What to learn from newsjacking Mark Zuckerberg's birthday
Yesterday (Wednesday 14th May) evening (UK time) I quoted a tweet by UK job site Jobsite (@jobsiteuk), it was a clever work around Zuck's birthday and how they used to Twitter to celebrate it over Facebook because people will actually see their message. I could hear all the community managers and social media managers I have worked with laughing at this one.
What I didn't expect by quoting the tweet was the reaction, to date there are:
- Over 159 retweets
- Over 90 Favourites
- Retweets by people who work at Twitter, journalists and people from all around the world.
Currently my tweet is more popular than the promoted tweet (in terms of RT's, I am at 159 RT's, @Jobsiteuk 153).
Why? Well my audience is mostly marketing people who probably appreciate the joke more than the "Average Joe" who will see the promoted tweet.
Sticking with numbers for a minute, just to emphasis how well visual timely content works this tweet hit 220x normal reach (taken from Twitter Analytics), it probably highlights a weakness in what I share but is now my (personal) my popular tweet ever.
My top three shared tweets all include images and all were timely or shared at a time where my two biggest audiences (UK and US) would see the content:
Number 3 - Paddy Power David Moyes Statue -
https://twitter.com/dannydenhard/statuses/460346713770049537 - Obviously this was more for the UK and football audience.
Number 2 - Google has a message for you
- https://twitter.com/dannydenhard/statuses/422444818737164288 - this did particularly well after a US follower RT-ed this and everyone online loves to bash Google+.
(You can find your top tweets by using a service like http://mytoptweet.com/?u=dannydenhard)
So what did I learn from Zuck's 30th birthday? (other than he is worth $30 billion and is 18 months younger than me and I definitely helped the Jobsite social media staff hit their engagement targets)
- It reinforces my belief that timely and visual content works on social media even from the strangest or unexpected accounts, as you have seen from my stats, I am hardly a RT powerhouse, however I had the right audience/right retweeters at the right time to push out the content.
- Even thou the content was a little niche it will find the audience with quality content and the right people pushing out the message.
- Promoted tweets can work for visibility (please still be careful on targeting and budgeting)
- People share and re-share content they can relate to and it doesn't matter where the account is from who created the content
- Brands should not be afraid to work around loosely related content and push out
I would love to hear about your surprise content successes or your random successful tweets, happily tweet me @dannydenhard or pop over to Google + i'm +dannydenhard