How Fitbit Uses Social Listening to Build a Loyal Community of Users

Learn how Fitbit uses social listening for better marketing and community building.

Despite the growth of health tracking apps and solutions during the last couple of years, Fitbit is still the second-most popular wearable brand across the globe.

As per statistics, Fitbit has over 31 million users across the globe and despite the increasing competition from the likes of Apple and other wearable technologies, the brand has been able to grow sustainably, despite slight dips in its popularity.

So what are they doing right?

Fitbit has been using social listening to be where their audience is, talk about things they truly care about, and keep them engaged in their journey to good health with proactive marketing campaigns.

If you’re new to social listening, read this guide on what it is and why it is important.

But if you are aware of what social listening is, let’s look into how Fitbit has made it a crucial part of its growth strategy over the years.

There are a number of ways in which Fitbit has been using social listening to strategize better for marketing, customer support, service, and sales. Here’s taking a look at some of the ways they have been using insights from social listening:

Social media trends move fast. Brands that are able to catch on with these trends in a timely manner are the ones who are able to tap into their full potential and reach a wider audience, riding on the high waves.

Fitbit does not make the mistake of not cashing in on trends. Take a look at how they have been using this meme on Beyonce for Superbowl on their social media accounts, giving it their very own twist for high context. Tell us you didn’t like this one!

Learn more about using social listening for identifying and predicting trends here.

2. Identifying their active markets

Since Fitbit was one of the first health-related wearables in the market, they were able to expand to global markets really quick. But instead of just relying on their first mover’s advantage, Fitbit has been proactively tuning into online conversations to see where most of their users come from.

They use these social listening insights to identify their primary markets and where they tend to get the most customer support requests or queries from. Using that, the brand now clearly states the languages they offer support in, making it much easier for its users to reach out to them and strike conversations to address their concerns.

3. Tapping into seasonal campaigns

Seasonal campaigns are the essence of marketing for direct-to-consumer products and services. This is the time when consumers are the most likely to make purchases for themselves or for their loved ones, and Fitbit is not the one to get left behind to position their products as seasonal buys.

They have identified the core seasons, occasions, and events their audience actively engages with. Using the same, they create their social media content to join the celebrations and become a part of the conversations happening around the time.

Here’s one from around the Lunar New Year:

And here’s how they subtly positioned themselves as a great Valentine’s Day gift in the month of love.

Learn more about using social listening for online conversations here.

4. Offer proactive customer support and service

Whether it’s a wearable, an app, a web app or a product, the one thing you definitely need to ensure to keep your customers engaged, is to offer proactive customer support and service. This may include addressing the simplest of questions like how to change the wearable settings to getting answers to repair, exchange, refund policies.

Fitbit offers customer support over Twitter. Considering the thousands of queries that come in, Fitbit has been able to keep up with them all using a social listening tool.

This helps them tackle negative experiences into positive conversations, helping them boost customer loyalty.

5. Building out features and capabilities

One of the things that’s important for apps and products to take into account is adapting to their target audience’s changing needs, preferences, and challenges. But basing a roadmap of features based on assumptions or your ability to build isn’t the way to succeed. You need to be able to build out features and capabilities that your users or your target audience actually wants.

Fitbit has been doing this pretty proactively. Looking into the trend of how people started to focus a lot on mental health as well, and leverage apps like Calm during the pandemic, Fitbit built out their integration with it. This feature now enables those who use their wearables to also access Calm much more easily throughout the day.

Building features that your audience wants is a great way to show you’re tuned into their needs and are building ‘for them’.

6. Influencer campaigns and collaborations

Influencer marketing has proven to help businesses reach their target audience much faster. But brands tend to have mixed experiences with the marketing strategy, depending on who they collaborate with to create content or run marketing campaigns.

Fitbit uses social listening to identify influencers that its target audience really connects with. They have been able to rope in influencers from across the globe based on the topics they proactively talk about, their influence, and how they impact the sentiments of their followers. This has led to massive success in their marketing campaigns, helping them further build a stronger community.

If you want to build a loyal following, you need to use social media for more than just broadcasting your content, product announcements, and offers. You need to leverage the true potential of social media and actually make use of it for having conversations – beyond what is required for offering customer support and service.

Fitbit makes sure to focus on their social media engagement with the help of social listening. They use every comment as an opportunity to strike a conversation, involving their customers with the brand on a much deeper and day-to-day level.

8. Creating branded hashtags

Seeing how the consumers who bought from them share their purchases on social media, Fitbit also created branded hashtags to improve the awareness around their products. This has also helped them follow posts and conversations around specific products of theirs to help understand their consumers better, and how they feel about them.

Here’s a glimpse at the currently branded hashtags they leverage, and the number of people who are using them:

Building a community helps boost customer engagement and retention rates dramatically. More than 70% of consumers have stated that they tend to stay loyal to a brand if they feel a sense of belonging to a group or a community. Fitbit did not hold back from tapping into this consumer behavior.

They created a branded hashtag to encourage their customers to become a part of their community. This is the hashtag their customers use when posting about their fitness progress on social media or sharing their daily progress screenshots.

What’s more? The community made posts also serve as authentic content for the brand to reach more people!

10. Using image analytics to plan their ad creatives

Cracking the code on ad graphics can be tough. You never know what visual can exactly trigger a response from your potential customers. Should you show your products, feature set, product pricing, use emojis or customer pictures?

This is where image analytics in social listening comes in. With the help of social listening, Fitbit has been able to identify what visually appeals to its customers – for example, the number of steps and heart rate monitor. Using this strategy, the brand has been able to drive higher conversions from their ad campaigns, and improve their ROAS as well.

Learn more about image analytics here.

11. Get better app reviews and ratings

A big part of online success for apps and products is the ratings and reviews they get. By leveraging social listening, Fitbit has been able to strike active conversations with people who talk positively about their brand and wearables, leading them to drop positive reviews and ratings on app stores and other review platforms.

They also leverage social listening to identify potential negative experiences and use the opportunity to converse with the users, find solutions to address their problems and turn that experience into a positive emotion in the best way possible.

The use of social media platforms is increasing by the day. From what used to be an app to take breaks, social media channels have now become a part and parcel of our lives, and we’re actively using them to share content or our opinions on topics that we care about.

These social conversations hold a lot of insights when it comes to understanding what your consumers want, how they feel and what you can do better to keep them engaged in a fast-moving, highly-competitive market.

So whether you’re an app, web or product developer, if you’re not using social listening, you’re leaving opportunities for your competitors to take on your market.

With social listening, you can actually do your product a lot of good:

Streamline your product roadmap to include features your customers ‘actually’ want
Proactively offer customer support and service to reduce user churn
Use ongoing conversations and trends to reach more people
Leverage different content formats to educate your audience
Plan out ad campaigns better to reduce user acquisition costs
Improve product/ app reviews on app stores and review sites

Looks like exactly what you need to build a successful product, right? It is.

Here is the complete guide to Instagram social listening.

Book a demo of Radarr today to see how you can build stronger communities around your app like Fitbit.