Best Practice Guide for Starbucks’ Instagram

Values

Our brand Starbucks prides itself on adhering to its values:

• Creating a culture of warmth and belonging, where everyone is welcome.
• Delivering our very best in all we do and holding ourselves accountable for results.
• Acting with courage, challenging the status quo, and finding new ways to grow our company and each other.
• Being present, connecting with transparency, dignity, and respect.

You must keep this in mind when you are posting and responding to customers.

Target Audience and Goal

Our Instagram target audience is “college students, young professionals, and white collars.” These are the people we aim to connect with daily using our Instagram. Our Instagram, “provides customers coffee recommendations based on weather, feeling, and emotion together with a nicely taken photo. Most of the other photos are about daily moments with coffee, which makes Starbucks something you need under any kind of environment.” Our aim with these photos is to make sure that someone who sees this drink wants to try it. When it is a post about our employees that they can get to know us. To create that connection with the people who want to buy from us.

Customer Service

Here at Starbucks, we pride ourselves on our customer service. It is one of our most important values. The most important thing to us is maintaining a connection to our customers. As stated on our website, our main aim is to make Starbucks a place for everyone. This same philosophy extends to our social media.

While we pride ourselves on our customer service when we physically help a customer, we do the same when we help someone online. This is why we must answer our customers as quickly and respectfully as possible. Yes, there is room to be funny, but make sure you understand what you are responding to. If it is just someone making a joke or tagging us in a post, feel free to respond with a pun or something funny. If it is a serious complaint, take it as seriously as possible, say something similar to “Hi [insert name here], I’m sorry to here about your recent experience. I’d be more than happy to look into this for you.” It is both personable yet helpful.

Instagram Posts

Our overall goal with Instagram is to maintain and create that connection with our audience while also getting them to buy our product.

It is because of this that our photos and videos have to be high quality, eye-catching, colorful, and well shot. The captions should be short, eye-catching, and quirky unless it is in regard to our workers or a personal experience i.e., our pride post.

Our Instagram posts have three major guidelines: high-quality picture/video, a short caption (sometimes using emojis and hashtags), and make sure to make Instagram as accessible to people as possible. This means using subtitles and closed captions and using the Instagram feature that allows you to generate a description for the image you are posting.

Make sure to use hashtags, when possible, but do not use too many. As a general rule of thumb, use two to five hashtags (as you can see in the examples below). Use emojis when possible and appropriate, but do not use too many. Our ideal caption length is 138–150 characters. Our ideal hashtag length is 24 characters or less. Our tone should always be fun, quirky, and friendly, unless it is a serious issue. We always post between 11am-12pm on our Instagram. Make sure to have a consistent posting schedule. You can use Buffer to schedule the Instagram posts. will help in making sure everything goes out on time. Our best day of engagement is on Sunday. Below I will include some examples of posts, captions, and of our current Instagram layout so we can maintain consistency. Welcome to the Starbucks Team!