Beauty retailer Sephora, recently announced the launch of their proprietary social network—Beauty Board. The site takes advantage of a growing trend toward social media sites focusing on visual and user-generated content over text only posts and ad-like images. It’s not surprising that the retailer would launch a community. After all, their use of digital marketing spans multiple channels—web, mobile and social—and integrates paid, owned and earned media. They’re also focusing more on digitizing the customer experience, and social media engagement with consumers can serve as the connective tissue between sales and marketing channels, while yielding rich insight about the audience.
Sephora isn’t the first brand to build a proprietary social network. Sears has launched social networking communities, such as myKmart, in conjunction with its retail formats and brands. They also wouldn’t be the first to discover that it isn’t as easy as it looks. Building a new social networking community, driving traffic and encouraging engagement requires a combination of capabilities in technology and marketing, as well as a dose of psychology to understand what prompts online behavior. Successful social networking sites must balance interrelated and conflicting goals like drawing and engaging users; creating and curating compelling content; and attracting brands and advertising dollars.
Of course proprietary social networking sites also offer an environment for enhanced customer engagement through rich media content like photos and videos, interactive experiences like polls and quizzes, direct link to the online shopping experience and an endless supply of customer data—without the encumbrances that come with operating on someone else’s platform. But there’s a certain magic that has to happen in order to reap the benefits of a brand-owned social site, while avoiding common pitfalls—low traffic or engagement; bias toward branded content; over exposure to ads or promotions; misuse or miscommunication around data collection and privacy; or detriment to the core business.
There’s little doubt that Sephora can attract users to the site, especially given their popularity as a retail brand and their successful use of other digital marketing techniques to engage their target customer. But can they keep users coming back? Social media users are a finicky bunch who tend to jump from one network to another with little sense of loyalty and an unquenchable thirst for the next best thing. The retailer will need a pipeline of creative content from a variety of sources—users, influencers, brands—in order to keep audiences engaged. They’ll also need a plan to monetize the platform through data mining for their own purposes or for advertising, while being mindful of the impact that has on user experience.
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