This story starts in 2009, with the then 42-year-old Ria Struijk from Rijssen. Ria and her friend want to have dinner together. One list to data of them has to pay when they go out for dinner, but who? A bet is made: whoever is the first to have 200 friends on a public Hyve, doesn’t have to pay…
Full of energy and determination, Ria starts a public Hyve that same evening for the articles of the Action. Exactly, the Action store. Ria explains why: “Oh, that is always a nice store and you can always buy nice things for little money and make nice things yourself. It was actually more out of fun.” When she looked at her public Hyve the next day, curious and with a nice dinner in mind, she suddenly had 300 friends.
From 300 friends to 32,000 fans: the statistics
This is the beginning of perhaps one of the biggest successes of a retail chain on social media. And that has everything to do with Ria. Because she kept Hyve, actually just out of curiosity. She posted pieces about new items she had seen and how you can make things at home even more fun with the stuff from Action. And her clean email number of friends grew and grew.
The bet was won
In November 2011 she switched to
Facebook and her network grew even more. Of course the first fans were the ones she brought from her then very popular opportunities in emerging european markets Hyve. After that it developed like a snowball. Due to the rapidly growing popularity of the Facebook page she was noticed on various forums. Links were placed to her fan page here and because of that the number of fans grew even faster. Most of her new fans come via the reference on the Action site or simply via friends of fans.