In 2019, we focused Twitter efforts on building brand loyalty and attracting new customers by creating a feed that brought the in-store experience online in a fun, relatable way. On Twitter, this meant creating a feed that tapped into trending moments in a tone of voice that seamlessly fit into the social feeds of those guests and inspired them to engage.
To develop the most relevant tone and reflect current trends we looked to the experts – our guests. Through social listening and daily moderation, we looked to understand, “What do they care about?”, “How do they talk about their Target experience?” and, “What do they talk about when they’re not talking about us?”.
What we learned is that our guests have a love for Target like no other, and many already personified the brand as their Target run “bae” or “bestie” in everyday engagements. In response, we shifted the focus of our organic tweets from promotions to testing a variety of content that tapped into customer and cultural conversations in different formats. Each day, we used social listening and trendspotting across platforms to find relevant conversations, memes, and new formats.
We would then come together to brainstorm ways for Target to personalize the trend and ensure it was on-brand - or create our own. This has been one of the most successful strategies of 2019, as exemplified by the engagement levels driven by the "Area 51", "Today's Tea" and "We Really, Really” tweets.
Target’s 1:1 response strategy also leaned more heavily into brand love engagements with guests and fellow brands. We began to proactively identify opportunities for brand-to-brand engagement to extend content visibility and further refine our persona. In addition to this, we pushed the boundaries on our brand voice when responding to our guests. A data-driven testing approach revealed that a brand voice leveraging a slightly flirty tone and a personable, relatable delivery drove significant increases in engagement.
In taking these steps, our persona successfully shifted from being a leading retailer on social to one that truly mirrored the unique position the brand holds in the minds of Target guests.
After shifting the brand’s persona and response strategy to bring cultural conversations to life, Target’s Twitter page saw a 57% increase in total engagements from 2018 to 2019. The most engaged content of the year received over 149,000 total engagements and successfully tapped into the Target experience while staying true to the culture cultivated on Twitter.
The evolution on Twitter wasn’t a one and done event, Target continued to refine and improve the strategy, creating content that brought guests and die-hard fans together. From 2018 to 2019 there was a 59% increase in the number of tweets receiving 5,000+ total engagements, confirming the evolved brand voice was more strongly connecting with Target’s audience.
The outpouring of love and accolades our brand received from our passionate fans further underscored the resonance of the new content strategy. Guests described the brand voice as “woke,” “on point,” “hip,” “clever,” and “relevant.” This article from Apartment Therapy, "Whover Runs Target's Twitter Account Has Been Reading Our Minds" - highlighted our shift into showing our guests we truly see them, "Whoever is behind Target’s Twitter account has been diving deep into all of our brains. It is like they know how to speak right to our souls."
By listening to our fans' love for the brand, we further solidified Target’s unique place on Twitter and with our audience.
