Week 2B: Business Research

Barnes & Noble

• website 
• B&N is an American bookselling company. It has the most retail stores out of any bookselling businesses in the United States and is part of the Fortune 1000. 
• I did not see any links to social media on the Barnes & Noble website. I managed to find their twitter and instagrams handles.
• Their last post is from 8 hours ago and it appears that they update their instagram on a daily basis. They have 694K followers.
• They have 261k followers on their twitter, but interestingly didn't manage to get their usual handle despite being verified. It looks like they also update everyday on twitter with their last post being from six hours ago.
• Despite being the preferred social media platform for most people, Barnes and Noble has significantly less followers on twitter compared to their instagram. Part of it, I believe, is that there is no difference between their posts on twitter and instagram; However, their twitter is filled with much more quick advertisements, and retweeting authors whom they are promoting...aka advertising. Their posts don't seem to reach a very wide audience. 

JC Painting

• website 
• JC Painting is a family owned business of painting homes and large scale projects alike. They only work in North County
• The website doesn't provide much information than stating that they are painters and leaving the owners email address and business phone line. The website is very standard issue squarespace. There are a lot of instagram handles going by some sort of JC Painting, but none I was able to confirm as our local one. 
• I picked this business to review because I have worked alongside this company a few times while I was a paint mixer. Everyone I came into contact with was kind and respectful, and considering they were in the store every other day I could only assume the business was thriving. The fact that they are one of the top painters listed near me further supports this reasoning. However, they have no social media to speak of, yet are capable of acquiring new customers due to connections and respect within the painting community. When the company started social media didn't exist, so everything they built was from hard work and satisfied customers alone. 

Wendy's

• website 
• Wendy's is an international food chain that originated in America. 
• Compared to the last two, the website works very well for what they are selling. It's eye catching but not overwhelming, and simple but not underwhelming. The food is big and looks good, and they even linked their facebook, twitter, and instagram handles in the footer. 
• Their twitter has 3.8 million followers. Their last post is from 4 hours ago, but it looks like they only update a few times a week, sometimes twice in one day. 
• Their instagram has 1 million followers. Their last post is from five days ago, and seems to only update once a week. 
• I am unfamiliar with how facebook functions, but I believe their last post is from 3 weeks ago. This is about all the information I can decipher from facebook. 
• As I've talked about before, Wendy's gained a lot of good attention thanks to its internet personality on twitter. Whoever runs it is able to deliver successful advertisements in a way that humors it's audience. Sometime's they even reply to things that don't necessarily have anything to do with advertising (but it is a international businesses social media so, everything is advertising). This was the lucky break Wendy's needed to save their business after the whole chili finger incident. People don't follow Wendy's because they love their food, they love how the account is run, which in turn entices people to buy their products. 

Daiso

• website
• There are actually two websites for Daiso Japan and Daiso US, and other than slight changes to the layout of the website and the products they sell, there is not really a difference
• Daiso is a variety store chain, popular in the US for being japanese themed and due to the fact that there are only 77 stores open in the US at the moment. Due to it's increasing popularity, they are expecting to open up many more in the future.
• Both the Japan and US Daiso website link to their social media's in the footer. Unlike the websites, these accounts are not separated by region. 
• Their facebook updated last week promoting their Halloween collection.
• Their twitter is not Daiso as a whole, but Daiso in California, even though it is linked on both websites. Their last tweet is from May of 2019, asking for part-time employees for hire. There are only 2000 people following their twitter.
• Even though I was using Daiso Japan's website, their instagram link directed me to Daiso USA. 75.1K people follow their instagram, and they have the same posts as their facebook which updated five days ago. However, this instagram is not verified, yet Daiso Official (which I can only assume is for the stores in japan), is, yet this is not the instagram linked on their website. The official instagram has 1.7 million followers and updated 14 hours ago. 
• Daiso has a youtube channel, which also centers around their stores in California. Their last update was from a year ago and it only has 400 subscribers. 
• I am pretty surprised with the way Daiso's social media is run. The website looks good on a surface level, but as I described above it got very confusing and messy very fast, and it is no surprise that several of these accounts blundered. It may be due to a language barrier and having to have 2 different websites for each region, but at the very least they could organize their social medias accordingly. 

Adidas

• website
• Adidas is a german multinational sportswear manufacturer. It is only second to Nike. 
• There were no links to any social media that I could find on their official website. However, a quick search pulls up not just the official instagram, but several verified accounts, one dedicated to each sport. It is the same on twitter. For the sake of simplicity I will only compare the official ones.
• Their instagram has 25.9M followers and their last post is from 2 days ago. They appear to update a few times a month. 
• Their twitter has 4 million followers and also updated 2 days ago. They update much more frequently on their twitter. 
• At first, I was annoyed at Adidas for not linking their social media on their website; but now I get why. Unless they'd want to dedicate a whole page to links to their social medias, which now that I say it that wouldn't be such a bad idea. I like the fact that they are organized by sport, so you are only advertized the things you actually want and/or need. Because their advertising is focused by sport, their official social medias are inspiring and sports themed, not necessarily trying to sell you their products. 

Final Thoughts

Before conducting this research and comparing these companies, I was so sure that if you were already a big name brand, it was a guaranteed verified twitter or instagram with millions of followers. And that's usually the case, as long as they know how to run it. 

As a family owned, local business, I was not expecting much from JC painters. Their website gave the bare minimum of information on how to contact them, and that is not from social media. However, I am shocked that I also have to put Daiso at the bottom end of my rating scale today. While their website was easy enough to manage, the social medias were a hot mess. If they were more organized and able to connect with their target customer base more, than perhaps this wouldn't be the case. However, despite their failings in the social media aspect of business, they are still running and receiving customers. I do believe that if they were to put effort into a successfully run social media, their business would only prosper. 

I put Barnes and Noble in the middle of my rating. The website had all the information you could want except for social media links. However, I don't blame them for not wanting to advertise their accounts, as it was pretty boring to go through. If they weren't so obvious in their advertising it would be more bearable.

Needless to say, Wendy's and Adidas know how to run their social media. I would go as far as to say that Wendy's pioneered this type of advertising. I was actually unaware that Adidas is a German company, and initially picked their business to analyze because I own and like a lot of their clothes. I am glad I picked them so I could compare it to Daiso, which is another non-US company.