Doesn't this image make you hungry for ice cream?

Another great milestone has been achieved through social media!  A couple weeks ago Dippin’ Dots Ice Cream reached a huge milestone of one million fans on Facebook.  How did I learn about this?  Through my news source, Twitter of course.  Orange County Dippin’ Dots franchisee, Debbie Tesla (@dippindotwoman) and I follow each other on Twitter.  Her tweet of this exciting news showed up in my stream.

Reaching one million fans is a huge milestone, but as you may already know, social networking is not about the number of fans and followers, but the quality.  The powerful Dippin’ Dots’ Facebook strategy proved that they have quality fans.  Their strategy not only helped them bond with existing customers, but also heightened brand awareness, boosted customer loyalty, and increased sales.

As you can see on the Dippin’ Dots fan page, they know how to engage their audience with questions, polls, giveaways, contests and more!  As a matter of fact, they gave away one million ice cream Dots to their one millionth fan, John Migetz.  That equals one gallon of Dippin’ Dots per month for 20 months.  Wowwie John, I hope you will be sharing some of that ice cream with your friends!

Aside from Facebook, Dippin’ Dots is on Twitter (@RealDippinDots), MySpace, Flickr, YouTube, and they have a corporate blog.  Plus, they also use crowdsourcing (poll & surveys) by tapping into their customers’ brains to help them create new ice cream flavors.

To see what Dippin’ Dots is up to, I interviewed Dana Knudsen, the director of marketing in Kentucky along with Erin Brown (@ErinRocks) and Anthony Cerreta (@AnthonyCerreta) from Matrixx in Los Angeles.  Matrixx is the digital marketing agency responsible for assisting Dippin’ Dots with the launch of the Facebook page in 2007 and helped them get to this great landmark. I have a feeling Anthony has a Twitter strategy up his sleeve for Dippin’ Dots pretty soon (I wonder if I can also bribe him to grow my fan page to a million fans? J/K Anthony).

Let’s listen to what the team had to say about social media.

What is the Dippin’ Dot social media lesson?

• Know what your customers want and show them you care by listening to them.
• Be patient because social media is not an overnight process.  It does take time to build a loyal and engage a loyal community (It took them 2.5 years to reach this Facebook milestone.)
• Be willing to experiment and make changes accordingly.
• And, have fun!

Congrats again to Dippin’ Dots for this amazing social media achievement!

I will be posting more case study interviews like this on a regular basis. If you are using social media successfully in your business and would like to be interviewed, please reach out to me. I love hearing social media success stories!