The River Island social team uses Sprout Social to publish a consistent stream of high-quality content, deliver top-tier customer service and gather insights from social listening to tailor content that’s a perfect fit for their followers.
Welcome to the Island
“We’re pretty social,” reads River Island’s Facebook bio. In the first half of 2020, the River Island social team published an average of nearly 400 posts per month across Instagram, Twitter and Facebook. Leading that team are River Island’s Social Media Marketing Manager Chloe Bebbington and Senior Social Media & Marketing Executive Kymberley Thomson.
Bebbington works within Sprout every day, focusing on the retailer’s organic strategy and approving the many messages they schedule.
A bit about Bots
River Island’s social strategy is not only about the content they’re publishing but how they’re supporting their customers. To help their customer service team respond to FAQs, River Island activated Sprout Chatbots on Facebook and Twitter.
Since the bots went live in mid-April with conversation flows developed by the River Island team, they’ve generated nearly 10,000 auto-responses on the brand’s behalf.
Talking shop using Social Listening
Retail is a highly competitive industry. If Thomson wants to look at conversations around something specific like denim campaigns, she can use the competitive analysis topic to measure River Island’s share of voice(SOV) compared to its competitors.
During the pandemic, the social team began reporting on SOV weekly and by channel to understand how their content streams were affecting that metric.
“Now, if we see a drop compared to the week before, we can ask ourselves: Did we have more IGTV content? Did we have more influencer support? What was happening in a larger sense that influenced the drop?” said Thomson.
The same is true in the weeks that River Island sees their SOV take off. “Again, we ask ourselves: Were we sharing more memes? Were more people commenting? Was there a big moment? Then we’re able to adapt our content and strategy around what drove that success, and make cases for building out new bespoke creative assets if that’s what the data is telling us works.”
5 mindfulness tips for good mental health ☺️ With yogi Lucy Sesto ? https://t.co/0TwILhUcez pic.twitter.com/fKHgw9CbUV
— River Island (@riverisland) July 10, 2020
Social data impacts the whole Island
When COVID-19 forced River Island’s warehouses and stores to close, the business really started to understand the importance of social data.
In a fiercely competitive industry, both in stores and on social, River Island manages to shine with sharp strategies, definitive data and a little help from Sprout.
