Corporate communication on social media needs to be learned. The Swabian medium-sized company Trigema is currently showing how to do it right. Owner Wolfgang Grupp plays a central role in this.
By Elisabeth Ries
Action, comedy, love story – pretty much all the important genres are represented in Trigema’s social media videos. The textile company from Swabia, which still claims to be “made in Germany”, is currently being celebrated online for its short videos. One ingredient in the recipe for success: the boss Wolfgang Grupp himself.
Grupp was a stranger to social networks for a long time – and was even extremely unpopular there at times. In a 2010 interview about social media, he said: “I don’t care about it. For me, Twitter is just stupid and the people who use it are idiots for me. People don’t actually have anything better to do than talk about trivial things Write stuff?”
Trigema boss Grupp polarizes
The Twitter community was – unsurprisingly – angry and punished Grupp with a shitstorm until he finally rowed back in an open letter. “This is certainly a very timely communication option,” he wrote. The Trigema owner, who still doesn’t have his own computer, probably had no other choice. At this point, his company was already using Facebook, YouTube and Twitter.
Instagram was only added in 2014, the first post was a mix of two classics. In front of an inflatable chimpanzee, known from the decades-long Trigema commercials shortly before the Tagesschau, employees had cold water poured over them for the then popular “Ice Bucket Challenge”.
Since then, such posts have been the exception. Mainstream models present the latest collections on most Instagram tiles. The situation is similar with Facebook, Twitter and YouTube. Practical, but classic online marketing and rather uninspired.
Helicopters and love stories on Tiktok
Nevertheless, you can tell that the company is trying to keep up with online marketing trends. For several years there were regular updates from the company, which was founded in 1919, in its own podcast. A year ago, Tiktok was the youngest channel to be added – and the medium-sized company is extremely successful here.
How does this work? Trigema doesn’t take itself too seriously there and plays with its image as a family business with a family business. Direct advertising for your own products takes a back seat. In the first video that went viral in fall 2022, a production mechanic named Patrick tells us in Swabian and in “behind the scenes” style how much he enjoys working in the company. There is a lot of praise for this in the comments.
And the social media team also works with the comments and involves the community in an exemplary manner. The most recent video, for example, shows the company’s own helicopter with a monkey likeness and “Hello Fans” lettering. A user provides the inspiration in another video: “Make a video about helicopters.”
But the videos with Wolfgang Grupp himself are unbeatable. The sole Trigema managing director talks about economic growth – or about his grandfather. The latter video is the channel’s most successful post with around 630,000 impressions.
The community is particularly impressed by videos that are intended to show his love for his wife Elisabeth: a sideways glance at an event, a smile in the camera, seemingly captured unnoticed. The whole thing is in slow motion and accompanied by emotional music. That’s cheesy – and just right for the Tiktok people. All of these videos have hundreds of thousands of impressions; the comments say, for example: “This man should be our Chancellor!!” and “What a great boss. Boom boom, I only buy Trigema shirts now. Great.”
Short snippets from Wolfgang Grupp’s speeches are also shared on other Tiktok channels, but things are more political and controversial there. Criticism of former Chancellor Angela Merkel, of arms deliveries to Ukraine, of other entrepreneurs. Unsurprisingly, the opinions in the comments there also diverge further. The Tiktok algorithm likes that too. In some cases there are over a million impressions. So far, Trigema has not allowed itself to be tempted to share the boss’s more contentious theses on its own account for greater reach. The feel-good strategy works too.
This article first appeared at .
Source: Stern
