I stumbled across an article in The Guardian’s Money Blog this morning – each week they review two shops operating in the same sector. This week it was the turn of Caffe Nero and Starbucks – Caffe Nero won on price, taste and experience. This started me wondering about their social media marketing efforts (wasn’t that the first thing you would wonder about!). This is what I discovered:

Starbucks
I visited the Starbucks website and found the ‘Find us on Facebook’ link on their home page, along with a ‘Follow us on Twitter’ link.
Facebook (446,531 likes and 205,134 check ins):
I was taken straight to their wall where you can see lots of fans asking questions about Starbucks branches and queries about products – it was good to see Starbucks replying to comments quickly. Starbucks themselves regularly ask their fans questions to encourage engagement on their page – mainly questions about what fans are doing with their leisure time which seem to be very popular (one question getting 475 comments – which means that the friends of the 475 people who commented potentially saw that, and as each person has an average of 130 friends … 61,750 people potentially saw a comment about Starbucks!).
They also have a very prominent link to their feedback page on the Starbucks website.
Starbucks also has an interactive Frappuccino tab where you can create your own drink, save it and share it with your FB friends. (Apparently there are 87,000 potential drinks).
Other tabs included Polls, Discussions and Reviews. Plus a very handy Location page showing me where my local shop is.
Twitter:
Starbuck’s Twitter feed is well stocked with replies to customers, obviously an excellent tool for them to deliver some extra customer service.

Caffe Nero
On visiting their website I could find no social media buttons at all.
There is a Caffe Nero Facebook page (20,395 likes and 381 check ins), which takes you straight to their wall – but disappointingly the last post was on 13 April. Their Twitter page was also last updated on 13 April.

I’d have to say that in the social media arena Starbucks definitely win. It would be interesting to know why Caffe Nero have decided not to continue using social media in their marketing strategy.

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