Nielsen: You Can Turn Twitter Users Into Brand Advocates

By Karen Fratti 

A new Nielsen study shows that social media users watching big events like the Super Bowl or the upcoming Oscars can be turned into brand advocates. In two case studies, Nielsen found that traffic surrounding specific ad campaigns jumped during the televised events.

For the first one, it looked at a personal care brand that ran 84 ads during the entire season of a professional sports league. The ads were places on both broadcast and two cable networks. Nielsen was looking at an audience of an average 76,000 unique authors for each game. As it turns out, social media users were posting just as much about the ins and outs of the games as much as they were talking about the personal care brand and a specific commercial. During an all-star exhibition, Nielsen found that brand activity was 779 percent higher on the day of the exhibition game than it was during the pre-season.

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It also looked at a car brand that advertised last April and May during the last three episodes of a drama series. The ads were both in-program and during the breaks. The series’ official Twitter account also tweeted behind-the-scenes digital shorts featuring the actors from the show and the car. In this case, social buzz varied depending on the episode. Overall though, the reaction was worth it.

There were 352 percent more tweets about the brand on the days when the episodes aired than they did when they show was in hiatus in January. That’s still a success. You can see how it played out in these graphics from Nielsen:

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It’s not easy to turn Twitter users into advocates for your brand. It’s all about a cross-platform push and finding that perfect moment. But it’s not just luck, judging from the results of this study. As long as you’re consistently a presence both on-screen and off, your audience will tweet about you.

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