After taking a look at the excellent social media campaign ran by Whole Foods I decided to continue on with another brand I value. Despite the variety of available shoe stores, I am compelled to take my shoe-addiction to the shelves of Steve Madden. A company and a shoe-maker that never fail to create a trendy shoe to my standards. Steven Madden is active in their social space and utilizes their brand presence with Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram accounts. Both are actively monitored and offer their audiences a promotional, yet personal opportunity to interact with the brand.
The Steve Madden Facebook account is liked by some 702, 032 profiles, with some 36, 709 people talking about the brand on Facebook. The account is proactively updated with relevant shoe links to events such as The Oscars, sales promotions, and style guides. Although, I wasn’t able to find any direct conversations with their audiences through Facebook comments, they do update daily to initiate these type of conversations. Yet, their Facebook page includes other interactions like linking their shoe-loving audiences to original fashion bloggers, and a competition for designing shoes. According to Steve Madden shoes are relevant to any given situation. Among holidays like the recently passed Presidents Day sales event and promotions that link their shoes to the Oscars. Steve Madden is able to pair their shoes with any occasion on Facebook.
The Twitter account for Steve Madden is home to 2, 391 tweets, 27, 566 followers, and following 2,030. The background to the account is a few pairs of their newest shoes, and an original account bio that links the actual Steve Madden shoe maker’s account. It is widespread knowledge that company twitter accounts are not ran by the CEO or founder themselves, and Steve Madden is classy about how it portrays this fact to its audience. The separate accounts not only give audiences another channel of interaction with a part of the brand, but also continue to uphold their authentic image. Steve Madden’s tweets include promotional messages, retweets, contest links, sale information, tweet prompting, and hashtag interaction. The shoe brand has found a way to make shoes highly relevant in trending topics as well. Hashtags, such as #Reasonsiunfollowedyou, are linked to tweets like “because your shoe game was ratchet.” This tweet shows how the brand is able to promote its messages without sounding commercial while speaking directly to its demographic. Steve Madden is completely aware of who they are speaking to in their Twitter space.
Steve Madden is also up-to-date with the use of Instagram, which seems to be a new space for most big brands still. The Steve Madden Instagram account is home to 905 pictures, 286,084 followers, and follows about 1,328 profiles. The photo posting website has pictures that give its shoe-loving audience a visual look into the brand. Among the 905 pictures in the account there is visual documentation of brand photo shoots, new shoes, fashion blog photos (with Steve Madden shoes), quotes, and pictures relevant to it’s demographic interests. My favorite aspect of the Steve Madden Instagram account is how they incorporate pictures of the corporate employees throughout the day at work with a new shoe. This brief glimpse into the work-life of the Steve Madden employees makes the brand very personal to audiences, and in my opinion contributes to the 5,000 to 20,000 likes every picture post receives.
After looking at all the social media accounts ran by Steve Madden, I journeyed to their website to look for any other connections. The company website is geared towards digitally displaying what the brand offers the consumer, ask selling their shoes. However, each Steve Madden product allows customers to read and write reviews. This option adds to the authentic company image the brand maintains. Despite the fact that Steve Madden is killing-it in the social media space, a company blog would continue to facilitate connections and conversations with audiences. The more connections formed the most authentic audiences, like myself, will view the brand. Despite my biased love for shoes and Steve Madden, I am thoroughly impressed with how high they raise the bar for other brands in the social space. They have a clear understanding for their audience on Instagram, great retweeting and hashtag efforts on Twitter, and a variety of daily posts for Facebook. The social media space can be a huge outlet for brands, as Steve Madden has proven. This company has created a brand message that is central to its target audience, and because of this is able to effectively manage all their social media accounts. I just love it when brands get it right. Until we meet again….