Social Media Review: Shopping Centres

Shopping centre marketers are starting to use social networking as a cost effective method of keeping their retail destinations in front of their key audiences.

Social media for shops (on and offline) has proven to be a great tool to drive awareness, footfall and most importantly sales. We are seeing a number of shopping centres now promoting the ‘Community’ feel on their sites, but many are missing a trick in integrating their community focus with social media.

Rocktime works with a number of fashion and beauty bloggers, who we know regularly tweet and blog about new store openings at their local shopping centres and are eager to promote the latest shopping trends to their followers. As a consequence, there is a significant opportunity for shopping centre marketing managers to leverage and connect with the local fashion bloggers, letting them know in advance of new launches, shops, or possibly even blogger-specific events. Many shopping centres use Facebook to connect with their regular shoppers and this morning we found almost 100 UK shopping centres of differing sizes that currently use Twitter.

The majority use Twitter to interact and engage with fans and shopping centre staff as well as promoting:

• Shop offers
• New launches
• New shop openings
• Meal deals
• Competitions-West12shopping centre in Shepherds Bush is particularly active
• Following the stores in their centres & Re Tweeting their promotions & news


Ashford Outlet Centre in Kent regularly posts lifestyle tips, new shops, charity events and personal shopping services on their blog. Their BIO states:

“Insider news on the latest stock, best buys and events from the people who work at, shop at and love Ashford Designer Outlet”

Bridgend Outlet centre has a similar message:
“Insider news on the latest stock, best buys and events from the people who work at, shop at and love Bridgend Designer Outlet”

On closer review this particular chain of Outlet centres in the UK shares the same web template, with each also offering a blog in the same standard design. Each page within the website is unique as they are focused on the individual shopping centre locations and facilities; content is however repeated across the blogs, which isn’t a good strategy for SEO, as the shopping outlet with the most links to it will be the one that will receive a placement in the search results for that blog post. Nonetheless this is an effective way of getting the word out on what is new to a location-targeted audience.

View the links below to understand more about the standard template designs:

Ashford Designer Outlet

Bridgend Designer Outlet

We recommend that shopping centres use social media as part of their overall marketing plan, but for true ROI it should not be viewed as an ‘add on’ but must be integrated with traditional media marketing such as print and radio, as well as focused on the website search optimisation strategy.

If you give shoppers a reason to integrate with your communities, then shopping centres can then drive these campaigns via other marketing channels - i.e. posters within the centre, local newspapers, or social responsible community PR programmes to increase community involvement further.

Examples of encouraging shopper to interact might include the following:

“Find out about all the latest shopping centre gossip over at Twitter and Facebook”

“Let us know what you think of the new XY store over at our blog”.

“Who would you like to turn on the Xmas lights? Vote over at our Facebook page”

“Keep up with the latest style trends with us”
(view: http://www.westfieldstylenotes.com/springsummer-preview-river-island/)

Social Networking can also assist with the creation of other cost effective ideas, which can be derived by listening, learning and engaging with your fans within social networks or on your corporate blog.

Shopping Centre Marketing Managers, or a designated marketing agency, can use social media to trail out new ways of getting people increase footfall to a destination, such as:

“Take part in an exclusive competition; pick up a leaflet from the info office this weekend”

“Print off this voucher available on Facebook and get it stamped over at the Info desk and receive discounts at xy store”

The information captured can then be fed back into the shopping centre’s marketing database, and used to further help promote community involvement and most importantly drive further footfall.

Sharing with you my (current) top ten shopping centres using Social Media
Bicester Village (Club, YouTube, Twitter, ENews, Facebook, Flickr, RSS)
West 12 Shopping (Twitter,VIP ENews)
West Quay (Twitter,Facebook)
GunWharf Quays (Club, Facebook, Twitter)
Liverpool One (Twitter, ENews)
West Orchards (Twitter, Facebook, ENews)
Spinningfields (Community, Club, Twitter)
Westfield (Twitter, Style Blog)
Bullring (Twitter, YouTube, Flickr, RSS, Community, ENews)
Trafford Centre (Twitter, Facebook, Blog, YouTube)

As a team we really are getting quite passionate about the value of social media for retail clients, if you are in retail and would like to discuss this further please get in touch with Fiona Anderson in the Flashlight Team.

Fiona worked on early in-store theatre innovations for fashion brands, through to current expanding a brand’s online footprint. Fiona’s direct experience with the challenges of operating a shopping centre has been the Dolphin Shopping Centre, in Poole and small scale events at The Cascades Shopping Centre, in Portsmouth, back in 2004. Surprisingly she has been quoted as saying “she hates shopping for herself but loves the shopping research for clients”. Give her a call and convince her that your shop, shopping centre or retail experience will change her mind.

Our Logic Content Management System boasts several modules to suit retail clients including: Voucher Codes, Competition module, Community features, Store Locator, find out more about Rocktimes Bespoke Web CMS here.

In the meantime happy shopping....


Author: Sarah Griffiths @sarahgriffiths

Who should you be voting for?

With tonight's election looming I thought to write a topical blog post based on the UK General Election. We have decided to share with you how much we like the "Vote for policies, not personalities!" website. Real time graph from the site displayed above. We are especially keen on the usable interface and real time collaboration features on the site and within social networks. A job well done by the developers.

The Vote for Policies website has been developed/designed to help visitors to the site compare the policies of the six main politcal parties, enabling visitors to make informed decisions based on the policies they want to live with, helping the visitor remove any bias they may have picked up from the mainstream and newstream media.

Go and try it out here: http://voteforpolicies.org.uk/ it may change your mind !!

The site has also been well received by the media, with the Financial Times stating "The test is well worth taking" and Channel 4 news mentioned that "Vote for Policies is an interesting survey based on policies alone - allowing users to find out who they would vote for if their policies were anonymous". We found out about the site on Twitter.

Another tool you may be interested in visiting is http://www.myvoteadvisor.com/ which contains information directly uploaded by those trying to win your vote and here is another tool: http://www.votematch.org.uk/ which also helps you to determine your voting preference for the UK General Election.

Rocktime have developed their own Online Polling Tool within their bespoke Web Content Management System (Logic CMS).

The Polls module or Voting module if you prefer, allows site users to vote on particular topics / questions. After a set period of time the poll is closed and the final result displayed. The results can be displayed as a bar chart, or graph as a percentage of all those that have provided an answer. This is a good way to receive feedback on any number of topics, without the audience feeling as though they're having to give away anything. The voting module can be expanded on so once answered, the website can take the visitor through to some other 'call to action' or reward (if it's necessary to entice the visitor).

If you want to find out more about our online polling tool then pick up the phone and talk to Rocktime Sales.

Author: Sarah Griffiths @sarahgriffiths

Rocktime's XML Sitemap generation tool

Introducing XML sitemaps

XML Sitemaps are an easy way for webmasters to inform search engines about pages on their sites that are available for crawling. In its simplest form, a Sitemap is an XML file that lists URLs for a site along with additional meta data about each URL (when it was last updated, how often it usually changes, and how important it is/priority in relation to other URLs in the site) so that search engines / robots can more intelligently crawl the site.

Web crawlers usually discover pages from links within the site and from other sites. Sitemaps supplement this data to allow crawlers that support Sitemaps to pick up all URLs in the Sitemap and learn about those URLs using the associated metadata. Using the Sitemap protocol does not guarantee that web pages are included in search engines, but provides hints for web crawlers/robots to do a better job of crawling your site.

Manual submission versus automatic submission

Many choose to update their XML sitemaps manually (re-submission when new content added) which is OK if your site content rarely changes. The main advantage of an automatic sitemap is that you completely eliminate the need to create and submit your sitemap to the search engines and you can explain to the web crawlers the structure of your site (setting priority). The main pages on your site that will benefit from automatic sitemap are the pages which include last modified date eg: news stories and blog posts and articles.

The value of the automatic sitemaps

The value of automatic sitemaps to the site, is that spiders will crawl updated content areas readily and without prompt of a new manual submission freeing up the webmasters time to concentrate on adding new content and new features to the site. Automatic sitemaps inform “this page changes ie: weekly” as they can see the up to date last modified stamp (with manual: this will be the same date for all pages). As the web has moved to real time online posting, we believe that the addition of an automatic sitemap now has even more importance.

The supporting meta data we recommend as standard includes: Location, Priority, Last modified date, Change frequency. Note the Meta data used in the XML sitemap is dependent on your site and there may be more extensions or exclusions to add.

Rocktime Sitemap Manager

With upgrades to our CMS, you can adapt the sitemap directly from within our CMS system.

NB: In order to get the sitemap to be automatic some changes were made to our CMS, as some pages being physical pages and others being page managed a technical rule was established so that the computer could determine which is the most appropriate page (managed or physical) to choose the “last modified date” from.

Find out more

To learn more about our Automatic XML sitemap generation tool available within our CMS talk to the Rocktime sales team.

Author: Sarah Griffiths