Tuesday, October 20, 2009

Make Twitter Trending Topics Work For You

Those of you who use Twitter know how reflective it is of current events. Results are shown in real-time, so if you want to be in the know right now, simply monitor your home page to learn the latest about New Moon, balloon boy and Halloween. (These are sure to change soon!) Trending topics are nothing new, but we at JB Chicago tried a new approach recently... instead of creating our own, we managed to make one work with us.

I've already posted about our social networking campaign for Tetra Pak. For those who need a quick refresher, we are helping Tetra Pak inform the public about the benefits, both for children's health and our environment, of serving chocolate milk (namely Hershey's and Organic Valley) in milk boxes. We have garnered huge traffic on Twitter, but due to a conveniently-timed "Twitter party" and some added push from our influencers, we were able to jump on the chocolate milk hashtag train and get many more people talking.

October 13th was the kickoff of the #chocolatemilk Twitter party, which was about announcing the launch of a new milk mustache campaign. We monitor Twitter activity and noticed the beginning of this trend. JB employees began to reach out to their influencers, asking them to help the trend gain momentum, as it directly related to our current campaign (example tweet: Trick or treat with #chocolatemilk this year on Halloween!! Support those dairy farmers! http://budurl.com/TWEA). The trend became the number one topic on October 13th.

From there we changed all messaging related to the campaign to incorporate the trend. This meant changing the verbiage sent via a Twitter “machine,” where users, upon receiving a trick or treat tweet, are driven to a landing page where they are encouraged to send their own. The number of these being sent was in the thousands, so the trend continued to hold its own near the top of the ranking. (Though I must admit some of those numbers came from Twitter users who participated simply because they were asking why #chocolatemilk was a trend in the first place!)

The trend began to die down on October 15th, but it spent a good day and a half in the top 10. Through the use of this tool, we brought some big numbers in for our campaign. Just how big, you might ask? After doing some quick math that takes into account that 1900 tweets per 11 minutes is what equates an average trend, we got 40,219,200 impressions. What does this mean for you? Well, you already know Twitter can help in your business outreach…. But trending topics are the things everyone is talking about – and they can help make that outreach increase threefold. So watch them regularly; you never know when one might be right up your alley.