In this video, Polly Barnfield presents a case study of Geek Retreat, a UK retailer with stores in Bradford and Wakefield, and explains how the company used an ethical social‑media campaign to encourage customers to travel by bus or train from Bradford to the Wakefield location while its Bradford store was relocating. The campaign offered to reimburse public‑transport tickets, highlighted the environmental benefits, and used personalized messaging, local tagging of the Wakefield store and transport providers, and clear visual cues. The approach boosted online engagement and helped drive in‑store footfall. Barnfield then demonstrates how to manage multiple store accounts efficiently using the ‘Engage’ platform: creating groups for all Geek Retreat locations, viewing and interacting with posts across Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram in one dashboard, and using features such as rescheduling, flagging, commenting, and task assignment. The video concludes with a call to action for viewers to ask questions.
Chapters
Today we're with one of Bradford's Green street pioneers, Geek Retreat, and they're looking at how they've created a campaign to encourage people to take public transport to their store using social media. Now, Geek Retreat is a business with various locations across the country, including Bradford, but as Bradford store was in the midst of moving locations, as you can see, they didn't want to lose customers, therefore they wanted to encourage people to their location in Wakefield. As you can see, this is the email and this is the post here. We can't wait to see you in store again soon. However, in the meantime, if you need your GR fix, why not come down to our Wakefield store? We're also offering to reimburse the bus station, the bus train ticket from Bradford to Wakefield. Now, I absolutely love this because they're clearly conscious being kinder to the environment. They're using social media to let people know that if they get the bus or train, because they can't come to the local store, they've got to travel so they can get the bus or train down to their other store in Wakefield, which is a journey, they'll refund them. What this has done is seen their engagement increase quite a lot. So it's such a good way to show that you can use social media to physically get people over the threshold of your store and be ethically minded all at the same time. Now, what's great about it is we can't wait to see you again. So it keeps it really personal. They're telling them that they've got a Wakefield store, which is great. And if the Wakefield store has a Facebook, I would definitely have tagged that as well so that then they could share it and they could have even tagged in the bus company here to say, you know, that the Bradford Wakefield bus company, it might have been, or the trains. And then they've matched what they've said in their content with their image as well, with the little asterisks there saying bus or train tickets can be reimbursed. So I think it's just a really good way of showing that social media can physically drive in store sales. And you can be a little bit more ethically minded by doing some kind of travel reimbursement or indeed even just linking up with a local train travel company. Or it might even just be posting the bus times to let people know that, you know, there are other ways of getting down to your store rather than just driving. Any business can do a campaign like this. As I say, there's just lots of different ways to do it. But ultimately, this is all about showing how Geek Retreat have driven people from one store, one area to another in a more ethical way, using social media. And it's increased their engagements. And as you can see, people are really excited about how long they have to wait as well. Now, if I was Geek Retreat, one of the things that I would want to do is look at all of my social accounts. Obviously, they've got multiple business, multiple businesses, so I don't look at my social accounts all in one and make sure that if I was, say, the main owner or the main person looking after all the accounts, then you can do it all in one place. So I would go to my maybe platform, go to Engage, and then I would go to Group and I would create a group for all of my Geek Retreat stores. Then in here, what you can do is you can click your group. I've just clicked Bakers here, but you can click the group and then you will literally see all of the posts done across Facebook, Twitter and Instagram for all Geek Retreat stores across the uk, which means that you can go in, you can, like, you can comment, you can reschedule them, you can view the post, you can also flag it if you need to, and you can also then assign it to someone as well. There's so many great things that you can do here, but it just means that everything's all in one place rather than having to sift through Instagram, Facebook and Twitter to look for all their individual accounts. Now, if you've got any questions whatsoever, please click on the little blue button. We love to help.
