The Social Media Success Thread
Social media case studies:
one business, one week, one thing that worked
Every week we take apart a real company that did something specific and copyable, and show you the mechanism underneath it.
Not a growth-hacking list. Not a thread of screenshots. A documented decision, why it worked, and the version of it you could run this month with what you already have.
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The archive · 13 issues
- No. 15Arby's · 20144 min
A Sandwich Chain Asked for Its Hat Back
Arby's social media manager sent the tweet from his snowed-in home in Atlanta. It reached 384 times the brand's normal audience on Twitter.
On the evening of 26 January 2014, Pharrell Williams walked the Grammy red carpet in a brown Vivienne Westwood buffalo hat. Within half an hour someone had created a Twitter account for the hat, and that account suggested the cap should be the new logo for Arby's. The resemblance was not subtle.
Read the opening → - No. 12Yeti · 2011 onward5 min
Sell the Guide, Not the Cooler
Yeti makes expensive cool boxes. Its most successful content barely mentions them, and features people who would have been interesting with or without the product.
Yeti sells a cool box for several hundred dollars in a category where a serviceable one costs thirty. Justifying that gap with a specification sheet is close to impossible, and the company appears to have worked that out early.
Read the opening → - No. 11Oatly · 2014 onward5 min
The Copy Is on the Carton
Oatly treated its packaging as the advertising, printed the argument on the side of the box, and when a dairy lobby took it to court, printed the court case too.
Oat drink is a commodity. It is oats and water, it is not difficult to make, and by the time Oatly became famous there were competitors on the same shelf at the same price doing roughly the same thing.
Read the opening → - No. 10Merriam-Webster · 2016 onward5 min
The Dictionary That Found Its Voice
Merriam-Webster had a two-hundred-year-old brand, no product news, and nothing to sell on social media. It became one of the most quoted accounts on the internet by publishing something it already had.
Consider the worst possible brief. You represent a dictionary. There is no product launch, no seasonal range, no customer photography, and no plausible reason for anybody to follow you.
Read the opening → - No. 09Gymshark · 2012 onward5 min
Free Product, Before It Had a Name
Ben Francis was screen printing gym wear in a garage in Birmingham and delivering pizza at night. He sent his stock to people with cameras before anyone called it influencer marketing.
The Gymshark story is usually told as a story about a teenager who got lucky with timing. The timing was genuinely good. The decision underneath it was better, and it is the part that still works today in categories nowhere near fitness.
Read the opening → - No. 08Blendtec · 2006 onward5 min
Will It Blend?
A blender company with almost no marketing budget put Tom Dickson in a lab coat and destroyed an iPhone on camera. The format cost a few hundred dollars an episode and outlasted the phone.
In 2006 Blendtec made commercial blenders in a category where the machine outlasted its rivals in ways a photograph could never show.
Read the opening → - No. 07Roger Wakefield, Texas Green Plumbing · 2017 onward5 min
The Plumber Who Taught Instead of Advertising
Roger Wakefield spent thirty years in plumbing before he started a YouTube channel and pointed a camera at a pipe. The trade told him he was giving away the secrets. He was building the largest audience in his industry.
The standard objection to a tradesman teaching his trade on the internet is immediate and it sounds like common sense. If you show people how to do it, they will do it themselves, and you will have talked yourself out of a job.
Read the opening → - No. 06River Pools and Spas · 2008 onward6 min
The Question Everybody Refuses to Answer
A swimming pool installer nearly went under in 2008, then built the most visited pool website in the world by writing the one article his entire industry had agreed not to write.
In the winter of 2008 a fibreglass pool company in Virginia was in serious trouble. Customers who had signed contracts were asking for their deposits back, three of them in a single day, and the company did not have the money to return.
Read the opening → - No. 05Airbnb · 2007 onward5 min
The Rooms Were Already There
Airbnb never built a hotel. Every room it sells existed before the company did: empty, unpriced and invisible. What it added was permission to trust a stranger. The beds already existed.
The founding story is well worn: a design conference came to San Francisco in 2007, the hotels filled, and two flatmates who could not make rent put air mattresses on their living room floor and built a page offering them with breakfast.
Read the opening → - No. 04Duolingo · 2011 onward5 min
The Owl That Came Back on Day Forty
Duolingo's innovation was never the teaching. It was working out that the entire product is whether somebody opens it again tomorrow, and then running its social media on exactly the same principle.
Language courses were expensive and dull, and most people who bought one stopped within a fortnight. Duolingo made one that was free, and then spent a decade on a problem the incumbents had never treated as a problem at all: getting somebody to come back on day forty.
Read the opening → - No. 03Warby Parker · 2010 onward5 min
They Deleted the Part Everybody Hated
Four students worked out that the worst thing about buying glasses was not the price. It was standing in a shop under a strip light being told what suited you.
Glasses cost hundreds of dollars for a piece of moulded plastic and two ground lenses, and they cost that because a very small number of companies controlled the frames, the lenses and, in many cases, the shops selling them.
Read the opening → - No. 02Patagonia · 2011 onward5 min
The Advert That Told You Not to Buy
On the busiest shopping day of the American year, Patagonia took a full page in the New York Times, printed a picture of its best-selling fleece, and told readers not to buy it.
Black Friday, 2011. A full page in the New York Times carrying a photograph of the R2 jacket, one of the company's best sellers, under the headline "Don't Buy This Jacket". The copy below it set out what making the thing had cost the world in water and carbon, and asked the reader to consider repairing what they already owned instead.
Read the opening → - No. 01Dollar Shave Club · 2012 to 20165 min
The Ninety-Second Film That Said the Quiet Part
A man with no razor factory asked out loud why a packet of blades cost twenty dollars. Four years later Unilever paid a reported billion dollars for the company that question built.
In March 2012 a video appeared in which a man walked through a warehouse explaining that his razors were good and cost a few dollars, that the ten-bladed vibrating handle sold by the incumbent was not necessary, and that nobody should be paying twenty dollars a month to a brand endorsed by a footballer.
Read the opening →