
http://econsultancy.com/uk/blog/62382-how-cadbury-uses-facebook-twitter-pinterest-and-google?utm_medium=twitter&utm_source=twitterfeed&utm_term=jeremy+dumont
Cadbury appears to be readymade for social marketing as it is a historic brand with products that people love.
However it hasn’t simply rested on its laurels and expected the ‘likes’ to come rolling in.
In the past year we’ve reported on Cadbury’s use of Facebook and Google+ for product launches, as well as its shift away from traditional media thanks to its success in social media.
Therefore I thought it would be interesting take a closer look at how the brand uses Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest and Google+.
This post is the latest in a series that has already examined the
social strategies of several other major consumer brands, including ASOS, Tesco, McDonald’s and Red Bull.
Facebook
It’s no surprise to find out that Cadbury has established separate
Facebook pages for each of its most popular products, including Dairy Milk, Wispa, Crème Egg, Bourneville and Hot Chocolate.
Each one publishes its own content and competitions making it
difficult to condense it all into a single blog post, so I'll just focus
on the key highlights.
The first thing to note is that all the pages are updated on a daily
basis with brand-related content, ranging from straightforward product
promotions to recipe ideas.
In general each post attracts thousands of likes and tens of comments, which the social team does a good job of responding to.
Cadbury clearly sees value in maintaining an active Facebook presence
and interacting with customers, probably because it has already
achieved a great deal of success in nurturing its fans as brand
advocates.
This is a departure from the more casual approach adopted by
Starbucks and McDonald’s, which make very little effort to maintain
their social communities but still achieve massive levels of engagement
on their Facebook walls.

Looking specifically at the Dairy Milk page, most of the content is
currently about promoting the Joyville brand with a strong focus on its
competition to find a ‘Joyville Taster’.
The winner receives a trip to the Cadbury factory, a year’s supply of
Dairy Milk and the chance to be the first to taste new products.
To be in with a chance of winning you have to come up with a word to
describe Dairy Milk chocolate then enter it either on a dedicated
minisite or within a Facebook app.
It’s a really smart competition as the prize is positioned as a
‘sweet benefits package’ that comes alongside the fictional job. It’s a
great way of rewarding fans with a prize that can’t really be won
anywhere else.
The Wispa page is also running a promotional campaign to celebrate
reaching two million ‘likes’. The social team has researched its fans
and has begun publishing random stats about them.
Again, it’s a clever way of celebrating the community and the posts make a nice change from the usual product promos.

The current Wispa campaigns follows a brilliant campaign that the
Dairy Milk team ran last year to celebrate reaching one million ‘likes’.
Cadbury realised that despite having so many fans, only 16% of them ever saw content that the brand posted on Facebook.
The challenge was to increase the engagement among its fans, as well
as reaching friends of fans and the wider Facebook community. To test
what content users would engage with, Cadbury decided to build a giant
Facebook ‘like’ thumb out of pieces of Dairy Milk.
It used teaser ads in the build up to the event, and then live
streamed in a studio decorated with user-generated content and photos.
The team also responded to user requests and comments in the video.
As a result, Cadbury gained 40,000 Facebook fans and more than
350,000 people were actively involved in the campaign. Some fans even
left the live feed running for hours on end.
Perhaps the most important result was that more than 33% of fans
engaged with the campaign and it proved that the brand could achieve
impressive results through social marketing, which helped underpin the
new Joyville marketing initiatives.
Twitter
As with Facebook, Cadbury has established separate Twitter feeds for
it different products, but unfortunately it hasn’t achieved the same
amount of success.
The main corporate account has more than 130,000 followers, far more than any of the product-specific feeds, and tweets upwards of 20 times per day.
However most of tweets are either repurposed from Facebook or are retweets of other users that have mentioned the brand.
The social team do occasionally respond to @mentions, but these appear to make up a small proportion of the activity.

The Dairy Milk (31,000 followers) and Wispa (6,000 followers) feeds are much the same, with repurposed content and retweets making up a majority of the activity.
Personally I’m surprised that so little original content is published
through Twitter, and that Cadbury responds to relatively few @mentions.
It is probably a decision dictated by resource to an extent, as it’s
obviously easier to adopt a centralised approach to social and limit the
amount of responses.
However ASOS and Tesco
have taken the decision to respond to as many @mentions as possible,
and personally I feel it is a great way of engaging with customers and
building brand loyalty.
Furthermore, unlike a number of other consumer brands that I’ve
looked at, Cadbury doesn’t attempt to provide customer service on
Twitter. Instead it includes a link to the customer service contact
information in its bio.
That said, Cadbury did make an interesting case study for the success
of Twitter advertising. It revealed that a campaign to promote the new
Wispa Gold using Promoted Trends increased 'positive' brand mentions on the social network by 1,800%.
Furthermore, the ‘Retweet for Sweets’ challenge associated with this saw engagement levels of 25%.
Pinterest
Cadbury UK has been running a Pinterest board for more than a year now, but its level of commitment has been somewhat lacking.
It has created just five boards and pinned a grand total of 116
images. Thankfully Cadbury hasn’t fallen into the usual trap of only
pinning its own content, however its difficult to see what the social
team is hoping to achieve by maintaining this account.

Cadbury has just 622 followers and there doesn’t seem to be any real
strategy behind it. The boards are generally quite uninspiring – one of
them is just a collection of uniform images of gluten free products –
and the activity is extremely limited.
The latest board is definitely the most attractive and includes a
range of images showing recipe ideas that use Cadbury products.
But overall the account is largely inactive and I can’t imagine it yields any positive results for the brand.
Google+
While researching these posts I noticed that the general trend among
consumer brands is to establish a Google+ account and then totally
ignore it.
There are a few notable exceptions, such as ASOS and Red Bull, but they are few and far between. However I can also add Cadbury to the list of brands that have embraced G+.
It posts several updates a day, much of which is repurposed from
other platforms though it seems some of the content is unique to this
platform.
The chocolate brand was an early adopter of G+ and last year social manager Jerry Daykin was kind enough to share his five top tips for using the platform.

Google has also flagged up the brand a case study for how to make use of Google Hangouts.
Cadbury has hosted several hangouts in the past 12 months, including
one to celebrate reaching 500,000 followers and another to let its
community ask questions to Olympic swimmer Rebecca Adlington.
At the minute much of the content is focused around its recipe for Crème Egg brownies, which also links into its Cakes and Baking Community.
The group has 26,000 members who share and discuss recipe ideas,
which is a great way of getting people talking about the brand and its
various products.