This week we took our Social Goes Local interview over to our sister island and found out what social media means to the people behind Jersey Post.
Tell us about Jersey Post’s range of current services.
Jersey Post offers a wide range of products and services for both businesses and consumers. Our social media efforts are currently focused on the B2C side of the business.
Which social channels have you implemented and how are these complementing your traditional marketing efforts?
We have implemented Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn so far. We have also started looking at other social channels such as Pinterest and how this could work for us. Twitter has been great for announcements such as the mail plane arrivals and delays, and also for announcing new products or changes to services. We have used Facebook for a lot of visual information such as pictures of new stamp releases and anything that maybe going on at Broad Street such as the Charity Christmas Card sale which is open at the moment. We have also used the cover photos and Apps on Facebook to complement our offline PR campaign this year around meeting the team and the people involved in getting your mail to you.
Do you think the changing landscape of how customers communicate means the traditional Post Office has to innovate?
Technology is often seen as the “death” of the postal service, however, it can really help us to increase efficiency, but also to reach customers using their preferred communications method. We really believe that the traditional post needs to innovate; people will always need to send physical letters and goods but communication has changed and we need to change with that. We have invested a lot into our digital presence over the last year and will continue to do so. We will soon be launching a new website which has increased functionality. This functionality is only set to increase over the next year as we make more services available online for our customers. Services such as Jersey Moments (our new personalised stamp service) is another good example of traditional post trying to innovate, we will soon be launching an iPhone app for this service as well.
Do you have a team looking after your social media or is this down to an individual in house?
Marketing have overall responsibility for social media at Jersey Post but it is open to different individuals within the business to tweet and update Facebook. When we launched social media we held training sessions on each of the channels and asked for volunteers from each department to be responsible for their own department’s tweets. Our mail plane arrival tweet each morning is tweeted by our Postal Director and tweets about our foreign exchange rates are often done by the team in Broad Street. We think it is important to get everyone involved.
Which areas of business has social media been most useful? e.g. Do you use social to deal with customer service and enquiries?
Social media has been great in building awareness of how much goes on at Jersey Post. We have run a series of open days this year and social media has been brilliant in promoting these. We have had a few customer enquires via facebook and also Twitter, but not as many as we thought we would have at the beginning. We have also have had some lovely thank you messages which have been really great to receive.
How do you find your audience varies on each platform?
We are a lot more popular on Twitter (just hit 500 followers!) than we are on Facebook. Our ‘likes’ on Facebook have mainly come from individuals, whereas our followers on Twitter are a real mix between local businesses and media, as well as individuals.
Have you come across any misconceptions or myths surrounding social media?
I think we were all nervous about entering the world of social media for many reasons – we all thought we would be inundated with unhappy customers but it hasn’t been like that at all. We have easily had more positive comments than negative and we are all really pleased with how social media has been working for us over the last six months. I think our customers really appreciate how open social media is and that we are trying to communicate with people in many different, more modern ways.
You can find Jersey Post on Facebook and Twitter.