I joined GameStop in 2019 to run the brand social channels. Previously, an outside agency was handling things, but the company wanted to bring social in-house and re-focus on a fresh strategy. I partnered with our community manager to build-out a strategy that centered around "speaking the language of our audience". To us, this meant crafting an online persona and voice that our followers could relate to.
Content-wise, our approach was to balance this new strategy of a conversational tone, memes (as long as they were relevant and served to positively promote our brand), and live event coverage that showed we had our finger on the pulse of the games industry.
Being a retailer, there was still a lot of promotional content that needed to be considered. We couldn’t just abandon all of that for memes (as much as we sometimes wanted to) because that social coverage was a big part of the agreements between us and our vendor partners. We had to find the best way to marry our new approach while still adhering to some of the ways we’d done things in the past. Our thinking was, if we can entertain, engage, and educate our audience daily, they’d understand when we had to post something more traditional.
It probably goes without saying that we needed a little time to dial this strategy in, but once we did, we began to see engagement steadily climb and our channels grow. This was especially true on Twitter (now known as “X”), where our casual tone and tendency to meme and make use of fun, outside the box (for a brand at least) ideas such as using ASCII art made our content resonate with our audience. On Twitter especially, our “fun” posts caused our engagement numbers increase pretty much right away. This was especially true with one of my favorite posts we did – the “Cat meme” as we called it.
Long story short, we recognized that we could use a meme that was popular in that moment to make a statement about something unique to our business that our audience would react to in a (more or less) positive way. So, to put it in checklist form:
Not only did the post perform well from a KPI standpoint, we saw lots of great brands chiming in on the post, including Wendy’s, where they posted some custom Mario Maker levels (genius).
That’s just one example, though. We got really good at recognizing trends that gave us opportunities to highlight the brand in positive ways, and we were quickly able to prove out our theory – if we kept people entertained, engaged, and were educating them where appropriate, they didn’t really mid the more “promotional” content we posted. In fact, we saw the engagement on that type of content improve as well.
This is all great, but how to spread this sort of success to other platforms? Easy – screenshots. We would post screenshots of our best performing tweets and along with some minimal “commentary” to other platforms, especially Instagram and Facebook. Our Instagram audience especially loved this format and these were frequently our highest performing posts many weeks.
After posting, we made sure to go into the comments/replies and engage with people there. This is where I really discovered the value of comment engagement. As I mentioned on LinkedIn last week, the effort is pretty minimal, but the benefits are usually huge.
This also turned out to be one of the most fun parts of posting. Getting to see people’s reactions in realtime was great. We were always so excited about the post we had crafted, that we’d immediately pop into the replies to see what people were saying. Admittedly, sometimes, the reaction was better than others, but it was still fun.
Seasoned social media managers will know exactly what I’m talking about here: it’s not uncommon for a post that you carefully planned and crafted to fall flat on its face, while a post that you randomly throw out there for fun ends up going viral. There’s just no way to predict what will hit.
That’s sort of the essence of my time running social at GameStop – throwing it against the wall and seeing if it sticks. We melded careful planning and professionalism with an intense love of experimentation.
From day one, we were given enormous freedom to try new things. As a result, we definitely made some mistakes, but we did so in a supportive environment that allowed for that. When it comes to learning how to run brand social accounts, you really ask for a better situation than that.
Are there some things I wish I could go back and do differently with the knowledge of social and the benefit of hindsight that I have now? Sure, but I’m super proud of the work our team did back in those days. We went on to receive promotions based on our work, the opportunity to speak to and train store managers at the GameStop Manager’s Conference in 2019, and establish relationships across the industry, simply based on the fact that we were having fun on social.
It doesn’t get any better than that.
Comments