We identify ten of the most active and influential individuals operating in social media in the sporting and sponsorship area, and find out a little of what excites them in terms of what they do. Â Today we sit down with Aoife Clarke of Lidl …
Who is Aoife Clarke and what do you do that has secured your place as a Social media Maven for 2016?
I am the Head of Communications for Lidl in Ireland & Northern Ireland and under my remit I have PR, Social Media, Internal Comms and Events.
It is a great portfolio to have as it touches on every area of the company so I get to work with colleagues all across the business. Social is the area that has had the largest growth and potential for me – both internally and externally.
I started Lidl’s first Facebook page back in 2010 and since then it has exploded and we have one of the largest followings for a retail brand in Ireland. I think our strength comes from the fact we see social as more than just a platform for pushing our products – we use it in a more informative and fun way to complement all our business activities.
We now have a dedicated in house social media manager, Eimear, plus support from our department administrator Niamh as well as using New/Slang creatively.
Social is a massive team effort – hugely time consuming but I love it!
What is your personal favourite Social Media Channel?
Personally my favourite is Twitter as I am a news junkie! I love being able to click into my timeline and see a snapshot of what is happening both nationally and internationally.
What do you think is the best thing about being able to communicate directly to fans or customers?
It is such a huge advantage having social accounts as feedback in instantaneous. We can get a great insight in such a short time into what our customers think. We use social right across the business – from taking feedback on products, identifying issues, promoting sponsorships and partnerships or even interacting with journalists.
What I love most is getting positive feedback on customer experience in store and being able to feed that back to our frontline teams, for me it is really important that they see the positive comments from customers. I also really enjoy when our own team interact with the pages – social isn’t just for our external customers.
We had a great initiative earlier this year where we got our store teams to post pictures of them showing #SeriousSupport in their LGFA jerseys – we had some brilliant entries where they teamed up with local clubs, went to local landmarks or got creative in store. The winning team got to come up to a corporate box for the Ladies final at Croke Park in September.
How much a part of your overall approach to marketing is geared towards social?
We take a case by case approach for social – not everything we do is appropriate in my eyes for social or different platforms work best for different things. Most of all it needs to be engaging and we need to give our fans a reason to watch a video or like a post.
I like to think we use social to show different sides to our campaigns – for our LGFA partnership we have done lots of content separate to our marketing campaigns – we’ve linked LGFA to key calendar dates like Father’s Day where we did a video of Dad’s and their Daughters involved in ladies football, or showcased players with interesting careers on International Womens Day.
Social is a great area to experiment with, we evaluate our posts all the time to see how they performed and it helps influence future use.
Broadcasting or engagement, if you had to pick one which is the most important?
Aoife ClarkeEngagement hands down – we want to be a brand people get enjoyment and value from so for me that metric is key
What are three social media accounts that you enjoy following?
Apart from Lidl 🙂 – Waterford Whispers never fails to entertain, Food Flicker for recipes and The Body Coach for HIIT workouts.
Finally give us a social media post that you were pleased with the response to.
I think the Ladyball post from January last year when we revealed we were behind the spoof. We produced a short video explaining why and promising #SeriousSupport to ladies football.
I know there was a fair bit of scepticism about our methods but I like to think the investment we have made in Ladies Gaelic Football has been recognised now. And remember we just completed year 1 of a 3 year partnership so we are only getting started.
I really loved the post we did also using our LGFA ambassadors in the style of Beyonce’s tour poster around the time of her Croke Park gig to highlight she wasn’t the only female playing Croke Park this year. There is great collaboration between my team and the Sponsorship team to make sure all the key milestones are covered.
Who run the world?#Girls#Beyoncé-not the only strong female in Croke Park this year!#serioussupport@LadiesFootballpic.twitter.com/IjRDlpl4rX
— Lidl Ireland (@lidl_ireland) July 6, 2016
Join us tomorrow when we will be highlighting the work of Roisin Glynn at AIB
