Danone’s Metrics-Focused Approach Brings Healthy Food to Consumers Worldwide

Danone’s social marketing team now know to prepare healthy results by more than just counting Facebook fans. But when Danone, the French multinational famous for dairy products and baby foods, began its social media presence in 2009, the company focused solely on ramping up the number of fans and followers.

Socialbakers helped us tremendously in getting out of this “fan obsession” and bring us to the next level of KPIs.

Chiara Ugozzoli
Global Digital & CRM Director

“To be honest, before using Socialbakers we were internally just looking at the number of fans. This is a very limited metric, because as you can imagine, it’s a very different reach to have 1 million fans in the US compared to the same number in, say, Slovenia,” says Chiara Ugozzoli, the Global Digital and CRM Director at Danone.

Once Danone began using Socialbakers, team members focused on relaying the company mission—bringing health through food to as many people as possible—via social media. But at first, their efforts were disorganized. “It all started very fragmented,” Ugozzoli says. Local marketers were free to make decisions about social and the company had not yet developed any sets of KPIs.

To remedy that, Ugozzoli and her colleagues began to take a more systematic approach. “We started to use Socialbakers, and the reason was very simple: we needed a state-of-the-art tool to set up and measure our performance.”

With help from Socialbakers, Danone’s team set up strategic KPIs. “We tracked not only reach, of course, but mostly engagement and page relevance,” Ugozzoli said. Additionally, Ugozzolli and her team now track performance of all of the company’s pages against the official KPIs at the central level as well as for local markets. This dual tracking gives all levels of management the ability to work together across distances and time zones to make sure that the KPIs are tracked and that each of the company’s pages is performing at its optimum level.

To this end, Ugozzoli’s team uses Socialbakers every day: “We have very positive feedback on the Socialbakers Analytics tool itself, as it helps us tremendously in the daily management of the pages.”

Quick Facts

• Using Socialbakers Analytics since January 2012.
• Founded in 1919
• Products sold on 5 continents
• Recorded sales of almost 19 billion euro in 2011
• More than 100,000 employees