America's Most Social Small Business: The Sweet Sixteen
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2014-03-03 20:44:48 UTC
As March Madness gears up in the sports world, Mashable and Capital One Spark are on the hunt for America's Most Social Small Business.
This week, we've narrowed down our first round of eliminations from the bracket-style challenge, cutting the initial list of 32 finalists down to the remaining Sweet 16.
Our seeding system, which is based on a mix of social fans/followers and company size, led to some pretty interesting pairings — a small farm in upstate New York vs. a Network Attached Storage (NAS) provider, and a toy company versus a Los Angeles brewery, to name a few.
And while all of these small businesses are truly rocking it on Facebook, sadly only half could progress. In the first round of competition, there were some blow-outs, some upsets and a few serious contenders emerged as possible champions. If this first round tells us anything about the upcoming weeks, it's that these small businesses are fierce — be sure to follow the entire competition on Twitter with the hashtag #SocialSmallBiz.
Below are the final victors progressing on to round two, which will be decided based on Twitter performance.
Round One Winners and Twitter Match-Ups
Image: Mashable composite
The Play-by-Play
Here is a brief summary of each "game" as we provide a breakdown of our deliberations.
Legendary Whitetails vs. Cake, Hope, and Love
Winner: Legendary Whitetails
In our first round, Legendary Whitetails proved an engaging presence on Facebook. With a full-time social media manager, the company speaks directly to its audience, challenging fans to prove why they are #legendary. Legendary Whitetails personalizes its page with custom, branded photo memes that resonate with its fan base, strengthening the bond between brand and audience.
Cake, Hope, and Love creates camaraderie among a smaller (albeit loyal) audience and interacts with customers in a very down-to-earth, colloquial manner. They post pictures of their deliciously creative cake products — we can only imagine these mouthwatering images lure sweet-toothed fans in the door.
Ultimately, Legendary Whitetails takes the cake with its audience of a whopping 870,600+ fans and high levels of engagement.
ShortStack vs. O2Fitness
Winner: ShortStack
A brand successfully making the most of its social platforms will not only publish content about its own products and services, but will also link to articles and media from external, reputable sources that are relevant to its audience. ShortStack, with more than 66,800 fans, does this well, and essentially creates a content hub for other marketers that sparks great engagement rates with every post.
While O2 Fitness, with a smaller audience of 10,536 fans, did not surpass ShortStack’s efforts in this round, they do an incredible job of engaging fans with refer-a-friend getaway contests, weekly mantras and fitness tips; their posts are also accompanied by inspirational imagery, which tends to share well.
The DigiTour vs. The Mailbox
Winner: The Mailbox
The DigiTour, a social media and music festival, uses captivating, custom imagery on its Facebook page to excite fans, and does a great job updating its fan base about current events, upcoming performances and venues.
Content-wise, The Mailbox scores big with its original trivia posts, sweepstakes and calls to action. The magazine's Facebook page publishes a mixture of custom content, blog posts and external articles relevant to its fans (its target audience is education professionals, as the publication focuses on resources for teachers). Mailbox's strategy stays up-to-date with educational trends and encourages a great deal of audience interaction, with some posts garnering over 700 shares.
Blue Bottle Coffee vs. The Home T
Winner (by a hair): Blue Bottle Coffee
This match-up came right down to the buzzer in somewhat of an upset. Underdog Blue Bottle Coffee carefully curates both the imagery and verbiage on its Facebook page, garnering exceptional rates of engagement from a smaller audience of more than 28,000 fans.
This was a tough competition, as The Home T interacts with its wide audience by highlighting user images and capitalizing on hometown pride. We've got to give props to The Home T for its creative efforts marketing a relatively simple product — growing a fan base this large is no easy task.
Both small businesses have roughly the same amount of fans ‘talking about’ the brands, yet this metric proves to be more impressive for Blue Bottle Coffee with a smaller fan base. Although a close call, Blue Bottle takes the win with effective storytelling, witty posts and original imagery.
Sevenly vs. SumAll
Winner: Sevenly
A cause-oriented clothing brand, Sevenly’s page impresses with its balanced focus on social action issues and the company's products. With a different campaign each week, the brand not only spotlights its own dedicated employees, but also challenges its audience to get involved, purchase products and help make a difference. The staff are passionate and dedicated to the causes they support, which is evident in the company's Facebook content.
SumAll, a social analytics platform and tool, has a mixture of links to their marketing analytics blog and interesting industry articles that appeal to its audience. However, Sevenly’s page — with a higher engagement rate — creates an open, curated space for users to interact with the brand in a two-way conversation, and thus moves on to the next round.
HealthDesigns.com vs. Out of Print
Winner: Out of Print
Both HealthDesigns.com and Out of Print do a great job connecting with their fans through interesting content and thoughtful engagement strategies, making this match-up a tough one to call. HealthDesigns.com offers fun behind-the-scenes looks at their business, which lends to fan feedback and brand loyalty. However, Out of Print diligently monitors user comments, adapts to social media trends and creates content specifically for an audience of literature-lovers, posting author spotlights, intriguing quotes and open book debates. Out of Print’s Facebook page becomes a reader’s safe haven, and lends itself to high levels of engagement per post.
ShopRiffraff vs. Juil
Winner (UPSET): Juil
ShopRiffraff.com certainly has acquired a large audience of more than 410,000 fans; however in this round’s Cinderella story, Juil beats out its larger competitor due to a unique and creative fan engagement strategy. Because ShopRiffRaff posts almost exclusively about its own brand, with numerous product posts per day, there are fewer opportunities for users to build a strong online community based on interests, style or industry-related news.
On the other hand, Juil provides links to external content that will excite and educate fans, and daily blog posts displayed in a fun way that drives traffic to their site. Juil urges customers to #StayConnected, an effective use of a custom hashtag.
Due to diversity of content and awesome engagement efforts for a comparatively small audience, Juil sets a great example for businesses with smaller fan bases.
KicksOnFire.com vs. A Real Change International
Winner: KicksOnFire.com
Both competitors in this bracket stand on par in regards to Facebook audience size and percentage of fans “talking about” the brand, yet KicksOnFire.com showcases its products with great imagery, as well as develops a casual rapport with its fans that builds brand loyalty.
Sandi Krakowski of A Real Change International is a Forbes Top Influencer, and utilizes her knowledge of social media and digital marketing to provide a wealth of articles and inspiration for her fans. While connecting with an audience of followers on a personal level is clearly a successful approach for Krakowski, KicksonFire.com wins this round with a whopping fan base of over 929,000.
Suja Juice vs. Strange Brew Coffeehouse
Winner: Suja Juice
Suja Juice has garnered an enormous audience of over 380,000 fans and has managed to keep them entertained and engaged in conversation by posting original content related to healthy living, requesting user-generated content and utilizing striking imagery every day. We're also big fans of Suja Juice's well designed cover photo, profile image and app icons, making the brand page one of the most aesthetically pleasing and cohesively designed of the competition.
While Strange Brew Coffeehouse posts captivating images of their products and customers, the brand’s audience engagement level just can't compete with that of Suja Juice. Still, props to Strange Brew for integration of humor and a personalized touch with each post.
sweetgreen vs. Grado Labs
Winner (by a hair): Grado Labs
Perhaps the closest match-up of round one, this competition was a real nail-biter.
Both sweetgreen and Grado Labs showcase their products beautifully and creatively, and the brands also have a unique way of interacting with fans on the page. Grado is a family owned business dating back to 1953 — this is evident in their content and responses to fans — and their social efforts are actually managed within the family. Grado creates a welcoming fan community with consistent social interaction.
Sweetgreen capitalizes on wit and imagery with their posts, which brings them a lot of online and in-store fans — and as we've mentioned before on Mashable , they have a commendable social presence.
Grado Labs wins this one by a hair due to their close-knit community, gorgeous utilization of imagery and overall engagement strategy.
Angel City Brewery vs. Fat Brain Toys
Winner (UPSET): Angel City Brewery
Another upset, Angel City Brewery advances with an audience size that is approximately a quarter of Fat Brain Toys' audience.
What stands out about the Brewery’s engagement strategy is the feeling of community, connectedness and playfulness that the brand creates through its photos, sweepstakes, posts about products and relevant industry news. Fat Brain Toys also runs contests and giveaways that excite its customers, but ultimately cannot compete with the deeper levels of engagement, custom imagery and interaction that Angel City Brewery masters.
Beekman1802 vs. Synology
Winner: Beekman 1802
Beekman 1802, a farm managed by Amazing Race winners Josh Kilmer-Purcell and Dr. Brent Ridge, doesn’t rely on its established presence in the public eye when conversing with its large Facebook audience online. The farm managers are able to keep engagement levels high with recurring posts such as “The Five Most Beautiful Things in the World (this week),” photo memes of farm animals and industry insights. While Synology does a great job speaking to their fan base and responding to customer inquiries on their page, Beekman 1802 wowed us with their ongoing efforts.
Georgetown Bagelry vs. Mud Puppies
Winner (UPSET): Mud Puppies
In this match-up, both Georgetown Bagelry and Mud Puppies impressed us with their relatable, engaging and quirky posts. Georgetown Bagelry has a considerable audience of more than 57,400 fans, with whom they interact with on a personal level.
However, in relation to their larger audience, the percentage of fans "talking about" and engaged with the brand cannot compete with that of Mud Puppies. The Austin-based, full-service dog business has relatively high engagement levels considering their much smaller fan base. Mud Puppies introduces its audience to adorable pets as well as spreads awareness of tools that are relevant to pet owners.
Serengetee vs. Jasmine Star
Winner: Serengetee
Serengetee, a clothing company that incorporates grassroots causes and global pattern fabrics into its product lines, advances over photographer and blogger Jasmine Star. While Star interacts with her fans through educational and funny picture posts, Serengetee takes its engagement to the next level by focusing on its fans — the company has a ‘fan of the week’ feature, runs special giveaways and runs its page through a professional lens. Both competitors have similar audience sizes and engagement rates, yet Serengetee takes the win with a unique and captivating strategy.
Plated vs. New York Grilled Cheese
Winner: Plated
This match-up, dubbed "the battle of the food porn," was filled with mouthwatering pictures, posts and products.
Plated and N.Y. Grilled Cheese are both doing unique things on Facebook to engage and unite foodies across the nation. N.Y. Grilled Cheese uses custom images, hosts contests and raises money for charitable causes such as Florida's AIDS Walk through fundraisers (like a recent ‘CheeseMania’ extravaganza). However, Plated truly generates interest in their recipes by sharing relevant content, starting Facebook discussions and challenging fans to create captions for quirky food-related videos. With a larger audience and a high level of fan engagement, Plated moves on to round two.
RecruitMilitary vs. Endangered Species Chocolate
Winner: RecruitMilitary
Two very different small businesses were pitted against one another in this round one match-up — a philanthropic chocolate company and a military-to-civilian job recruitment site.
Endangered Species Chocolates has a nice mixture of product-based content and resources for both animal lovers and food aficionados. RecruitMilitary has very high level of engagement on each post, and posts content that is both meaningful and helpful for veterans on the job search. One tactic that RecruitMilitary implements is “Find a Job Friday,” for which veterans post their dream job title and location, and RecruitMilitary responds to every post with a match from its database of 596,595 jobs.
While both sites have a medium-sized audience with interesting content, RecruitMilitary maintains a high conversation level and produces an engaged community, propelling them to round two of the competition.
Coming up
Round 2: Twitter Presence — this next round will be based on each business' performance on Twitter, including number of followers/RTs, engagement, wittiness, etc. We will be paying attention to follower/following ratios, frequency and quality of tweets, creativity and more. Engagement will be weighed against total volume of followers, so as not to favor businesses with larger followings.
Round 3: Use of imagery — this round will focus on how each brand utilizes visuals, including platforms such as Instagram, Pinterest and YouTube, as well as how the business incorporates visuals into its overall social media presence.
Round 4: Brand voice — we'll look at how each brand has developed its online voice, including cohesiveness, humor, engagement, uniqueness, etc.
Dates to Remember
March 6: Mashable Most Social Small Business Elite Eight announced
March 10: Mashable Most Social Small Business Final Four announced
March 13: Mashable Most Social Small Business National Championship Game announced
March 18: America’s Most Social Small Business crowned
Which small business do you think should take the title of America's Most Social? Tell us in the comments
Topics: Business, Facebook, Marketing, America's Most Social Small Business, Small Business
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