Valentine’s Day is one of the biggest social media events of the year, just like the Super Bowl, Ice Bucket Challenge, April Fool’s Day or the Oscars’ gala, so it’s no shock that brands are trying to leverage their social media presence by joining the conversation. We checked how they do that and what the status of Facebook users in the US and in the UK is. If you are a social media marketing professional, check our tips on how brands can benefit from the love that is in the air. Our thorough analysis continues the topic started earlier by Adweek and Beeliked and is based on our experience in measuring brand activities in social media.
Valentine’s Day – lovely topic for brands
During the lovers’ day social media are completely dominated by one and only topic – love. We wanted to check how brands communicate with social media users. We analyzed almost 3 k posts published by 2, 5 k pages during the last year’s Lovers’ Day. The word cloud below presents the most frequent words appearing in the posts published on February, 14th 2014. Different size of particular words suggests the the frequency of their appearance in published posts. What are the brands telling us about during Valentine’s Day? As you can see the words most frequently used during the last year’s holiday were: day, valentines, love, one and happy 🙂 By using words that can be easily asociated with love and affection brands are trying to establish closer relationship with their target groups that can be potentially interested in the topic as well.
Valentine’s day world cloud
Engage not only with the engaged
One of the most important factors while building audience with the use of paid promotion on Facebook is choosing the right target group. We checked what are the relationship statuses of Facebook users in the UK and in the US. As we can see on the charts below on Facebook both in the US and the UK most of the users don’t want to share their relationship status. Among those who do so, the majority is married. It is interesting that in the United States percentage of married Facebook users is higher than over the Pond, but it is the other way round when we consider engaged users. Singles percentage is very similar in both countries. Valentine Day is a holiday for people being in love, no wonder the vast majority of social media marketing campaigns is targeted to people being in a relationship. However, there are some campaigns targeted to singles. Some are based on negative approach to lovers’ day, some are embracing the search for the One.
Facebook UK based users’ relationship status
Facebook USA based users’ relationship status
Reach the peak on Valentine’s Day
Valentine’s Day is extremely important for marketeers who are doing their best to engage as many users as possible. Our analysis shows that the branches particulary interested in gaining popularity by binding their communications to the topic of love are: clothing, liquer, art & culture and hotels
& spa. On Facebook their effort is clearly visible even before the Lovers’ Day, when the paid reach of posts starts growing. For most of the branches it has its peak on the Valentine’s Day itself, which means that on the Lover’s Day the brands spend the most on posts with paid promotion.
We analyzed data from Facebook Insights concerning paid reach of posts published by over 2k profiles in February 2014. Because we registered significant differences in paid reach of posts published by pages from different branches, while preparing the chart we adopted a scale from 0 to 100 where 100 stands for the highest paid reach in the analyzed period.
What is interesting is the fact that before the lovers’ day different branches adopt different custromer acquisition strategies. For example pages from hotels & spa category tend to reach the highest number of users just before the Valentine’s Day, while pages from the art & culture category – on the lovers’ day itself. Clothing pages for a change tend to start their paid promotion much earlier – almost a week before the holiday.
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Love is not all you need to succeed – follow our tips!
Remember that just as in the case of Super Bowl which also is a huge social media event that every brand wants to use it in its communications, writing only about love won’t help you leverage you social media presence during Valentine’s Day.
In order to really succeed in the clutter of love messagges that will entirely swamp all social media :
- have an idea what to do and which platform to choose,
- know how to adjust the topic to the real image of your brand,
- carefully choose the right target group you want to engage.
We’ll show you three excellent examples from the last year’s lovers’ day that meet all of these expectations:
Bud Light Valentine’s Day post
T-Mobile Valentine’s Day post
Tiffany and Co. Valentine’s Day post
Remember that you don’t have to run your communications only on Facebook. Joning the conversations on Twitter by using trending hashtags. Just to give you a hint: check the most popular hashtags regarding Valentine’s Day on Twitter below.
The most popular # for Valentine’s Day
Don’t hide your brand’s feelings and start flirting with your customers today!
Taher Batterywala
Paul Staten
Andrew Ginsberg
