Shopping Centers Today

NOV 2016

Shopping Centers Today is the news magazine of the International Council of Shopping Centers (ICSC)

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42 S C T / N O V E M B E R 2 0 1 6 Day) that reached 120,586 people, and an Instagram photo of a popular, laced- up sandal recently arrived at one of the shopping center's stores. The experience of Plaza Las Améri- cas matches the survey data. "People on social media are looking for ex- periential versus informational con- tent," McKeon said. "They are not posting and sharing information about the six pairs of jeans they just bought. What they are looking for are photos or content that invoke an emotion, that represent how they are feeling. Those are the images that get shared with their friends." Customers also want to feel that their shopping centers understand them and their interests and can con- tribute to the conversation, McKeon says. At Atlantic Station, a mixed-use retail center in Atlanta, many of the most popular and shared Facebook and Instagram posts had nothing to do with shopping at all. "Things that have gone viral on our page generally are more movie- or pop-culture-based," said Scottie Knollin, Atlantic Station's social-media manager. "A lot of our users love pop culture and want to be on the cusp of any new information. When Gene Wilder died, for instance, we threw out our condolences. We were one of the first local outlets to report on it, and the post was shared a crazy amount of times." One of the surefire ways to make sure that more eyeballs are seeing posts is to pay to elevate content — something a lot of shopping centers are still re- luctant to do. While 42 percent of re- spondents said they consider Facebook postings very important, only half that number considered paid Facebook ad- vertising to be very important. South Florida's Aventura Mall, which has the most Facebook follow- ers among those shopping centers surveyed (approaching 505,000 at last count), holds the latter view. "We think that Facebook is one of the most robust advertising opportunities avail- able out there for fans," said Anabel Llopis, the mall's senior director of sales and marketing. The key to getting the most engage- ment out of paid content is to un- derstand fan demographics, Llopis says. Aventura Mall attracts a large international audience, but its execu- tives know that a customer in Brazil has preferences different from those of a customer in Florida. Two years ago when Cartier was about to open a store in Aventura, Llopis teamed F E A T U R E Social-media frequency S O U R C E : A L E X A N D E R B A B B A G E

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