Engagement Meter: Brands appear with new year cheer

Unmetric, a social media intelligence firm focused on brands uses its analytics platform to uncover the top performing campaigns, content and videos in the APAC region. Unmetric's Engagement Score rates each piece of content from 0 to 1000 depending on the amount of user interactions, which allows easy comparison of content regardless of the number of fans or followers a brand has. For the weekly Engagement Meter feature, Unmetric curates the list to pick the most creative, innovative or unusual initiatives. Here is a roundup of a few of the best in the period of January 2 through 8.

The New Year is here and so are brand new brand campaigns! In the first week of 2015, social media was flooded with New Year resolutions and multiple brands leveraged the event to score some easy engagement with their communities. Here is a curated list of five campaigns and content that stood out in terms of user engagement. 

1. KFC India
Feed Your Fire
Engagement Score: 1,000

In one of their most unique ads ever, KFC discovered how a strong story and an emotional trigger performs just as good or maybe even better than their regular promotional advertisements. Their latest advertisement features the story of a young basketball champ and portrays how he "feeds his fire". The two and a half minute long video, which is a break from the traditional 30 second ads many brands upload on YouTube nowadays, saw over 225,000 views in a week and is now in KFC India’s top 5 most viewed videos.

On both Facebook and Twitter, the campaign brought in above industry average fan and follower growth. The campaign on Facebook gave the brand over 94,000 Likes, 4,500 Shares and 100 per cent positive sentiment as people truly appreciated the campaign. On Twitter, the hashtags #KFCFeedYourFire and #KeepTheFlameAlive were used over 11,000 times.

The takeaway here is that a campaign can be run across social networks as long as the theme remains the same but with content that is tailored to the nuances of each network.

2. Urzza
#UrzzaPower New Year's Resolution
Engagement Score: 1,000

Energy drink brand Urzza charged its social community by urging them to share with the brand their New Year's resolutions. This campaign generated of 46,000 Likes and helped the brand reach an engagement score five times the industry average. This also gave them an impressive 100 per cent positive sentiment on their posts.

Though the campaign's performance on Facebook didn’t see quite the same resonance on Twitter, it gave the brand an engagement score much higher than the Food and Beverage industry average.

Is staying #fit on your #resolution list? Power it up a notch this year. #UrzzaPowerResolutions pic.twitter.com/FDezHxzOVc

— Urzza (@UrzzaPower) January 5, 2015

Building micro-campaigns around current events was always a sure way to get the community to engage with you and still is today. The difference is that the posts now need an extra paid push to make sure that it appears in the newsfeeds of users to ensure they see it.

3. Ford India
#FordAtCES
Engagement Score: 995

Although not necessarily known for its car tech, Ford leveraged its presence at CES to create highly engaging content for its India market. 10 of the 12 posts they published on Facebook in the time period analysed was around the CES. The car brand ran a contest and all the content contained the hashtag #FordatCES. This strategy collectively gave them over 56,000 Likes, 2,000 Comments and Shares, and an engagement score twice that of the industry average.

On Twitter, the brand's tweets received over 2,900 Retweets and 1,800 Favorites on average, whereas the automotive industry average was only 197 and 248. The brand also experienced a follower growth rate of 2.6 per cent which is twice the industry average. To top all of this, the #FordatCES was used 13,000 times by the Twitterati and garnered an engagement score of 998.

Q3 When was Ford’s SYNC technology launched in India and how would you describe it? #FordatCES Watch this video --> http://t.co/X0eKT88Kn4

— Ford India (@FordIndia) January 6, 2015

Huge consumer shows like CES give brands an excellent pivot around which to build engaging content. The hashtag #FordatCES helped to remind people that inside the Ford cars, there is plenty of tech for the gadget geek.

4. Head & Shoulders Philippines
#groufie
Engagement Score: 1,000

Head & Shoulders started the year with a very minimalist yet highly engaging strategy. The brand only posted once in the entire time period analysed and yet managed to get over 156,000 Likes, 700 Comments, 150 Shares and an engagement score of 1,000. To hit this social media jackpot, the band leverage pop culture trend of groufies, or group selfies, and encouraged their community to simply share their pictures and tag it with #groufie. This post is part of a larger campaign that gave fans a chance to win cash prizes and also get featured on the brand's page.

Although highly engaging, there didn’t seem to be any link back to the brand itself. Brands should be wary of creating campaigns that might bring in high vanity numbers but fail to reinforce a brand message.

5. Fastrack
#SorryForWhat
Engagement Score: 474

Known for its off the wall, provocative ads, the new campaign from the irreverent style brand took a new stand with their latest campaign, #SorryForWhat. Though the campaign hasn't yet begun in full swing on Facebook and Twitter, the video on YouTube has already made the channel's top 3 and gotten close to 300,000 views in a week's time.

The offbeat campaign has also gotten Fastrack over 25,000 Likes and a handful of mentions on Twitter.

We’ll have to see where this campaign will go over the next week, but the message is certainly in keeping with its brand identity. 

About the author

Ranjani Raghupathi is marketing executive at Unmetric. You can follow her on Twitter @ranjanithinks.