Soy Mocha Please – Facebook & Community

By Julie Burgmeier

La Crema Coffee Facebook posting from yesterday: 

Offering $2.00 16oz Any Flavor drinks for the rest of the day 🙂 and just for a special someone soy mocha’s are $1.00 for a TALL.

Boy did that get MY attention!  And what perfect timing.  I was getting ready to run my ballot to the drop-off box in front of the library, so I grabbed my buck and skipped across the street.   To my pleasant surprise, a friend I haven’t seen for a long time is at La Crema ordering a coffee too.  Between good banter and laughs I feel connected to my community.  (Social Media made that interchange happen.)   I can’t wait to spread the word to all of my Facebook friends the next time La Crema Coffee posts a special.   (Viral marketing at a local level.)

Now let’s take a look at a corporate giant, Starbucks, and its Facebook fan page.  Starbucks has almost 5 million fans,  587 discussion topics,  15 fan videos, 1073 fan photos, and their info box states “follow Starbucks on Twitter”.   However, there isn’t much interaction between the fans and Starbucks.  It’s as if the Starbucks fans are all just talking at each other and even using the platform to promote themselves.  After checking out a days worth of Starbucks fan page action, I  noticed Starbucks did post once and had  3200 fans give the post a thumbs up and left 203 comments within 5 hours of the Starbucks post/announcement.  I thought that was pretty good interaction.  However, why doesn’t Starbucks answer some of the questions asked by fans?   

For comparison, I checked out the community effect of a Facebook fan page at a local level.  The Black Drop Coffeehouse in Bellingham, WA has won many local “best coffee shop” awards,  so I thought I would start there.  Their Facebook fan page stats:  366 fans, 36 fan photos, and their  info box states “we make kick-ass coffee”.  The Black Drop posts are interspersed with customer interaction and personality.   The Black Drop wall appears more like a conversation where the Starbucks wall feels like a crazy crowd of people not knowing which direction to go.  I became a fan of the Starbucks page in hopes a free coupon might come my way someday.  I joined the Black Drop fan page to get a feel of a community different than mine.  

La Crema doesn’t even have a fan page, but uses Facebook to create community which in turn has a viral marketing effect.  Starbucks has a huge fan base across the world and the Facebook fan page brings it all together.  Black Drop uses their Facebook fan page to build community at a local level.  Facebook now has over 325 million users and is gaining approximately 10 million users a month.  Facebook users now surpass the population of the USA which  is right around 304 million.  Whether you are building community at a local level or an international level, Facebook fan pages should be a part of your social media strategy.