Social Media Campaigns: Boston Wine Festival case study
Social Media Campaigns are the best way to rally a community and help promote events.
The Boston Wine Festival decided, for the first time in twenty-three successful years, that they would implement social media campaigns to help promote their 2012 events. When we first met, the festival had zero social presence.
We launched their Twitter and Facebook pages in November, just over 2 months from the beginning of the Festival’s grand opening. In an effort to quickly grow a following on these virgin accounts, we launched the Facebook Page with a giveaway event and drove users to it primarily through Twitter — utilizing popular hashtags for #WineLover, #Giveaways, and #Boston. In order to help Boston Wine Festival build a community quickly, we started by engaging on their behalf in conversations on Twitter and online communities that were wine, food, or Boston related. During the launch of the Social Media accounts, we created a few promotional contests that gave away tickets to the Boston Wine Festival to work as incentive to build up our following.
A month into these social media campaigns (once the accounts were populated) we connected wineries who were attending Boston Wine Festival, and developed several branded partnership cross-promotional strategies. In addition to the regular content we posted for Boston Wine Festival, we were now creating regular, relevant content in the form of giveaways that would continuously bring in a new audience for Boston Wine Festival’s social accounts as well as for the wineries with whom they were partnered.
We gave away over $800 in 2 weeks at no cost to Boston Wine Festival, and grew their online presence into a healthy and influential part of a larger online community.
Social Media Strategy helps your brand reach far beyond your own following. Here, Boston Wine Festival reaches over 20,000 people in one tweet, only about 60 of which were they're current followers!
Our posts were getting 20,000+ impressions, & our accounts only had 100 followers.
The Festival was able to make a bigger impact with effective social media campaigns.