TurboTax’s Social Media Strategy

If you live the U.S., you’re probably thinking about next month’s tax deadline. You’re also probably using TurboTax to file your tax returns.

TurboTax is a brand built on the principles of word of mouth. For 25 years, TurboTax (and its parent brand, Intuit) has focused on building relationships with its customers — even doing “follow me home” research to get 1-to-1 feedback about how people actually do their taxes.

Here’s a presentation by the brand’s Social Media Marketing Manager, Christine Morrison, in which she describes how the company is extending the fundamentals of word of mouth marketing to social media for customer acquisition and retention. She shares how social media is helping them build a persuasion engine, how they’re making user reviews more relevant, and how they’re using their Twitter presence for customer support.

Takeaways:

• Help customers share the great experiences you create. Customers feel a colossal sense of joy and relief when they finish their taxes. TurboTax helps them share this with a “Publish to Facebook” option after they submit their e-file.
• Customers trust each other more than your ads. TurboTax is reporting some striking numbers vis a vis the social-media engagement model anecdotes we’ve all heard. On Facebook, for example, they’ve found News Feed publications are four times more engaging than banner ads and have 30% higher conversion rates.
• Customers love to help each other. Motivated by little more than the satisfaction of sharing their expertise and helping others, TurboTax’s community members are doing amazing things. One retired CPA answered over 50,000 questions last year, and more than 5,000 customers viewed his content.

Watch the  case study presentation and follow along with the slides below: