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A platform driven by conversation and virality, Twitter has positioned itself as an optimal location for brands such as Ben & Jerry’s, Uber and Verizon to market their brands and products. But reaching that sweet spot for users is largely dependent on what kind of content is marketed, how it’s presented and which audiences are targeted.
Audience intelligence company Pulsar partnered with Twitter to conduct a deeper study on how and why campaigns become successful, and utilized that information to form a more predictable optimization model for advertisers. The two companies presented their findings at Adweek’s Spotlight event, The Audience Is the Message: a Data-Driven Playbook for Content, Targeting, and Spend.
How brand conversation impacts sales
By studying 40 companies, Twitter found that a 10% increase in brand conversation can lead to up to a 3% increase in sales. Audiences exposed to both organic brand conversation and paid advertisements were much more likely to buy the brand’s products, too, and paid media leads to a 105% incremental conversation lift around the brand, on average.
But beyond these initial findings, the brands also analyzed how campaign strategy be optimized to best engage brands’ target audiences—and what specific details make a social conversation more useful to advertisers.
The meaning of ‘campaign conversation shape’
To define the characteristics of audience engagement, Twitter and Pulsar describe a spectrum of conversation “shape.” On one end, the conversation is fragmented into silos of audiences who do not interact with one another. On the other end, the conversation is cohesive—meaning audiences are more closely connected by their interests, who they follow and the ways in which they engage with the content.
The two brands conducted case studies to demonstrate examples of each shape. The first study, where an entertainment brand aimed to drive buzz around new music releases, was fragmented into separate music fandoms with minimal follower overlap or conversation. In the future, Dina Peck, research analyst for marketing insights and analytics at Twitter, suggested the brand could create more cohesive conversation by creating content that is relevant to multiple fandoms and is more broadly appealing to the audience.
In the second case study, a brand wanted to market a TV show. By targeting audiences of similar affinities, such as gaming and hip hop, the brand enabled a cohesive conversation that traveled more easily between audiences. They key takeaway of the case study is that creating content relevant to groups of overlapping interests and audience members can lead to a more widespread conversation.
“Based on these initial tests, we’ve learned that conversation is super nuanced, and each brand needs to lean into their campaigns’ conversation shape to better understand which audiences to target,” said Peck. That will allow brands to bolster campaign volume and impact, she said.
Audience response determines content effectivity
Pulsar’s final case study examined campaigns by their modes (organic, earned or paid), dynamic (conversational or advertise-y), topics, languages and resulting behaviors by viewers. The brand found that the substance of each campaign resonates differently with different groups.
“The audience of a campaign is not a monolith,” said Francesco D’Orazio, co-founder and CEO of Pulsar. “It’s a system of communities who engage with the brand or product and its campaign for very different reasons.”
Because of this, the way in which audiences of various backgrounds, cultures and perspectives respond to the same campaign may vary greatly, forming individualistic interpretations of the content.
“The beauty of this job is to see how different nuances and affinities and interests are playing back a very different campaign,” said D’Orazio. A single campaign can actually be “played back by audiences in so many different ways that it’s almost a kaleidoscope.”
How this information translates into strategy
By undestanding conversation shape and how the response to the campaign forms that shape, Pulsar created a four-step plan for campaign development.
The plan includes outlining the audience, mapping its shape, articulating the substance of the conversation and how it will be perceived by different audiences, and then using these findings to create a spend, targeting and creative plan that best meets the needs of the brand.
“The key to understanding virality and how it happens wasn’t really in the content in itself, but was more in the audience behind that content,” said D’Orazio. “The social structure of the audience and the way that structure affects interactions is really the main variable in the work we’re doing with Twitter.”
