Week 2 Part B: Business Research

This week I will review five companies and take a look at their social media platforms and online customer engagement.  The five companies I am reviewing are REI, Cochlear, Garage Grown Gear, Flippa, and Salesforce.

 REI https://www.rei.com/

Recreational Equipment, Inc., or REI is an American recreational and outdoor products retailer.  It sells a variety of outdoor equipment to support activities such as camping, hiking, climbing, cycling, running, skiing, and various other outdoor related activities.  However, unlike other sporting goods stores, it does not sell hunting or fishing equipment.  REI prides itself on its environmental and community initiatives. REI is an older company, being founded in 1938.  REI is also a large company as it has over 15,000 employees and over $3.7 billion in revenue.

REI is an early adopter of internet retail as they launched rei.com on September 19, 1996. Since then, REI has also established and maintained a large social media presence across various platforms to include Instagram (2.3M followers), Facebook (2.1M followers), Pinterest (209K followers), and YouTube (431K followers). All these social media platforms are listed/linked on their homepage and are actively being managed.  However, I found it interesting that REI didn’t put their X (Twitter) link on their homepage even though they appear to have a large active following (454K followers) on X.  Of note, REI’s last active posts on Twitter seemed to be around November 2022.  After further research, it appears REI has paused their engagements on X due to their “standards for moderating harmful content.”

I believe that REI does a very good job at communicating at interacting well with their customers on their supported social media platforms.  They appear to remain committed to and staying on message with their environmentally and community friendly social branding. Their preferred social media appears to be Facebook/Instagram, and browsing through the comments, they appear to be very interactive and responsive to customers comments and reviews. 

 

Cochlear https://www.cochlear.com/us/en/home

Cochlear is a medical device company based out of Australia that designs, manufactures, and supplies the Nucleus cochlear implant to patients around the world.  Founded in 1981, Cochlear is a mid-sized company with 4,800 employees across 50 countries with annual revenues of $1.2B.  Cochlear’s mission is to bring hearing devices to people who are deaf or partially deaf.  I am familiar with their products and services as my 20-year-old son has complete bi-lateral deafness (completely deaf) and has relied on his Cochlear devices since age 2.  The cochlear device is pretty amazing as my son has been able to basically “hear” ever since wearing them.  However, the “hearing” is a learned skill over many years of speech therapy as this device collects sound that bypasses the eardrum and goes directly to the cochlear nerve. 

I have actually never looked at their social presence prior to this exercise, but upon review on their homepage, they have listed socials on Facebook (83K followers), YouTube (16K subscribers on the US page), X (Twitter) (14K followers), and Instagram (24K followers on US page).  Their X page has sporadic posting but does not seem to be actively managed.  The YouTube page has more postings but mostly seem to be informational in nature. Facebook and Instagram platforms are being actively managed with frequent postings and engagement.

Cochlear appears to rely mostly on Facebook and Instagram for its online community engagement. The Facebook and Instagram interaction is both informational as well as inspirational (sharing success stories). If I was a new customer, I feel like I could find quite a bit of useful information and customer reviews by reviewing the Facebook and Instagram platforms. Cochlear appears to have done a great job on these platforms but does not spend too much energy on the other social media platforms.

Garage Grown Gear https://www.garagegrowngear.com/pages/about

Garage Grown Gear or GGG is a small company dedicated towards ultralight backpacking.  GGG is based out of St. Paul, Minnesota and is known for its commitment to supporting small brands.  I could not find any information about their actual employee or revenue size, but from their website it appears they have about 20 employees.

On their web homepage, they have links to Facebook (15K followers), Instagram (91K followers), and YouTube (8K followers).  They have online presence seems to be a combination of gear sales and promotions as well as reposting images of customers using  their gear.  I also caught a neat video on Instagram of their employee operations in their warehouse, which really highlights the small business nature of this company. 

I think this company does a great job at highlighting and advertising the fact that they only support small name brands and businesses.  It is of course a very niche company, but they do appear to have a loyal following with and active social media presence of Instagram (mostly), Facebook, and YouTube.  I did not see much of a social media presence on other platforms.

 

Flippa https://flippa.com/

Flippa is a private marketplace for buying and selling online businesses; its based out of Melbourne, Australia and Austin, Texas and it was founded in June 2009.  It has since grown to a number of other international locations and they also advertise that they can buy and sell online businesses in 193 countries.  Flippa has annual revenues of around $5 million and has 157 employees.  It is famous for buying and selling notable websites and domains such as Mark Zuckerberg’s former website Facemash. 

Their web homepage lists their preferred social media platforms as Discord (2K members), LinkedIn (13K followers), X (19K followers), Facebook (37K followers), and Instagram (7K followers).  Facebook, Instagram, and X appear to be mostly informational and advertisements in nature and not much in the way of community engagement. The most active community engagement platform appears to be LinkedIn where they not only advertise their wares and services but also post recent buys and sells of online businesses and congratulate the various parties involved. 

I think this company is doing a great job on LinkedIn, and if I were them, I would put their LinkedIn as their first social media platform.  There might be a specific reason that they have Discord listed first, but as a casual observer, I am not sure what that reason might be.

 

Salesforce https://www.salesforce.com/

Salesforce is an American based Software as a Service (SaaS) company headquartered in San Francisco.  It provides software applications based on sales, customer service, marketing automation, e-commerce, analytics, artificial intelligence, and application development.  It was founded in 1999 and has since grown to be the 61^st largest company in the world by market cap with a valuation of $153B and annual revenues of $35B.  In 2022 it became the largest enterprise software firm in the world. They have approximately 75,000 employees.

The web homepage has a variety of social media platforms listed in the order of Facebook (806K followers), X (113K) , LinkedIn (6M followers), Instagram (256K followers), Youtube (827K followers), and TikTok (61K followers). 

Their Facebook page is very actively managed and has a variety of posts but mostly centered around system features supported by customer video testimonials.  One key aspect of this customer engagement platform is that the question posed but customers in the comments sections were almost immediately responded to by an AI response (or at least what appears to be an AI response). Their X Social Media platform had a lot of recent posts, mostly around features and demos, but not nearly the customer engagement level that Facebook had. Surprisingly, their Instagram platform seemed not to be currently managed, and it has been at least a couple months since their last posting.  LinkedIn is, by far, their largest social media presence with over 6 million followers.  Youtube had quite a few posts, and appears to be actively managed, but it seemed more as to serve as a resource library of informational and instructional videos rather than an engagement platform.

I think that Salesforce is doing an outstanding job on LinkedIn, as they have clearly dominated the market on this platform.  Their Facebook had some pretty good engagement, but they have clearly put their energy into LinkedIn.  I was surprised to see that they had TikTok listed on their website as an engagement platform, but as I scrolled through the videos it was oriented more towards employees (agents) and the perks and benefits of working for Salesforce, rather than geared toward the customers.

 

Overall Assessment

In my review of five businesses and their online social media presence, I found some trends that I was not previously aware of.  To begin with, in my review I picked five companies that were very different in size, scope, mission, and location.  Two of the companies (Salesforce and REI) are considered to be large companies; one of the companies (Cochlear) was mid-sized, and two of the companies (Flippa and Garage Grown Gear) were small companies at least in terms of employee size.  Of all the companies I reviewed, they had one social media platform in common and that was Facebook.  Facebook was actively being managed by all of the companies and seemed to be pretty ubiquitous in how it was being ran.  Instagram was another common social media engagement platform, and despite being a subsidiary of Facebook, it did not seem to have the same level of customer engagement as its parent company. 

A couple surprises that I found in my review.  I was surprised by the lack of engagement on X.  I personally don’t spend a lot of time on X, but I was under the impression that it was a major engagement platform for businesses.  What I found was that it was far from the preferred platform for businesses, and in some cases such as REI, they have abandoned it all together.  Another surprise for me was the fact that three of these businesses (REI, Garage Grown Gear, Cochlear) did not list their LinkedIn account on their website.  After further looking on LinkedIn, all three of these businesses appeared to have active LinkedIn accounts with substantial followers.  I am not sure why a business would not want to put their LinkedIn account on their homepage website along with their other links.  Whether it be a website restriction or simply an oversight, it seems like a missed opportunity to make some more customer connections. 

Finally, my last surprise was the almost complete lack of customer engagement on TikTok.  I have personally not been on TikTok much myself, but recent reports indicate that around 170 million people in the U.S. alone use TikTok, and that those U.S. adults spend an average of 53.8 minutes per day browsing the platform. I was especially surprised that the small businesses I reviewed did not list TikTok accounts, as TikTok seems to be oriented towards supporting small business.