MyKidsTime.ie is a listings website for parents and their children in Ireland and their continued success on Facebook offers wonderful insights to other SMEs on how to use digital to grow business. In this #TYBspotlight, I find out how this Irish SME is building a viral Facebook community and business. [Disclosure: I’ve been advising Chief Executive and Founder: Jill Holtz and her team for nearly 4 years]
MyKidstime with a staggering 2656 % engagement rate on Facebook above (The average is 2%).
When I first started to work with Mykidstime we decided to concentrate our efforts on building an engaged and localised Facebook community. Social media and Facebook in particular quickly became a significant source of traffic sending 10s of 1000s of visitors to their website every month.
Mykidstime Facebook Strategy
When we first devised the initial Mykidstime Facebook strategy – we knew that:
- There wasn’t a big budget available.
- The team were prepared to invest their time provided they saw results, i.e. increased sales.
- The social media strategy needed to align with the business strategy – they should be complementary.
The Mykidstime Facebook community now numbers a collective 42K fans across their Facebook pages and this fanbase has been built organically. The average Facebook page engagement rate is 2% whereas the Mykidstime ER consistently runs at between 100% – 200% and in recent months – a number of their posts have gone viral on Facebook.
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Jill, tell me about those viral Mykidstime posts – how many have there been and how regularly are they happening?
Our new website and brand arrived at the start of October and we were keen to re-focus our Facebook efforts to help with getting the word out. Since then, we’ve had 4 images go viral:
- 4th of October -> 1.8M impressions
- 10th of October -> 4.8M impressions
- 6th of November -> 10.7M impressions
- 15th of November -> 12.5M impressions
What impacts are you seeing?
There has been 3 noticeable impacts:
- Fans - Firstly, an acceleration of new fans. On the main Mykidstime Facebook page we now have over 20k fans – so we have gained 11k fans in the last 3 months with 1k coming in just one week.
- Reach – There has been a collective increase in reach with all our posts, which are now getting seen by more fans leading to an increase in the number of likes and comments per post.
- B2B - Interestingly, a third impact has been our ability to get B2B to now respond via Facebook. Prior to this, our Facebook page was mainly a B2C vehicle but now we are able to use it to directly drive sales leads from businesses.
For example, we’ve just recently launched the Mykidstime Store - Ireland’s first online marketplace for parents – and we were quickly able to secure our first 15 suppliers/customers via Facebook. We have also sucessfully used Facebook to secure new advertisers for our digital Christmas Gifts Guide.
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So why have these Facebook posts gone viral?
The images appeal to our target audience and we’ve always achieved high levels of engagement without posts going viral on Facebook.
- Promotions - When Facebook relaxed their promotion rules in September this offered us an opportunity to give away fun prizes legally directly on Facebook (we have always been hyper careful to abide by fb rules!). The downside is that if we get people to enter on our website we gain on our mailing list but don’t via Facebook entries so there’s always a trade-off.
- Engagement – I believe the momentum generated by those giveaways on our already engaged Facebook page created the opportunity for posts to go viral but we’re still very surprised by the how frequently they now appear to be happening for us.
What challenges does achieving virality on Facebook bring?
Challenges I see are:
- Sustaining engagement levels - While I think we are good on Facebook and know what our audience likes, maybe our new fans are different from our old fans, and we don’t yet know if they will stay with us.
- Keeping new fans – Many of the recent fans are from other countries, so maybe we have gained fans that we will lose because they are not interested in our localised content?
- Converting engagement into sales – Continuing to monetise the effects of the engagement, so keeping sales leads coming in.
Lastly, what’s next for MyKidstime?
Now that we’ve launched the Mykidstime store we need to grow and test it with our local and established audience. Our aim is to expand the Mykidstime brand and store over time to eventually become a global business, starting with entry into the UK.
Well done to Jill and the Mykidstime team on their understanding of social media and their continued success on Facebook. Again, they’ve proven that you don’t have to be a significant brand or have a big budget if you apply the right approach on Facebook and truly value your community.
Thanks for reading,
Niall
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