Global online retailer OLX’s South African website, OLX.co.za, has emerged as South Africa’s most popular brand on Facebook. It has over 581 000 supporters, making it the number one brand on Facebook in the country, according to Socialbakers.
“OLX has demonstrated the advantage of integrated marketing strategy powered by customers, insights and creativity, seeing the brand grow by over 30 000 fans monthly,” says Bronwyn Johnson, marketing director of OLX Africa. “We attribute the success to a strong understanding of our supporters, an integrated marketing approach and driving engagement through quality content with a two-way communication between OLX and our fans.”
Since the launch of the OLX platform two years ago, Johnson says the website has seen tremendous growth, with more than a million ads posted and thousands posted on a daily basis. In addition, OLX has invested heavily in marketing its offering to ensure the brand is well known to South Africans. “This achievement has seen the OLX brand growing from being the third largest on Facebook last year to taking top stakes at the beginning of 2014.”
Johnson says the company’s social pages are run by a “small expert team always available to manage customer relationships, reputational issues with strong linkage to traditional media, this allows us to remain engaged, listen and respond to our invaluable fans in real-time”.
She says OLX Facebook fans are among the most engaging on the social network and regularly contribute toward discussions around product improvements and safety education; making it one of the first ports of call for our business to measure public response.”
“Our other social platforms are also proving very popular with over a 1.3 million YouTube views to date and interestingly, towards the end of 2013, according to Google’s annual Zeitgist rankings, OLX made the list of the top 10 overall South African trending searches at number 6 on Google above ‘Reeva Steenkamp’ and the ‘Royal baby’ as well as number one trending brand for online shopping above Zando and Computicket South Africa.
Johnson believes South Africa has a huge South African Facebook population just waiting to be captured. “We are looking forward to continuing our success through 2014 and grabbing the attention of those 9,4 million active users,” she says.
Globally the OLX brand is one of the world’s leading free classifieds online platforms with over 100 million unique users, generating traffic of over 1.8 billion monthly page views or 60 million per day.
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