As part of Delineo’s Are you being found online? online marketing report, we’re focusing on the social media case studies from five companies in five different industries. The purpose of this research is to establish:
- How active these companies are in the social arena
- The success of various companies in engaging with their online audience
- How responsive various companies are in dealing with negative feedback
Introduction
Blackpool Pleasure Beach is one of the most-visited destinations in the United Kingdom. A resort with a prestigious history, the attraction was founded in 1869 and has grown to become one of the twenty most-visited amusement parks in the world; in 2007, an estimated 5.5 million visitors passed through its doors. The below research was undertaken across March 20112 unless otherwise stated.
Blackpool Pleasure Beach online
Blackpool Pleasure Beach operates across three social networks; Facebook, Twitter and YouTube. To date, the Twitter profile has 3,110 followers, while the Facebook page has accumulated 146,292 likes. The venue’s marketing efforts on YouTube have resulted in 41 videos with a total of 1,772,208 views.
Social media activity
The chart below displays the activity from Blackpool Pleasure Beach on this particular social network. On average, the account posted 1.9 tweets per day during the research period, devoting 6.38% of updates to interacting with other users on the social network.
A chart demonstrating the tweets from Blackpool Pleasure Beach during the research period
The majority of activity on the Blackpool Pleasure Beach account is devoted to the promotion of the resort; highlighting new and current attractions, while also sharing positive articles relating to the area. The below graphic demonstrates the most used keywords posted by the account.
The most frequent comments include ‘March’, ‘Wristband’ and ‘RT’, offering us an indicator of the focus of the account (March is in relation to the ‘March Madness’ promotion being offered by the venue).
During March, the Blackpool Pleasure Beach account posted 23 updates to its 146,000 Facebook fans. These comments varied from the promotional of specific restaurants at the attraction to photographs and special offers. In all, these comments received 1,273 interactions from fans. The page offers no dedicated applications.
YouTube
The Blackpool Pleasure Beach YouTube channel features a number of videos from the ‘Pleasure Beach TV’ series, a collection of interviews with guests at the attraction. The channel also includes a number of promotional videos, with a particular focus on the rides and attractions on offer.
Interaction with other users
The majority of interaction with other users comes via Twitter. Over a seven-day period, Blackpool Pleasure Beach is referenced on 216 separate occasions across the social web. A chart demonstrating these references is below:
In regards to gender distribution, 52 per cent of comments which reference Blackpool Pleasure Beach were from females. Sentiment break-down for the selected period was overwhelmingly positive with 89.3 per cent in favour of the resort. Only 3.7 per cent were deemed to be negative in nature.
Some examples of these positive comments are below:
Conclusions
Blackpool Pleasure Beach has a committed and passionate community of users. The attraction has a number of online brand advocates and it is hard to find negative comments directed towards the social media presence of the organisation. It’s a loved British brand and you can immediately see the goodwill towards the resort through its social media channels.
However, while Blackpool Pleasure Beach enjoys a positive sentiment online, the organisation may be missing the opportunity to harness this community for its own benefit. The company could certainly focus more on its customer engagement, using the Twitter and Facebook channels to interact with comments and tweets in order to develop a stronger relationship with advocates. Indeed, the company offers very little for fans on Facebook, providing the standard collection of photographs, comments and videos. And while this content does provide the foundations for discussion, there is greater opportunity here for the company to create stronger relationships with fans. Indeed, many of the questions from fans on the page go unanswered by the Facebook profile. It might be time for Blackpool Pleasure Beach to take their social media community management to the next level.
If you would like to understand your brand’s social media performance please contact us on 0161 839 6289 or send us an email.
Stay tuned for our following social media case studies in our report: IT and communications.