With all the talk about the role of social media in marketing these days, many brands are turning to Facebook and Twitter in an effort to connect with today’s consumers.  Adding further fuel to this trend, there seems to be no shortage of experts proclaiming Facebook and Twitter “must-use” marketing tools for businesses.

So, we thought it would be useful to take a closer look at our unique corner of the world, to see how mattress companies in particular are using these platforms and what successes are being achieved.  What is the role of social media in the mattress industry?  And what goals should mattress companies be prioritizing with this emerging media channel?

Warning: This is a lengthy (and rather wonky!) post, so if you’d prefer to skip the gory details and go straight for the key take-away’s, just scroll down to the Analysis and/or Conclusion sections toward the bottom!

A High-Level View

As a starting point, we focused our research on our industry’s 5 largest mattress manufacturers and 5 largest specialty retailers.  This gave us a more manageable scope, and the success of this group seems like a useful leading indicator, since these are generally the mattress brands investing the most money and effort in Facebook and Twitter.

We started by looking at how these companies have been doing in collecting social media fans. Mind you, we know full well that measuring business success based on the number of Facebook “Likes” or Twitter “Followers” is no more accurate than measuring someone’s professional success by the number of phone numbers they keep in their contact list.  But since so many social media campaigns have the express goal of driving Likes and Followers (eg, promotions or contests that you can enter by Liking or Following that company), we thought it would be an interesting metric nonetheless.

Here is what we found:

Manufacturers

• Manufacturer A — 258K Likes, 0 Followers* (not using Twitter)
• Manufacturer B– 69K Likes, 5K Followers
• Manufacturer C — 42K Likes, 5K Followers
• Manufacturer D — 42K Likes, <1K Followers
• Manufacturer E — 3K Likes, 3K Followers

Total — 415K Likes, 14K Followers

Retailers

• Retailer A — 6K Likes, 1K Followers
• Retailer B — 4K Likes, 1K Followers
• Retailer C — 4K Likes, 2K Followers
• Retailer D — 1K Likes, 8K Followers
• Retailer E — 2K Likes, 1K Followers

Total – 17K Likes, 13K Followers

A Deeper Dive on Facebook Engagement

Next, since social media marketing is supposed to be all about “engagement,” we thought we’d take a deeper look at how much consumer engagement is being generated by these Facebook efforts.  To evaluate this, we used the statistics that Facebook provides for “People Talking About This” — which provide a total of any and all interactions that Facebook users have with this company through Facebook in the past week.  We borrowed our methodology from a recent study conducted by the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute, an independent research group.  Accordingly, we then separated out “New Likes” — which are included in the “People Talking About” number — to get a sense for how much existing fans actually engage with the company after the initial “Like.”

A Deeper Dive on Twitter Engagement

While we were at it, we decided to take a look at Twitter engagement as well.  To estimate this, we used stats on the number of @mentions of each brand over the past 30 days (as provided by Topsy) to get a sense for the frequency with which people are talking about that brand on Twitter.  Comparing this with the number of Followers they have gives us a (rough, and probably overstated) approximation of how engaged these Followers are.

Note that these @mentions do not necessarily represent unique users (ie, the same user may be responsible for more than one mention of a given brand).  Thus, relative to the Facebook engagement statistics (which are based on unique users), the Twitter statistics will tend to appear misleadingly larger.  So, in an effort to make a more apples-to-apples comparison with Facebook, we assumed that each “mentioner” mentioned that brand 2 times in the past 30 days.

Analysis

So, what can we learn from all these numbers?  Let’s try to add some useful context as to how these numbers stack up, before we summarize our conclusions.

Reach

Getting consumers to spread the word about things that may be of acute interest to other consumers — such as special promotions and events — turns out to be by far the best way for most mattress companies to use Facebook and Twitter.  As any marketer knows, reach is a numbers game, so let’s take a closer look at some of the social media numbers in the mattress industry.

Overall: In aggregate, the 10 largest mattress brands have accumulated a total of 432K Facebook Likes and 28K Twitter Followers to-date.  Facebook Likes are highly concentrated, with about 60% of the Likes coming from Manufacturer A, while Twitter Followers are more evenly distributed.  It is very difficult to put industry-level social media numbers in context, but to get a sense for the size of the overall customer base, one can consider that there are probably about 200-250 million mattresses currently in use in the US, of which roughly 75% were likely made and/or sold by one of these companies.

Manufacturers: The 5 largest mattress manufacturers have an average of ~80,000 Facebook Likes.  By comparison, the world’s largest company by revenue — Exxon Mobil — has only 8,000 Facebook Likes.  On the other hand, successful companies in other industries have been able to amass upwards of 10,000,000 Facebook Likes.

Retailers: The 5 largest mattress specialty retailers have an average of ~3,000 Facebook Likes.  Each of these companies has total annual sales that approach or exceed $100 million, putting them amongst the largest 25,000 companies in the US.  So does that mean they are also among the largest 25,000 companies on Facebook?  Probably not.  It turns out there are over 1,800,000 Facebook brand pages in the world that have more than 1,000 Likes.

Engagement

Much of the buzz around social media comes from the potential to “engage” our customers and prospects in a meaningful way.  However, this is much easier said than done, especially for companies in the mattress industry, most of whom have never been known for high levels of customer engagement.  Here’s what we found in terms of the success that mattress companies are having in engaging consumers using Facebook and Twitter:

Facebook engagement: On average, only 0.3% of mattress company Facebook Fans engage with that brand or its posts in a given week.  While this probably seems very low, the bad news is that the real level of consumer engagement is probably even smaller, since this number includes disproportionately high engagement from employees, vendors, dealers, suppliers, and the like.

The good news is that most companies outside the mattress industry aren’t realizing sustained consumer engagement on Facebook either — it turns out that the average weekly engagement for all Facebook brand pages is only 0.45% and even the best brands on Facebook only have an engagement rate of 0.03% for any given post (that means that for every 10,000 fans, each post results in only 3 likes, comments or shares).  This could be partly due to the fact that 4 out of 5 consumers simply don’t want to have a “relationship” with any brand, other than to get discounts from that brand.

Bottom line: consumers are on Facebook first and foremost to engage with their real-life friends, so even when they “Like” us, they are unlikely to engage with us.  In fact, only ~3-7% of a brand’s Fans even see that brand’s posts.

Twitter engagement: On average, 0.6% of mattress company Twitter Followers engage with that brand or its posts in a given week.  In some ways, it is not surprising that this number would be slightly higher than Facebook, especially when one considers the more “broadcast” nature of Twitter relative to Facebook.  People are not following us on Twitter to see pictures of our kids — they follow us because they WANT us to forward them things we think are interesting, and for the same reason they are more likely to forward our things to others.

What happens to engagement as we get more fans:  The more Likes we have, the less engagement we get.  This inverse relationship has been found true across all industries on Facebook.  In the mattress industry, our limited data bears this out as well, seeing that the manufacturer with the highest number of Likes (Manufacturer A) also has the lowest engagement %, while the manufacturer with the lowest amount of Likes (Manufacturer E) has the highest engagement %.  Of course, Likes can be  accumulated in a lot of different ways, which means that not all Likes are created equally — especially when they have been obtained in large numbers.

Conclusion

The real take-away here is that the way mattress companies truly stand to benefit from social media is as a “reach and awareness” medium, NOT as an “engagement and conversion” medium.  The “engagement” that is happening on social media involves only a tiny portion of any given brand’s followers.  One can certainly hope that this tiny group of fans can and will have a huge impact — but their impact will be measured in the number of other consumers they reach on our behalf, NOT in the number of fans that we convert into actual customers.

As for how the mattress industry is doing in generating reach and awareness through Facebook and Twitter, it would be fair to say that we are doing about as well as could be expected — maybe even better.  Of course, this is another way of saying that we should temper our expectations from Facebook and Twitter in the first place.  The key to getting “reach” via social media is in compelling consumers to share our message with other consumers, which is a tall order for companies that historically have only engaged with consumers once every 10 years.  However, there is now clear proof that some consumers are willing to engage with mattress companies, at least to some degree.

The question that remains for mattress companies using social media is how cost-effective it will ultimately prove to be for the mattress industry, relative to other available tools for building awareness amongst consumers.  While it is tempting to think of social media as “free,” this would ignore the very real resources that are required to design, promote and manage a successful social media presence.  For industries that have naturally high levels of consumer engagement, the economics of social media are likely to be compelling relative to other alternatives.  But for the mattress industry, the jury is still out.