Barbados’ Biggest Export

So, are there any Barbadian companies to master the art of working social media? But how is social media defined.  I’ve been using the term, but what is it? 

According to Barker et al. (2013) social media is a term to describe online “social networks,..blogs, wikis,...other online collaborative media”.  The more well-known social media tools are Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube, Flickr. 

I decided to browse for social media profiles of local entities.  The very popular Beer of Barbados (Banks Beer) has 29.6K Facebook fans and 3.5k Twitter followers. A comparison of regional luxury jewellery stores with a presence in Barbados revealed that the New York-based Diamonds International had more than 70k Facebook fans, 2.4k Twitter and almost 900 Pinterest followers respectively. In contrast, Little Switzerland had more than 41k Facebook fans and no other social media presence. Colombian Emeralds International, under the umbrella of a locally-based holding company Duty-free Caribbean had approx 7.5k Facebook fans – which is quite fledgling. These are all minnows in the current social media environment. 

The question then is: does Barbados have a major exponent of social media either as a brand or a product.  The answer is: the Barbadian born and bred, American-branded mega R&B star...Rihanna, Barbados’ biggest export to date.  

Hers is a real-life Cinderella story.  Robyn Rihanna Fenty, a pretty teenager with a flair for the dramatic, an ability to dance and sing gets a big recording break and today seven albums later, her Facebook page has 81 million fans and her Twitter followers number 575k. Unbelievable! That’s the power of her personality. Her Twitter page, for example, is updated regularly with re-tweets, original tweets about her appearances, her achievements, her nights or days out, her nominations, her new mobile app. They all reinforce her popularity. Who under the age of 21 would not want to know about Rihanna’s daily jaunts? 

Having heard, anecdotally, of her social media success over the years, it was still remarkable to read her Facebook stats in Barker et al. (2013) for 2011, when her page was the fifth most popular with 41.8 million fans. However, even then her page had the second-highest daily growth of 57.1k and highest weekly growth of 479.7k. Clearly, she was a viral sensation in an age when peer-to-peer influence via social media is greatest among millennials. Clever management of social media certainly seem a key contributor to her popularity.

REFERENCES
Barker, M., Barker, D., Borman, N. and Neher, K. (2013) Social Media Marketing: A Strategic Approach. International Edition. Boston: South-Western Cengage Learning.