chat with customer service agents in real time on any style or service related questions. And they will be supported by an involved community of furniture and décor enthusiasts.
