An inside look at one impressive social media campaign

“Our goal is to provide real-time value to our more than 6 million daily customers, at scale,” says Adam Kmiec, director of social media for Walgreens. “That means figuring out a way to connect with customers at each and every one of our nearly 8,000 community drugstores.”

Here’s how Walgreens is doing it: Using social media monitoring tools from LocalResponse, the company finds tweets announcing check-ins at its stores. Walgreens’ social media team replies to that check-in announcement with a reply directing customers to new products, offering them coupons, or telling them about how their check-ins can do some charitable good.

Going local

Walgreens started working with LocalResponse last summer, Kmiec says. It’s the first retailer that’s working with the company to offer promotions.

Those promotions differ depending on the time of year or what’s on sale. For example, the drugstore chain’s recent Twitter responses to check-ins have directed customers to Halls Warm-Ups cough drops. The company sent more than 5,000 of those tweets in January, and they have continued into February.