Big brands + Twitter = Going places

28/06/10 posted by Annie

These last few weeks, the World Cup has been on everyone’s lips - especially for Twitter and Coca-Cola. You probably read our recent posts about Twitter’s difficulties keeping up with the massive international growth caused by the World Cup frenzy. Coca-Cola took a giant risk by investing in a Promoted Trend advertising campaign on Twitter for reportedly tens of thousands of dollars, during a period of frequent Twitter downtime and fail-whaling.

It paid off. Coca-Cola’s brand pulled off 86 million impressions world wide, and a 6 percent user engagement rate. The plan to home in on Twitter’s popularity during the World Cup season worked a treat, despite the hefty fee. However Coca-Coca’s Global Interactive Marketing Vice President, Carol Kruse, said the expense was small in comparison to other advertising buys, and Coke was very pleased with their success.

Twitter also looks like they're on a roll, with their Twitter Places feature gaining momentum in the lucrative geo-location side of online marketing. We briefly spoke about Twitter’s integration with Foursquare and Gowalla last week, however Mashable’s Jennifer Van Grove thinks Twitter might have the best chance at turning location-sharing into a norm. She says funky Foursquare has yet too small a network for a real shot at the prize, and Facebook, while being the most popular and mainstream of the social networks, focuses on socialising and sharing info between friends more than location.

Ofcourse it all may change in the future, but if these forms of social media are the current trend, we might expect to see many more large brands getting on the band wagon. And of course, smaller businesses can also benefit from the social media. In order for your business to maximise its ROI (return on investment) on social media marketing, it’s important to keep in touch with what’s happening in the here-and-now. Where does the social media fit into your integrated advertising campaign?