During my time at uShip we went from being a company without a real social media presence to one that uses social media as a tool to communicate with customers and potential customers.
Building Accounts from Zero
One of the foremost challenges of creating a social media strategy for uShip was how to address two disparate audiences: transportation providers (e.g. truckers and transportation brokers) and consumers (further subdivided into individuals and businesses).
Twitter Promotion
To attract followers to our Twitter account, we first targeted the large trucker community on Twitter. To augment that outreach, we ran a contest that had a few primary goals:
- Attract new followers
- Gain inbound links to the uShip website
- Get new uShip users
I felt that the problem with many contests on Twitter is that as soon as someone wins, there’s no incentive for others to enter. Or–conversely–a contest that just chooses a winner from a number of different entries doesn’t users a reason to pay close attention to the contest. I chose a hybrid model.
In the contest I ran for uShip, every weekday I would ask on @uShip a transportation related question (e.g. “What’s your best tip for the day of a big move?” or “Best music to listen to while driving?”). The first person who answered the question would win an Amazon gift card. We would then choose one person at random from that day’s entries to win a second Amazon gift card. Finally, after the month-long contest concluded, one person would win a Flip Mino HD camera. Each answer they gave over the month was an entry, which gave people a reason to keep coming back.
The results of the contest were strongly positive. At a cost of just under $700, we gained 366 new followers, got 33 new uShip users, nearly 2,000 visits to uShip, and 15 inlinks from other sites to uShip.com.
Facebook Promotion
We took a different approach to gain followers on Facebook. uShip already asks users to provide a “uShip Story”–essentially a testimonial–at the end of the shipping process. This was the perfect spot along the line to also ask users to share their story on Facebook. To provide incentive, we also offered every user who shared their uShip Story on Facebook a free uShip hat.
This promotion was instrumental in pushing our count of “Likes” from 43 to nearly 1300 when we discontinued the promotion to coincide with the launch of Facebook Connect integration on uShip.com.
Video Content
Although video was proliferating on the web, uShip was still behind the curve–with some site tutorials but little else. I approached the management team to suggest provide video content that provided customers with transport tips. Since customer trust is an issue in an online auction–even moreso one that deals with transportation–this video could go a long way toward increasing consumer trust. By reaching out to some of our more active transportation service providers to help us create this content we fulfilled two goals: providing consumers with information that would increase trust in the process and increasing the bone that our service providers felt with uShip.
uShip Blog – “Ship Happens”
By August 2008, the uShip company blog, “Ship Happens,” had fallen into disuse. I took over the blog, turning it into a primary channel for communicating with users, a channel for receiving inbound links, and a way to share transportation related information. I instituted a clear hierarchy of content–targeted toward shipping customers, toward transportation service providers, or all users–and created an editorial calendar. I managed the uShip blog from September of 2008 through the fall of 2009.
Corporate Social Media Guidelines
With the proliferation of social media guidelines for employees to follow. Although generally common sense items like, “Don’t use anonymous comments to discuss uShip.”, the guidelines provided employees an outline with which to approach social media and gave those less familiar with social media a framework in which to work. These guidelines were later included in the employee manual agreed to by all uShip employees.
