Social Media Success Story - One of VPI's Twitter Followers Writes a Story Picked-Up by CNN

Social Media Success Story

We recently sat down with our own social media consultant, Bryan Howland, to talk about one of his successful experiences with social media.

Bryan provides consulting services for The Harriman Group, and also works as the social media specialist at Veterinary Pet Insurance (VPI) in Brea, California. He’s been on the job for a little more than six months, and during that time, VPI’s social media audience has expanded significantly. As in growing to 19,000 friends on Facebook from 3,000, and from 2,500 Twitter followers to 4,000.

The impressive increase in VPI’s social media popularity, according to Bryan, is due to the fact that the company strives to be a resource for its customers, posting relevant content, rather than trying to sell and upsell to new and existing customers. It turns out that pet owners are not the only audience that finds VPI’s useful content tweets interesting.

Morieka Johnson, a freelance writer for the Mother Nature Network, was writing a holiday story about pets, entitled, “Pets and holidays: avoiding mutual destruction.” She contact Bryan via Twitter to find out if there was a spike in pet mishaps during the holiday season.

Bryan said that the request “came out of the blue, but if we had not been active social media participants, Morieka may not have considered using VPI as a source for her story.”

Intrigued by VPI’s extensive claims data, Morieka included information in her story about the company’s Hambone Award, which is given each year to the pet with the “most unusual health insurance claim.”

CNN picked up Morieka’s story - Pets and holidays: Avoiding mutual destruction – and the company experienced ten times the average number of daily visits to the Hambone Awards page.

”Instead of telephone calls and meetings, we’ve developed a relationship through social media that is the basis for on-going, future interaction,” Bryan said. “Posting information that others can use rather than sales pitches, lays the framework for social media success."