I just spoke in some detail with Dylan Fuller who is behind the “Cheers to Social Media” UK social media case study that I referred to earlier today. To refresh your recollection, Dylan and a colleague were promoting a small beer festival sponsored by a local business just outside London, about a 10 minute train ride from Victoria Station.
They used Eventbrite for the registration and pointed to the Eventbrite site with their social media promotion. They began promoting the event online about a month before the scheduled date. There was limited space so they didn’t want to have too many people but there was also concern about getting enough people to the event outside the city. They initially released 500 tickets and then subsequent batches of roughly 100 each. In the end they exceeded their goals and had about 1,350 people in total attendance.
Here’s the really interesting part . . . Fuller said that the owner’s internal email list drove roughly half the registrations/ticket sales. The other half were from Twitter and Facebook promotion. In this case Fuller said that they got 23 attendees (twenty three) based on their Facebook promotion and more than 600 (six hundred) from Twitter. Fuller told me that retweets were approaching 10X for each tweet they put out. Among other things, they discussed the types of beer varieties that would be a the festival and were generally thoughtful about the content they presented on Twitter.
Let’s be careful about generalizing, notwithstanding my inflammatory headline, but in this case Twitter was dramatically more effective as a promotional tool.
July 2, 2009 at 11:07 pm |
Facebook!
July 2, 2009 at 11:37 pm |
Depends… Festivals about beer…. TWITTER. Twitter is less content but more topics. Facebook is the same topic over and over. Facebook is more of a networking tool such as myspace. They are both very similiar. Heavy Facebook users also use Twitter and other aps. I say why not do both. People spend more time focusing on the method of distribution with content (i.e. Website, Video, Twitter, Facebook, Press Releases, Blogs, Online Profiles, other site etc.)
July 2, 2009 at 11:51 pm |
Well you need to use both. Neither is mutually exclusive. I’m just reporting the results of a particular effort.
July 3, 2009 at 1:23 am |
Question is – how did they promote via Twitter? Deals? News? Follow a lot of users? RTs a lot? Lots of @user messages?
Would love to know more about what they did (and Twitter’s power is really impressive considering relatively they do not have that many followers).
July 3, 2009 at 1:53 am |
Maybe Dylan can fill in some of the blanks.
July 3, 2009 at 2:07 pm |
Doesn’t surprise me at all—we’ve seen a great success using Twitter to promote events & news of our clients from http://www.720media.com. Long live Twitter!! http://twitter.com/720media
July 5, 2009 at 11:45 am |
Which doctor should I go to? The dentist or the optometrist?
Kind of silly questions. But that’s the same thing when people ask which they should use, Twitter or Facebook.
Duh! BOTH, unless you want to miss out on the variety of networks that life has to offer.
July 5, 2009 at 2:26 pm |
To be sure, use both. I just thought it was interesting to expose the results of this particular campaign and the fact that Twitter was such a larger driver of ticket sales.
July 6, 2009 at 9:39 am |
I am co-author with Dylan Fuller on the case study. A couple of comments:
1. FB vs. Twitter
As Greg says in his post and in the comments using both FB and Twitter is worthwhile and other social media elements as well.
The point is that we found Twitter was much more effective over Facebook for acquisition and traffic driving.
Is that true in other cases? Not sure yet but will be looking to do more experiments and if others have data, please share.
2. Twitter Tactics
@AhmedF
If you look at Slide 6 of the deck, you will see a graph on Event Mapping to Traffic (you’ll need to view it in full screen). You’ll notice that we get spikes around retweets. This refers to the WandsworthBeer user network retweeting. RTs was mostly about ticket info/deals.
The key strategy was around engagement, which could be broken down into at least the following couple of tactics:
1/ Follow/Follower Management – Felt it was important to have a good balance between the ratio and use tools like Search, Twello, Mr Tweet to find the right people
2/ Useful Content – Had a fairly even mix between event info & news, deal & tickets, interesting links & conversation
3/ Conversation – That is the @user messages, etc. – sometimes answering questions but more often in using Search to find other users to engage with
It was often the Conversation aspect that won the best followers, e.g.: measured by simply by those who would rt the most.
Hope that helps but please feel free to ask for more details (here or on slideshare).
July 6, 2009 at 9:40 am |
Thanks Simon for the clarifications and additional information.
July 6, 2009 at 2:54 pm |
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