Last week Friday, here in Jamaica as well as in New York, there was Fashion Night Out (FNO). A One Night Only crazy discounts event. The #FNOja hashtag was created by Rachel Cunning @RachiebabieJa and endorsed by The Jamaica Observer – the originators of FNO Jamaica. And then it simply blew up on Twitter. Let me walk you through this success story.
Let’s start with the hashtag #FNOja. What is a hashtag? It’s simply a keyword, a short bunch of letters that describes the brand, product, site that it’s attached to, that’s easy to recognise, pass along and in the case of our web app, easy to track. They’re like tags on Flickr, only added inline to your Tweet. Anyone can create a hashtag by simply by prefixing a word with a hash symbol: #hashtag. #caribtechnews #fnoja.
While The Jamaica Observer and the many businesses that participated have declared it an amazing success, we have declared Twitter, a resounding success in spreading the reach of Fashion Night Out Jamaica online and offline. On the workshop and conference circuit over the last two years spreading ideas, sharing strategies and case studies about how Social Media can help businesses to humanize their brands, build brand affinity and drive sales, I’m asked one question consistently.
That questions is – What’s the ROI? The Return on Investment? Companies want to know the impact of their time and money spent on Social Media. We can now help companies to do just that with a new web app I co-developed (Disclosure) with one of the Caribbean’s top Software Architects @Khary Sharpe – it’s called SocialRecord.
The Web App and What We Tracked
Using Social Record we tracked the hashtag #FNOja for nine days to gauge its reach, viewership and its impact on the Fashion Night Out Jamaica brand. We tracked three things:
1. Tweet – a single message sent (including retweets) ( a retweet is when someone passes along a tweet using the prefix RT)
2. People – unique accounts that saw the tweet (account may not be equal to single person e.g. siliconcaribe and ingridriley)
3. Viewership – how many times the tweets were viewed. (some persons would have seen them multiple times due to retweets)
The Results
Stats:
tweets – 1,680 using the #FNOja
retweets – 310
tweeters – 407
people – 98,169 viewership/impressions – 1,335,480
TOP 20 tweeters and how many times they used the #fnoja hashtag
We used the App and Google Maps to create a Map of the #fnoja tweets that were geotagged. You can see tweets made globally, regionally, nationally and on a parish and town levels. It has the ability to go to neighbourhood and street level as well.
#FNOja GeoTagged Tweets around the World
#FNOja GeoTagged Tweets Jamaica
#FNOja GeoTagged Tweets Parish, Neighbourhood
Not all about Numbers and Maps
All this shows, that if people feel connected to a brand, an authentic message, cause, event, restaurant, bar or have a great experience with them, they will share it – in this case, they will tweet, retweet, mention it to their friends, followers. It’s word of mouth powered by social media platform of Twitter.
I must add too, that while everyone gets excited about numbers, it’s not all about the numbers, it’s about relationships. The word Social in the term Social Media gives you a clue into what it’s all about.. It’s about people connecting and sharing themselves, their information and experiences. Twitter, Facebook, FourSquare are platforms that enable people to connect. For business, it enables brands to listen in, find out how you are perceived by your customers, your potential market, what messages will connect, what ideas will spread and move people to action.
Shameless plug continued: You can follow Social Record on Twitter @socialrecord