Back in March my colleague Simon B and I spent some time promoting a beer festival via social media. We took on this project with the specific goal of experimenting to see if social media, and in particular Twitter, could be successfully leveraged to drive people to a real world event. Cutting to the punch line, yes we were successful.
We have now published a short case study on the results of this social, which you can see below or by going directly to Cheers to Social Media on Slideshare:
One of the key findings was that there is a positive Social Media ROI. For this campaign (or event) we managed to drive:
- 63% of attendees were a result of Social Media Marketing
- £571 revenue per 1 hour spent on Social Media
- £11.41 for each £1 spent (=11x ROI)
- 5.6% total cost of sale for revenue generated by Social Media
We also believe the ROI can be significantly increased by deploying ‘emerging’ Social Media best practices and development of better tools to manage campaigns and review data (ie, a social media analytics work bench).
The primary lesson was that with attention at a premium, Social Media does indeed provide a great platform to ensure the success of marketing campaigns and in this case a real world event. In particular Twitter and Eventbrite proved cost effective and easy ways to drive awareness and consumer actions (e.g. attendance, footfall, purchases ).
Interesting to note that Facebook underperformed on what we expected. We also found that social media magnifies the value of search, at least for something very time based (ie, event).
For the event microsite we had 3175 unique visitors during the promotional period and the traffic sources were as follows:
- 61% search (Google 58%)
- 24%-38% social media (*estimated low end of 24% to as high as 38%)
- 4% blogs
As a follow-up – “sort of real time mini case study” – we are finding that social media again is proving a powerful way to drive awareness and interest in the actual case study!
Cheers To Social Media is currently being showcased on the ‘Business & Mgmt‘ page by our editorial team [slideshare] …
An additional proof point for success if using social media – here’s the screen grab is below.
7 responses so far ↓
Staff // 14 June 2009 at 3:44 pm |
Following your case study with great interest as we have a dedicated volunteer growing the twitter and YouTube presence.
http://twitter.grader.com/location/?location=hilo
http://www.youtube.com/easthawaiiculture
http://www.twitter.com/easthawaiiarts
Mahalo for sharing your process and successful campaign with us!
dylanfuller // 14 June 2009 at 6:42 pm |
Aloha! Thanks for the comment. Great to know someone in one of my favoriate places – Hawaii – is taking a notice… I’ve actaully speant more time in Fiji than Hawaii so will say: “Bula Vinaka for reading the case study!”
Monika Lorincz // 15 June 2009 at 2:26 pm |
Great case study. Real time search and social media are indeed great marketing tools.
Monika Lorincz
monika@surchur.com
http://surchur.com/
Blog: http://blog.surchur.com/
Twitter: @surchur
links for 2009-06-15 | Working Three | Direct Marketing, Direct Branding // 16 June 2009 at 3:07 am |
[...] Cheers to Social Media – a social media marketing case study « A Fuller View (tags: marketing socialmedia twitter socialnetworking Casestudy) [...]
DanC // 16 June 2009 at 7:39 am |
Great case study!
What I like most about it is that through the social media seeding, and sales through Eventbrite you had a pretty controlled environment for your experiment, allowing you to measure ROI effectively, and less ambiguously than many others are doing.
Measurement of any campaign depends on success against objectives – if the objective is reach, and sometimes it is, then fine, delivery metrics are what you need. If the success is based on revenue or footfall, then measure that.
The problem comes in the greyer areas, like for films, for example. There are so many determinants of a film’s performance (quality of the film, stars, other media activity, other films out that week, other events on that week etc), so you need to find proxies to measure against instead for that part of the campaign. & If these are the problems with films, just think of the problems you’ve got with cars!
I’ve seen various models of this sort of measurement using proxies, assigning values to blog posts, re-tweets etc, and some of these are persuasive, but it’s really all about having clear campaign objectives and then a way to measure against that.
In your case it was a local, short term revenue and footfall goal, and from your results you definitely acheived ROI on that!
dylanfuller // 16 June 2009 at 10:30 am |
Thanks, Dan C – great comments and insight into social media ROI measurement. Remind me to buy a pint at the 2nd Wandsworth Common Beer Fest in October 2009!
Social Media and Local Events « Screenwerk // 2 July 2009 at 3:07 pm |
[...] Media and Local Events By Greg Sterling Dylan Fuller has an excellent case study reflecting how he and a colleague successfully used social media sites like Facebook and Twitter to [...]