GE Factory Service shows how NOT to use social media when advertising appliance repair

During a routine check of one of our client’s local markets, we noticed in a social media feed a curious advertisement from one of the largest companies in the world, GE. Specifically, GE Factory Service which provides in-home repair services supporting anything that GE may sell to consumers.

The post is a typical marketing campaign to build general awareness to customers in a specific market that GE has in-home oven repair services available. Take a closer look though and you’ll notice that the Facebook emojis are a mix of thumbs up, laughing, and anger. Two out of three of these emojis are not something most business owners would be thrilled to see with a marketing campaign.

The next thing we did is to take a closer look at the specific comments and each one is pretty rough. Every single comment at the time of this posting was negative. So not only has GE posted this content online, they are paying for it. Paying to have their brand and services dragged through the mud of social media.

But let’s be clear, it’s not Facebook’s fault. The blame falls to the marketing company in charge of this. Appliance repair is a service that customers need, in most cases, it’s unexpected and not something customers want to deal with. Any competent marketing company would know this going in if they properly qualified their client and the needs of their customers that the client serves.

GE Factory Service is reminding customers with this social media campaign that, “Hey! Remember the last time your stuff broke down?” or “Hey! Remember that last horrible experience you had with a service company??”

It’s no surprise that this post is getting mostly negative engagements. While Fluid Services strongly encourages getting feedback from every customer you service (we make it easy with Fluid Local), we only recommend creating content that is either authentic(your team shares aspects of their day-to-day work) or helpful (content that helps consumers in some way).

This is the stuff that will usually trend on social media in a positive way as you expose your customers to the people working at your company. It creates a stronger relationship between you and your customers.

Creating content is not easy but we can help!

We can also give you some free tips on how to start generating your own content in-house so feel free to reach out to us today!