Why the National Peanut Board Is Unleashing a Year’s Worth of Tweets in One Day
A 'Farmer's Almanac of social media'
Want to know what 2016's biggest pop culture moments will be? One peanut organization is doling out its predictions on Twitter today.
The National Peanut Board, which supports American peanut farmers, is launching a new Twitter account today centering on a fictional peanut vendor who used to sell salty snacks at ballparks.
The board is working with PR firm Golin and Twitter to push out 366 pieces of content today, posting roughly every two minutes for 12 hours. Meanwhile, a team of 15 to 20 Golin staffers is monitoring social chatter and responding to peanut enthusiasts in real time.
"We see it as an opportunity to shift gears from a traditional approach that focused on print and outdoor advertising to a campaign that we felt like consumers could really get excited about," said Ryan Lepicier, senior vp of marketing and communications for the National Peanut Board. "It's sort of like the Farmer's Almanac of social media."
The tweets lay out a full year's editorial calendar and predict what the brand believes 2016's major pop-culture moments will be. There's also a paid-media component with Promoted Tweets targeting millennials who love peanuts and other salty snacks. The brand declined to disclose the cost of the campaign.
After today, the Twitter account will be used to push out posts, images, videos and GIFs about peanuts. And if one of the predictions turns out to be right later this year, the New Year's content will be reposted.
Marketers regularly lament real-time efforts because posts are often crafted months in advance, so it's hard not to find a bit of tongue-in-cheek humor in the National Peanut Board's campaign.
"This peanut character is rooted in the same character as the farmers who grow the peanuts," Lepicier said. "They're unfancy, [but] unsophisticated and uncomplicated and don't take themselves too seriously."
