Six steps to Twitter triumph

Contagious’s Katrina Dodd and Twitter’s Stephanie Terroir present research into the six pillars that have helped campaigns on the social platform find success in Cannes.

The social platform’s Stephanie Terroir and Contagious’s Katrina Dodd analyse research on Cannes-winning work.

Katrina Stirton Dodd, head of trends at creative intelligence service Contagious, and Stephanie Terroir, head of Twitter Next MENA, stood in front of a crowd of creatives recently at a record shop in Dubai’s arty warehouse district of Al Quoz. They presented Contagious’s research into the Twitter-centric campaigns that have won big at the Cannes Lions advertising festival in recent years.

The study was first presented in Cannes this year. Contagious collated 1,856 campaigns that used the social networking platform between 2014 and 2018 and analysed the work to find common themes that can turn a Twitter campaign into an award-winner.

The six pillars that Contagious found were:

TAKE OUT YOUR AIR PODS

Twitter is a place for listening as well as projecting messages. It can provide valuable market feedback but it can also allow marketers to leverage the little moments they see occurring. Dodd quotes BBDO New York’s chief strategy officer Crystal Rix, who calls these “judo moments”, where you can use the momentum of conversation to benefit your brand.

An example in the report was when Burger King introduced spicy chicken nuggets to its menu in 2017, after seeing people complaining on Twitter that rival burger brand Wendy’s had dropped the item from their stores. They sponsored the angry-atWendy’s tweets and sold three months’ worth of nuggets in just four weeks.

Terroir says: “You need to be aware of what’s happening around you so that you can hop on these chances when they occur.”

COMMUNICATION BEATS CONSUMPTION

“People will share something if they can use it to either express themselves or to communicate with someone else,” the report found. This can be emotional content, which shows someone that you know how they are feeling, identity content, which tells someone that you know something about who they are, or informational content, which implies insider knowledge or status.

Emotional content gets shared more, the research found. And earned media boosts effectiveness by 26 per cent, according to marketing consultants Les Binet and Peter Field (who Dodd calls “the Kim and Kanye of marketing”).

GET BEYOND FIRST IMPRESSIONS

Twitter-led, Lion-winning work tends to hinge on real-world outcomes and deeper connections with consumers. The Contagious report cites VMLY&R North America chief client officer Jen McDonald, whose agency “still looks at the interplay of impressions, engagement and sentiment – but changing people’s attitudes and making sales are better goals”.

THINK SMALL TO LAUNCH BIG

“Some of the biggest successes on Twitter come from ideas that were unburdened by great expectations,” says the report. It cites the example of #NuggsForCarter, when a Wendy’s fan asked in April 2017 how many retweets he would need to get free nuggets for a year. (A surprising number of campaigns hang on burger chains and their nuggets – perhaps this could be grounds for a future research project from Twitter.) Wendy’s said 18 million, and Carter’s tweet became the most retweeted in history. It also won Wendy’s a Silver PR Lion in 2017.

But success like this doesn’t come out of nowhere. “If you’re going to be able to take advantages like that, which the site throws at you, then you need to be confident in the moves you take when those opportunities arise,” says Dodd. She has worked with Wendy’s agency VMLY&R, and says, “There are three people at the agency who live and breathe Wendy’s every single day.”

PARLEZ-VOUS TWITTER?

The report says: “The most reliable way to avoid sounding like a corporation desperate to infiltrate the Twitter ranks is to demonstrate the two qualities that companies almost never display: self-awareness and self-deprecation.”

It says that ‘guardrails’ are essential. These are the limits within which a brand’s social media team, whether that is in-house or agency-based, can operate. “I think this is super-important, says Terroir. “Agreeing on the things you cannot do and then giving flexibility to the people that are actually working on your tone of voice. This gives them a little more leeway to experiment and avoid doing things that are not culturally relevant.”

Dodd adds that finding a brand’s persona on Twitter is an ever-evolving process. “You feel your way towards the voice that you end up with,” she says.

REMEMBER – NO ONE CARES

Contagious quotes Havas’s 2019 Meaningful Brands survey that found people would not care if 77 per cent of brands disappeared tomorrow.

It means that brands cannot think they are entitled to an audience’s attention; they have to earn it.

“If you want the attention of people on Twitter you have to say something that stops them from scrolling past,” says Contagious.

The MENA region is ripe for brands to engage with their extant and potential consumer base on Twitter. Terroir explains that along with the US and Japan, Saudi Arabia is one of the biggest markets in the world for Twitter.

But few of the campaigns cited in the Contagious survey have come from the Middle East.

“That’s exactly why we are doing this [session],” says Terroir. “It’s to make sure that agencies and creatives will be able to understand the platform a little bit more, and take ownership and come up with ideas.”

Dodd adds: “It feels like a missed opportunity if we can’t find ways to parlay [the engagement with social media] into interesting creative ideas that go on to fly.”

The turnout and engagement from the agencies looks promising, so armed with the six pillars above, we might see the region’s Twitter campaigns bringing home some more Lions next year.