GOSF 2014: Making sense of Tweets
The success of any online campaign is driven by it's pulse on social media. Hence, when GOSF '14 came along, we decided to check out how the users reacted to the event. Around 450 brands participated, out of which we tracked the top 50 active brands on social media. The rest 400 brands were found to be too minuscule on their social media footprint to skew the analysis.
Twitter Activity
Here's a quick look at how the tweets and retweets timelines panned out across the three days of the event. There were prominent peaks in activity around noon everyday and it all seemed to die down towards the fag end of the day, only to pick up the next day.
We investigated the peak hours for the cause behind these distinct crests. Three of the biggest brands involved, Google, Snapdeal and eBay India, ran their campaigns each morning and contests around this time, thus resulting in massive engagement. Nokia Lumia (#poweroffive) and Shopclues (#shopcluesgosf) too jumped aboard the ship on 11th and 12th.
Engagement Analysis
A lot of the brands we tracked are extremely active on social media, so we checked out how much of the total share of tweets have been brands vs consumers. While at it, we also mapped the nature of posts the brands were involved in, in an attempt to figure out if the support-seeking users were affected because of the event, and we weren't disappointed at all.
GOSF was a strenuous event for social media teams and a very easy source of distraction from their raison d'etre on social media. Our analysis shows that brands were 20 minutes faster in their response times during GOSF as compared to the weeks leading up to the event. This demonstrates the maturity amongst the Indian brands in preparing for big events such as GOSF. Kudos to the customer-centric spirit here!
User Analysis
The brand vs consumer graph gave us a very clear statement that this event was consumer-driven. Some of the brands duly used the momentum of engaging users to spin off their own hashtags successfully, including Snapdeal (#gosfwithsnapdeal), eBay India (#lastshowonebaygosf) and Shopclues (#shopcluesgosf) etc.
Investing further, we drew ourselves a curve which gave us valuable insights into the number of tweets the users were making. The graph was rather compelling.
We took a logarithmic fit of the number of tweets made by every user and it gave us some damning numbers. The top 10% of the users, i.e around 3000, made up for almost 83% of the total engagement around the event.
The remaining 90% of the users tweeted at an average of 1.5 tweets throughout the event, which led to us to believe that GOSF wasn't really centred around the masses talking about it, as it could have been assumed from the sheer volume of engagement.
We further analysed the top engaging users and found out that the highest engaging users were relentlessly involved in campaign & contests. Here is are the top 10 engaging twitter handles along with their number of tweets and retweets during this event:
@crickyyash - 4280
@sanketdhende - 3378
@shah_himanshu - 2850
@dinku_cfc - 2476
@rajendra9prasad - 2468
@am_navin - 2392
@awwwww12121 - 2240
@dinnu_m9 - 1858
@sathishmunna - 1641
@bindaas_nj - 1449
The activity of the top engaging users reveals a trolling nature which shadows the true reach of such events.
GOSF 2014 has been widely called as a successful event getting thumbs up and reported user engagement upto 7 times more than normal., whereas Twitter has a different story to tell altogether and we believe it was a lackluster event only catering to contest & campaign mongers with no real skin (read: chatter) in the game.
Successful campaigns tend to sprout conversations amongst the consumers and it surpasses the brands. The GOSF story couldn't gain enough escape velocity on Twitter.
