How A1 Telekom Austria uses Socialbakers to balance daily social media monitoring with long-term trend planning
For A1 Telekom Austria AG, online customer engagement is a finely-tuned service.
As telecommunications market leader in the country, A1 Telekom Austria uses social media not only to advertise mobile plans and products, but to also assist customers on purchasing decisions and cut down on support resolution time.
“If we can reach people with our content and they don’t feel like it’s just the next ad…it makes us more reliable,” said Wolfgang Sturm, Head of Social Media, AI Telekom Austria AG.
Since September 2013, A1 Telekom Austria’s social team has been using Socialbakers products to make sure the company’s online communications are strategic and effective.
While A1 Telekom Austria maintains six online channels for customer engagement, the company’s Facebook Page is the most active. The company’s 302,000 fans view the Page for breaking news direct from the company, links to hot unboxing videos of new smartphones and popular contests that reward engaged fans.
Using Socialbakers, A1 Telekom Austria’s social media team is able to target which Facebook users they think will benefit most from their ads, and prepare special posts for each target audience. Using tailored content for specific times of day “you can switch a lot between the customer bases, so you are spending less money and getting directly to the right customer,” explains Wolfgang.
In addition more effectively controlling the daily and minute-to-minute interactions on social media, Socialbakers also assists the A1 Telekom Austria team in long- term planning, and in staying afoot on industry behavior trends.
For us it’s really important to see how competitors develop. If they are changing something, we can see it quite easily in Socialbakers.
Wolfgang Sturm, Head of Social Media, AI Telekom Austria AG
A1 Telekom Austria’s social media outreach includes campaigns and events that weave together customer and company interests. When the company set out to do a YouTube smartphone test – an important value for consumers – they knew that typically these kinds of videos don’t go viral.
But when the social media team asked customers to think up unusual tests to perform on the device – and then used the most over-the-top recommendations, including a fire brigade spraying the phone with water – they created engaging, shareable content that quickly got 1.5 million views.
This kind of customer-centered outreach represents one of A1 Telekom Austria’s social media goals: to be part of customer’s lives. “Our goal is to gain social reach,” Sturm says.
Buoyed by several award-winning campaigns like the mobile test video, the social media team at A1 Telekom Austria uses analytical tools, great teamwork and careful planning to set goals and maintain its high rate of customer engagement.
It’s really important to set goals, and to set goals that you can reach and communicate those goals and the success of campaigns. We achieve those goals with Socialbakers.
Wolfgang Sturm, Head of Social Media, AI Telekom Austria AG
Synchronizing offline campaigns such as television advertising or event sponsorship and “second screen” interaction with the company’s large Facebook community is a huge strategy for the brand.
With this approach, they analyze what content brings the most engagement from customers and customers’ networks and the most effective timing for such posts. Using Socialbakers, A1 Telekom Austria’s social media team can fine-tune their synchronized campaigns at a granular level to best match their customers’ online habits and interests.