How Sam’s Club Creates Community With Social Media

The five-part Sam’s Club Deep Dive series looks closely at how big businesses manage social media, covering all the strategies, methods, and team dynamics over not one but five episodes. The series kicks off with Sam’s Club, the beloved wholesale membership club.

Bringing People Together

Social media has a way of bringing people together, and that’s what Sam’s Club is all about. The social media team at Sam’s Club has ballooned in size over the past few years, and it’s transformed the way it approaches social media.
In part three of five episodes in the Sam’s Club Deep Dive series, Social Pros talks to MacKenzie McCarver and Hunter Wuensche about creating community through social media.
MacKenzie is the Director of Social Media, and Hunter is the Social Media Manager at Sam’s Club. They share how Sam’s Club creates a community, both within its own team and its members, through social care, employee and user-generated content, as well as influencer marketing.
You’ll also hear how MacKenzie and Hunter’s roles fit into the team and how they impact the day-to-day social strategies at Sam’s Club.
All five episodes are out now, so get ready to binge!
This is a brand-new series, so we’d love to hear some feedback on what you think of the Social Pros Deep Dive. Please share any thoughts you have by emailing Jay directly at jay@convinceandconvert.com.

In This Episode:

• 5:00 – What the day-to-day social media strategies look like at Sam’s Club
• 6:44 – Reaching different types of Sam’s Club customers on social
• 7:52 – The ‘Happy Host’ segment that Sam’s Club focuses on
• 8:46 – Collaboration between the social team and different departments
• 10:06 – How influencer marketing fits in with the rest of the social strategy
• 13:45 – Sam’s Club’s methods for finding influencers to work with
• 16:35 – How Sam’s Club manages an editorial calendar across the states
• 18:57 – The process behind creating organic social posts
• 21:26 – The best type of visual content for Sam’s Club
• 23:34 – How Sam’s Club encourages employee-generated content (EGC)
• 24:54 – The tool that Sam’s Club uses to manage EGC for Facebook posts
• 27:10 – Why the social team works closely with operations, HR, and legal for EGC
• 28:40 – Sam’s Club’s approach to brand-to-brand interactions
• 30:43 – How the team uses trends and hashtags as part of its campaigns
• 34:27 – MacKenzie’s tip for those wanting to become a social pro
• 37:09 – Who Hunter would love to have a video call with

Quotes From This Episode:

It's really important to have local credentials, local credibility in our influencer program. Click To Tweet
“Most of our customers are on social, and so we try to think strategically about how we’re leveraging each channel to be able to reach them.”
“Hunter’s very good at understanding what type of content and what type of influencer will resonate with our audience.”

Sam’s Club Brand and Social Team:

To help you follow along, here’s an organizational chart of the Sam’s Club Brand and Social Team.

Resources:

• Get the new State of Marketing report for free from Salesforce
• Download Upfluence’s Brand Influence Ranking Report
• Download the Social Media Metrics template from Supermetrics