Facebook

Tiffany & Co. has more than four million fans and generally posts one update per day or fewer. A vast majority of posts are simple product images or albums complete with links to its ecommerce page.

These are interspersed with product videos, images of celebs wearing Tiffany jewellery and various content promoting the brand’s tie in with the recent Great Gatsby remake.

All of the updates achieve an extraordinarily high level of interactions, with product images generally being the most popular. It’s common for simple product-related updates to achieve upwards of 50,000 ‘likes’, thousands of shares and hundreds of comments, while in comparison videos tend to get only a few thousand ‘likes’.

This high number of interactions is probably due to the fact that Tiffany & Co. is an iconic, aspirational brand that people want to be associated with, therefore they’re happy to give a $10,000 necklace a digital thumbs-up.

Tiffany is also quite good at responding to user comments, though in keeping with its luxury image it avoids entering into chatty conversations with fans and customers. Instead the social team just responds to product questions by supplying relevant links to its ecommerce site or the number for customer services.

It’s also worth noting Tiffany’s recent social campaign to promote the launch of its new Blue Book Collection, which incorporated Facebook, Pinterest and Instagram.

A few days before the official launch on April 18, Tiffany began sharing images and details of the collection exclusively through its social channels. This included a dedicated Facebook tab that users had to access using a special password.

It culminated in a special event in New York attended by various celebrities and models, photos of which were published on Facebook.

Rewarding Facebook fans with access to exclusive content and using them to build excitement around a new product launch is a tried and tested marketing tactic, and one that Cadbury has used to good effect several times in the past few years.

It’s a cost effective way of building buzz among your existing fan base prior to a big launch, though it’s interesting that Tiffany hasn’t gone down the route of creating a hashtag for the campaign, no doubt because it doesn’t quite fit with the idea of it being an exclusive sneak peak if there’s a hashtag splashed around everywhere.

Twitter

While many of the brands I’ve looked at have numerous Twitter feeds for different departments and international markets, Tiffany & Co. appears to only have two official accounts – one for the US and one for Brazil.

The US account tweets between five and 10 times per day, and is generally a mix of product suggestions, images, promos for its engagement ring finder app and links to other social accounts.

In fact quite a lot of the recent tweets have been promotions for the Tiffany & Co. Tumblr, which basically hosts a load of the brand’s products and adverts.

Tiffany & Co. also occasionally responds to tweets from other users, however never more than one or two per day.

It also seems to have a very limited repertoire of minimalist responses, which include “lovely,” “perfect,” “indeed,” and “cheers to you on your birthday.”

The only time it gets close to using 140 characters is when responding to customer queries and complaints: “Please email us at service@tiffany.com with the best way to reach you, so we may address your comments. Thank you.”

Overall the emphasis is more on broadcasting marketing messages rather than actually engaging with other users, however the content that Tiffany & Co. posts is probably quite interesting for a certain demographic and as such it has almost 600,000 followers.

Pinterest

In theory Pinterest is the ideal social network for Tiffany & Co. as people often use it to collate product wish lists and wedding ideas, so images of engagement rings and jewellery are in high demand.

And though its follower count of 28,000 is higher than most of the businesses I’ve looked at, it’s still surprisingly low for such an iconic jewellery brand.

It could be down to the fact that Tiffany hasn’t exactly made a huge effort with Pinterest, pinning just 350 images across nine boards, despite establishing an account several months ago.

But as mentioned, Tiffany & Co. used Pinterest as part of its promotional campaign for its new Blue Book range and often cross-promotes its account on Twitter, so it could be that it plans to make more of the network going forward.

Google+

Many major retailers remain indifferent to Google+ and either post infrequently or never at all, but Tiffany & Co. is among a very small minority that haven’t even bothered to establish an account at all.

The benefits of G+ to a brand with Tiffany & Co.’s target audience are debatable, particularly as a majority of agencies believe the network doesn’t even have an SEO value, but even so it’s unusual that the company hasn’t even bothered to register an account.