As Panthers and Broncos fans geared up for Super Bowl 50, social media channels exploded with excitement. This year, users posted 27 million Tweets about the event, generating 4.3 billion impressions globally.
A large portion of this chatter – about 10 million Tweets – was directed at brands, as viewers created their own versions of the #PuppyMonkeyBaby and reacted to Peyton Manning’s plan to “drink a lot of Budweiser” after the game.
But with this staggering volume on social, were brands able to keep up?
The growth of mobile has caused consumers to expect instant replies, even during monumental events like the Super Bowl when brands receive thousands of Tweets every minute. To put things in perspective, during this year’s game Twitter generated more than 400,000 retweets from company Twitter feeds.
While major brands might have 10 to 20 people on staff dedicated to social, there are still thousands of posts, favorites, and photos they have to sift through every minute – many of which are irrelevant or come from spam accounts.
How, then, were brands able to sift through all of this data in minutes?
At Earshot, we consistently help brands to achieve just that. Our Decibel Level algorithm scores social media posts captured through our platform (0.1-9.9), based on a customized set of brand inputs, so that companies can easily identify and engage their most relevant consumers and audiences.
In anticipation for the Super Bowl, we worked closely with clients to help them achieve their goals, which included increasing engagement rates, capturing more earned media, and reducing response times.
Consider how a Fortune 500 alcoholic brand leveraged Earshot for the Super Bowl:
First, our platform was set up to capture the obvious: customers who were either a) talking about the Super Bowl at the national level; or b) attending the game in person at Levi Stadium, using geo-fencing technology or inferring location. Next, the Decibel Level algorithm was configured based on a customized set of brand attributes – including keywords, personal bio, followed brands, logo detection, influence, and other proprietary inputs to surface the most relevant people in real-time through social media.
As we had hoped, Decibel Level worked its magic – sifting through the millions of posts on Twitter to identify only those that matched the brand’s criteria – leading to an initial volume of 2.7 million posts, or 10% of the total Twitter volume that day.
Through Earshot’s unique age-verifying process on social, we were able to identify users 21+ that our clients sought to engage with – cutting the volume down to 168,000 posts (or 6% of the 2.7 million original posts). Next, our client focused on connecting with users who received a score of 7.0 or higher (out of 10) to connect with the most relevant audience – this curated the list to just 27,000 posts, leaving our clients with a highly targeted, tailored audience that was ripe for engagement
In summary, by leveraging the power of Decibel Level our clients were able to engage in the most meaningful conversations with customers. Engagement rates increased to a staggering 85%, and response times declined by nearly 3 minutes per post. Further, our software detected 1,300 brand logos – enabling our clients to discover customers they would never have found otherwise.
As Peyton Manning celebrated his 200th career win, we at Earshot celebrated our client’s success. By harnessing the power of real-time, our clients were able to identify and engage with their most relevant customers, leading to higher retention and loyalty.
By reaching customers at the right place, right time, brands can connect with customers during key moments – engaging them when the opportunity for conversion is highest. As brands continue to recognize the importance of marketing in the moment, they will form deeper relationship with customers, ultimately leading to new forms of earned media and higher revenues.
Joanna Lichter (@joannalichter) is Director of Marketing at Earshot, a social marketing platform that enables brands to discover and engage customers in real-time. Learn more about Earshot at earshotinc.com and follow us on Twitter @earshotinc.