Traditional retail brands are using social media to stop themselves becoming irrelevant, and seeing increasing financial benefits as their customers become part of their brand communities.
Social media is both a difficult challenge and a great opportunity for legacy brands. On the plus side they have established brand recognition, history, and often a loyal customer base, but they can also be seen as outdated and out of touch especially by younger, digitally-native consumers.
Hootsuite is a social media performance management platform, which covers all the social media channels, and offers a range of tools from scheduling and tracking content, to measuring and understanding audience engagement.
Since its acquisition of social listening platform Talkwalker last year, the company pitches that it has been able to spot trends before they happen, and understand the conversations that are going on on social media, whether that’s regarding an industry or hot topics within an industry. It also has tools that benchmark against competitors’ social media, and a security platform for highly regulated industries, to ensure social posts don’t violate any regulations.
Trish Riswick, Team Lead, Social Marketing, Hootsuite says legacy brands attempt to re-invent themselves using social media strategies, and coming to life through culturally led storytelling.
Legacy brands are using static, video, and audio platforms to promote their status. Increasingly people don’t shop for a product, but are becoming members of a brand community, and this social media engagement is driving business success.
No curries here
In terms of status, Riswick points to TikTok, arguing that it is not just a social media platform, but can be a true corporate partner in brand strategy. She uses the revival of UK electrical retailer legacy brand Currys as an example:
Currys has pivoted, using a different, fun, youthful tone of voice. In December its video of a woman kicking a bottle, whilst a saleswoman was trying to describe a laptop had 14 million views and also showed off a different type of brand. It was more fun and Currys made it its own.
Currys was founded in 1884 as a bicycle building business, and floated on the stock exchange in 1927. A legacy brand if ever there was one. Riswick comments:
It made the decision to re-invent itself using social media in order to continue this legacy. If you look at the numbers it is very clear the direct impact social media has made on its financial performance.
Social media engagement with Currys doubled in nine months from 75,000 in mid 2024, to 164,200 in early 2025, and online mentions jumped from around 6,500 to 15,000. Its financial performance in this time period also increased from a £462 million loss in FY2023 to £28 million profit in FY2024. Riswick says:
Financial performance began to improve when it started telling stories about its products in different ways. I believe that the timing is not a coincidence. Its strongest sales and profit gains are aligned with its social engagement, and it’s a clear example that social is not just for brand building anymore. It can help drive the bottom line, help get products off the shelf and help reinvent these legacy brands, as personality, content centric, driven machines that can help in all facets of the organization.
She uses another recent Currys video as an illustration of this.
There’s a trend going around where you say four words, just four words, four times. Currys’ was: ‘We don’t sell curry, we don’t sell curry, we don’t sell curry, we don’t sell curry’ This is fun and humorous, and connects so well to a younger audience who, for example, might not know what Currys is. That’s a really fun introduction to the brand. ‘We actually don’t sell curry’. ‘Okay, well, what do you sell?’
Sausage croissants
Another legacy brand going great guns with its use of social media, according to Riswick is Greggs, one of the UK’s most popular QSR (Quick Service Restaurant) and bakery takeaways outlets. which was founded in the 1950s. It has of late produced some very on trend social media. It has also continued to grow with sales up from £1,810 million in 2023 to £2,024 milliion in 2024, and has opened its 2,600th shop, with more to come.
But when your signature dish is a sausage roll – sausage meat wrapped in puff pastry, for our non-UK food aficianados (note to the US, no, not a ‘sausage croissant’) – how do you employ this as an engagement tool on a social media platform? A good example Riswick says is how Greggs has used the current craze for a Labubu (a handbag accessory, or accessory to an accessory) to engage customers:
“Everyone wants a Labubu now – people are literally stealing them off of bags. Greggs posted a picture of one in a Greggs uniform, and all the customer comments were like, ‘I would pay an obscene amount of money for this.’ ‘I want this’ ‘When is this coming?’ That’s such an amazing example of a trending conversation. It’s literally just a figurine, but it was able to assert its brand into the conversation in a fun way, to drive engagements and also just to retain its audience.”
The next step for legacy brands is to start thinking small on social media, according to Riswick.
It’s not small ideas, it’s small details. Trust, community, and personality are all very important things we want on social, but we’re also moved away from the polished moment. We want to see the messy middle. We want to see how the sausage is made, and also who is making the sausage. Employees are becoming the new faces of retail, and the brands that are empowering these voices and letting them be authentic are the ones that are also building long term trust.
For example, the founder of a small fashion company called Oddmuse, is deeply involved, according to Riswick:
It is pulling back the curtains on everything from how they make the dresses, why they’ve made those dresses, and what it’s like to be on a photo shoot, miles away from home and the weather is horrible. It’s very honest, it’s raw, it’s intimate, and it’s very effective. It helps to build that brand trust and relatability.
My take
We’re living in a world where people buy from people and they trust the employees behind these organizations.
This is not a new format. Booze chain BrewDog has been doing it for a while, according to Riswick, and has 100s of videos of employees showing how it is growing as a brand on its YouTube channel. She believes these raw and behind the scenes moments are what helped that brand evolve. That said, Brewdog’s current financial problems perhaps make it a less potent symbol to support this social media marketing message.
More from Hootsuite next week when I’ll be on the ground in San Francisco at the firm’s annual Inbound user conference.
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