Research Conclusions and Suggestions

W Taipei is always a shiny star in Taiwan since his debut to the stage. Thanks to its unique brand image and strong brand characteristic, even after the following five years, W Taipei has earned a huge amount of exposures on both traditional media and social media.

However, it is not enough to maintain the high level buzzes on the internet for such a long time just because this brand is cool, fashion or target to younger generations. There shall be some useful tactics that W Hotels and W Taipei is adopting to become “forever young and chic” for its lovers.

W Taipei utilized its successful brand positioning and Target Audience setup, and the younger-generation-oriental four passion points (i.e. music, fashion, design and fuel) as the main theme to create lots of non-promotional lifestyle contents on social media to

differentiate with what its competitors are doing, which are mainly delivering promotional contents that led low social engagement. We could say that content management wise, W Taipei is indeed outstanding.

By its sophisticated content strategy, W Taipei balanced the proportion of

promotional posts and non-promotional posts and provides various topics and contents for its Facebook fans, which then create high engagement rate and continuously stay in a high level.

By Facebook’s algorithm, the high engagement then enlarges W Taipei’s social marketing influences by enlarging its Facebook page’s organic reach so that its posts could be shown on more Facebook page followers’ newsfeed than others. Therefore, W Taipei could save its

In regards of the secondary social media platforms such as LINE@ and Instagram, W Taipei also framed its content strategies by finding out the different user preferences and behaviors on LINE@ and Instagram, and provides suitable contents to achieve the great social marketing results in multiple dimensions.

Along with the contentiously user growth on a photo-sharing platform like Instagram, brands need to be aware of that end users prefer to use a more visionary way to present their lives nowadays. Moreover, brands have to adjust its social media marketing strategy

accordingly to communicate and influence its consumers deeply and effectively.

More importantly is that brands need to stop regard social media platforms as media channels to deliver promotions and/or advertisements purely. What contents that consumers really need and want to read on the social media are the deep combination of a brand’s marketing contents with character of that platform to maximize the use value of that specific social media, but to disturb their original user experience by excessive promotional messages.

Here are five suggestions that a brand shall consider while doing social media marketing from now on,

a. Uniqueness

Sometimes, to achieve high Click-Through Rate, brands tend to use popular talking points or Click-Baiting headlines but neglect building the uniqueness of the brand. While a brand’s characteristic is too vague, it might lose customer engagement in a long-term perspective.

Take W Taipei and its competitor’s Facebook pages’ comparison as an example, we can see that W Taipei utilized its very unique four passion points and creates a series of post with soft contents, and that indeed lifted up its fans stickiness.

It doesn’t mean that brand that is not younger generation oriental cannot achieve high social engagement, just they need to think from the beginning and find out its unique brand positioning that could be talked about in the first stage.

b. Diversity

Just like what W Taipei is doing on its social media content management, a brand shall overlook the proportion of its promotional posts and non-promotional posts and try to make as many non-promotional ones as possible to drive the

engagement of its social media account. No one wants to follow an account that is full of advertising posts only.

c. Visibility

It’s true that to compete with hundreds of thousands of brands on social media is more and more challenging nowadays. That is why a brand shall non-stop

sharpening its social media strategy to increase the engagement and earn sufficient visibility on its target audiences, so it could achieve the business goal in the end.

In the past, post-game (i.e. to encourage fans to like, comment or share the post by sending out certain giveaway or holding a lucky draw) is very efficient to achieve high organic reach and makes the Facebook page looks popular. However, frequently conducting post-game activities would only attract “Facebook zombies”

into the page, who has no loyalty toward the brand at all but the giveaway. One of the useful suggestions for social media marketers is to follow as many as Facebook pages you can and absorb their strategies into yours.

d. Communication Points

The most difficult part for social media marketing is to mapping out the content strategy that matches with what end users really need. However, before this, a brand shall think about what are the points that it wants to communicate with end users, based on its brand spirit and value.

For W Taipei, to speed up its fans’ awareness onto a post, the series posts such as I Love TKT, I Love YEN or You Think You’ve Known W Taipei series are served for this purpose. By the specific themed title, users could understand the point that the brand is communicating easily and decide if he or she is interested in this topic.

e. Credibility

Credibility is the key to build long-term customer loyalty. If social media become a tool for a brand to brag about itself, it would lower down the trust of the brand towards end users and led social media becoming pure advertising channels.

For the actual practice, a testimony post would be a useful consideration. W Taipei once conducted two testimony campaigns on Facebook, one is for its buffet restaurant the kitchen table by inviting guests to leave their comments on a card and share the best ones on Facebook; and another is for its talent recruitment campaign by

sharing employees’ words to this company on the social media. Both of these two campaigns have created great engagement, since it looks much more genuine for the readers.

6.2 Limitation

In this case study research, the question about why and how W Taipei does well on social media marketing is answered in the previous chapters. However, it might be a question that how other brands, especially hotel brands could adopt these strategies.

One of the feedback regarding to my research above is that what I’m pointing out in my previous chapters seems like common sense for marketers. However, the fact is there are still tons of promotional posts on each brand’s Facebook pages and Instagram official accounts – the balance of promotional and non-promotional contents is not considered at all in the real practice.

One of the blames for this phenomenon is the brand has a common brand image that makes it unable to initiate so many unique topics to be communicated on social media just like what W Taipei is doing. In that case, I would suggest the brand shall think about

something higher, that is to re-consider its brand positioning before forming its social media marketing strategy. As long as the brand’s positioning is correct, the following social media marketing activities are more likely to be succeeded.

All in all, I sincerely wish that based on the introduction, research analysis,

conclusions and suggestions in this case study research, individuals who are interested in this topic could furthermore find it useful for his or her future research and study.

Appendix I

W Taipei’s DIY Burger Press Release in Traditional Chinese