iStrategyBlabs

March Madness Final Four Basketball: Twitter Mentions Over Time

Date

April 8, 2013
Posted By

Katie Lancos
Comments

0
Categories

Social Media, Strategy

The NCAA Championship game is upon us tonight, and believe it or not, 3 of us ISLers have Louisville winning it all in our own brackets. Not too shabby for a bunch of nerds!

Although none of us could craft the perfect bracket, we were able to find some interesting Twitter data around mentions of Final Four teams from the past 3 years.

Although Cinderella story Virginia Commonwealth University (VCU) couldn’t muscle up enough prowess to beat Butler and move on to the championship game, it surely won on Twitter. Mentions of #vcu peaked at a whopping 124,187 tweets during the tournament – an 8,000% increase from its typical monthly showing.

Not surprisingly, the month of April saw UConn, the inevitable champion, and Butler, the runner-up, as the tweet leaders.

Kentucky stayed on top on and off the court during the 2012 March Madness. Led by Anthony Davis and Michael Kidd-Gilchrist, Kentucky won its six tourney games by nearly 12 points per contest. Nothing could stop them and the mentions just poured in, garnering almost 150k mentions by championship time – more mentions than all of last year’s Twitter activity combined.

If Twitter mentions is any indication of future success, as it has been for years past, it looks like the Wolverines may take the cake this year. They rocked almost 400k mentions during the month of March, which is twice what Louisville pulled in.

Some lessons learned:

Hail to the victors: Winners get more mentions than losers. Since 2011, winners of their Final Four game as well as the championship games scored the most mentions. One exception: VCU, an #11-seed Cinderella story who won the hearts, and tweets, of Americans across the country.
Football schools get a little bit more love throughout the year. Look at Ohio State. Look at Michigan. Where other Final Four team spikes come March from an otherwise non-existent fan base, schools with prominent football programs see a steady level of activity 6 months out of the year.
Twitter is still gaining popularity [#duh]. In 2011, we were seeing 230 million tweets per day. Last year, it went up to 400 million tweets per day. So although it looks like March Madness keeps getting more popular – especially with more than 2 million #marchmadness tweets seen over the past 30 days – it’s really Twitter in general that is the popular one.

Data collected with Topsy Pro <3

Lessons Learned from Promoted Tweets: Tips To Maximize Engagement

Date

March 28, 2013
Posted By

Katie Lancos
Comments

0
Categories

Our Work, Social Media, Strategy

We recently executed a promoted tweets campaign to enhance visibility around select videos and infographics we produced. Through the combination of using a dozen individually targeted campaigns and up to 20 different tweets in each of them, we collected engagement data from over 100 instances of tweets.

In order to understand what methods were most successful over the course of our campaign, we looked at the most common characteristics found among the top 20% most engaging tweets. Below is a summary of the most engaging attributes of our promoted tweets.

Most Effective Targeting Type: Search (and/or Handles)

Target Type	Impressions	Engagement
Search	3,281	2.32%
Handles	19,089	1.38%
Interests	3,533	1.31%

Targeting search proved to be the most engaging targeting method, as we targeted hashtags around specific events that already had an active conversation occurring. This produced 68% and 77% more engagement than targeting handles and interests.

However, opportunities for search-targeted tweets to show were far less than targeting handles because of its smaller potential audience size, causing it to earn almost 6x less impressions than handles and lowering its overall effectiveness.

Overall, tweets targeting the followers of other relevant handles were 5% more engaging than those targeting general interest groups.

Most Effective Call to Action: “Check Out”

Call to Action	Impressions	Engagement
“Check out”	173,995	2.15%
“Watch”	5,307	1.81%
With Call to Action	89,651	1.98%
Without Call to Action	4,271	1.34%

A significant attribute of the varying engagement level of a tweet was whether there was a call to action present. Tweets with any call to action had 48% more engagement than those without a call to action.

Between the tweets using a call to action, “Check out” preformed 18% better than tweets using ‘Watch.”

Most Effective Mention of Media: Video

Media Type	Impressions	Engagement
Video	4,429	2.18%
Infographic	23,057	1.43%
Mention of any media	13,743	1.80%
No mention of any media	3,657	1.14%

Our analysis shows it’s critical to share with your audience what exactly they are looking at. Tweets that revealed the type of media they were linking to produced 58% more engagement that those that didn’t.

Among the top 20% most engaging tweets, we found that promoting a video was 52% more engaging than promoting an infographic. (However, among the top 50% of tweets, videos only produced 10% more engagement.)

The Name of the Game is…

Title of the Campaign	Impressions	Engagement
Tweet includes title of the campaign	13,265	1.72%
Tweet does not include title of the campaign	8,716	1.34%

A big insight is that mentioning the title of what you’re promoting proved to be 28% more engaging than saving those precious characters for something else. Overall, being as specific as possible in promoted tweets is proving to yield higher engagement levels.

The Making of @EmbassySuites’ Vine #firstpost

Date

March 22, 2013
Posted By

Katie Lancos
Comments

1
Categories

Creative, Our Work, Social Media, Strategy

On March 7, iStrategyLabs produced and launched Embassy Suites’ first Vine video:

— Embassy Suites (@EmbassySuites) March 7, 2013

Although Vines are only 6 seconds long, these things don’t just happen with the snap of a finger; it actually takes a lot of time, planning, and resources. Let’s take a look at how we made it happen:

1. The Concept

We knew for our first Vine we wanted to highlight one of Embassy Suites’ three brand pillars: two-room suites, complimentary made-to-order breakfast, and a daily manager’s happy hour. After several rounds of concepting, we decided to focus on the free breakfast, a staple for which their brand is very well known.

Narrowing down our ideas, we had to figure out a way to highlight this brand pillar and the brand itself, all in just 6 seconds. We also knew we wanted to shoot on-site to showcase the actual breakfast that Embassy Suites serves.

2. Practice makes perfect

If you have ever tried to create a Vine before, you KNOW that there is no room for error. There is no editing, no splicing, and certainly no command + z. If on second 5.5 you mess up – tough luck, you’re starting over. So we set up a scene on-site the week prior to the actual filming and launch to practice our composition, lighting, and timing. That helped us to answer a lot of questions, identify specific materials we were going to need, and work out any kinks that would prevent us from getting a perfect final cut.

3. Setting up the scene

Come gameday, we had to be ready. We had the chef make up several colorful, perfect omelets to use – one in filming and others for backup.

We collected plates of breakfast items and began to build our scene mimicking what we decided on in the test round. The plate we used as a base was a custom plate we had made with the Embassy Suites logo, Twitter handle, and hashtag #firstpost.

Et voila! A plate of delicious complimentary cooked-to-order breakfast perfection.

4. Filming the Vine

This was a 3-man operation: one person held the camera (I mean, iPhone), one person pressed the screen to initiate recording, and one person pulled away food after each take and cleaned the plate. With everyone in place, we began creating the Vine, recording for a little less than a second, pulling away food, and repeating until the plate was clear (about 4 or 5 times).

Once the plate was clear, we replaced the first plate with a second plate we designed – identical, except for the addition of a “yum” thought bubble – which closed out the Vine.

Once you start filming, there’s no turning back. I would love to say we got it on the first try. But we didn’t. Luckily we allowed for enough time and resources to retake until it was perfect and ready for posting.

Disclaimer: Free breakfast not included in all instances of Vine video-making.

Vine: ISL Favorites from Brands and Fans

Date

March 18, 2013
Posted By

Eric Shutt
Comments

1
Categories

Community Engagement, Experiential Marketing, Social Media

If you’ve been paying attention lately, you’ve heard of Twitter’s new video sharing platform, Vine – a mobile-only app that lets you record and share 6-second video clips edited on the fly, in an incredibly fun and unique way. It combines the best of photo, video, stop-motion, and our favorite — animated GIFs.

Here’s how it works:

Sign into Vine with Twitter and that’s it, you’re ready to record. With Vine’s custom camera, video records when you tap and hold on your phone screen. Take your finger off the screen and Vine stops recording. The simple, real-time editing lets you create everything from simple 6-second un-cut videos, to more complex stop-motion clips and animations.

How brands are using Vine:

Across all industries, from food to gaming, brands have used Vine to foster online discussion with their fans and even tease new products. Here are a few great examples :

GE: It’s Raining Data

Gap: What shoes do you plan to wear with The 1969 Skimmer?

Rolling Stone: Guess Who’s on the cover

Nintendo of America: Check out what you get with the Wii U ZombiU Deluxe Set

Bacardi: #SixSecondCocktail

A few of our personal favorites:

People have been shooting and sharing Vines non-stop since the service launched this past January.

Some cool Vine spin-off apps include Channel 6, ”a personalized channel of videos posted to Vine” (type a search term in the bottom left corner to sort and filter). Similarly, All Around the Vines pulls together a collection of Vine videos you might like based on category and tag. Here are a few of our staff favorite Vines:

- @Corbett3000

- @eshutt

-@EmilyTav

Best of both worlds:

We worked with our client Embassy Suites to get them on Vine and create their #FirstPost to promote the delicious breakfast you can expect when you stay at an Embassy Suites hotel.

With all of these fantastic Vines in just over a month, we can’t wait to see what comes in the near future from fans and brands alike.

+++

All-star interns Ryan Horgan and Zach Khan contributed to this article.