This post by Katie Williams is an entry to our $4,000 Blogging Contest. Katie serves as the International Marketing Manager of eFaqt, an education-tech startup in Amsterdam. She uses Hashtagify to analyze trending hashtags, and evaluate the success of various marketing campaigns.
This November the Make-A-Wish Foundation, along with Clever Girls Collective, and the city of San Francisco teamed up to grant the wish of 5-year-old leukemia survivor Miles Scott. His wish: to become Batkid for a day. Thanks to Hashtagify, we can take a deeper look into the rise of the #SFBatKid hashtag, and remember some of the highlights of Miles’s special day in San Francisco.
Leading up to the event: PR Best Practices from Clever Girls Collective
About two weeks before #SFBatKid became a worldwide sensation, Clever Girls Collective Founder Stefania Pomponi contacted the Bay Area Make-A-Wish Foundation. She’d read in a blog about Miles’s wish, and decided to reach out and offer PR support. She knew that Miles’s story had the potential to go viral because it was inspiring and could really involve the entire city of San Francisco.
Clever Girls Collective then immediately began creating a social media plan, which including securing the Twitter handles of @SFWish and @PenguinSF, and monitoring all of their social media activity.
As the team wrote in a CNBC blog post
People respond to significant stories via social media, whether you want them to or not, and whether you participate or not. Goal one is a story worth telling. The second goal is to do everything possible to steer the conversation and make it easy for people to contribute to your narrative.
The Clever Girls Team knew the importance of making information online accessible, and easy to understand. They immediately secured a Facebook page, and a blog.
They also stress the importance of scripting the social media component of an event. They used Batkid’s itinerary to plan a Twitter script using key points, photos, hashtags, and relevant details. By planning the social media script in advance, your team can save valueable energy on the day-of.
Clever Girls also fully staffed Batkid’s special day. They had two teams of about a dozen people each. The first team actually traveled with Miles, and reported on the on-the-moment happenings. The second team pushed scripted Tweets to the #SFBatKid hashtag, tweeted from personal accounts, and responded to high profile tweets regarding the event. According to the Clever Girls Collective, coordination and thorough planning are really the keys to starting a viral trend.1
The Day Of: Miles Gets His Wish and the World Cheers On
#SFBatKid became so popular that Miles even received a shout out from President Obama, which received over 7,000 retweets, and over 4,000 favorites.
#SFBatKid Hashtagify Analysis
Now, let’s take a deeper dive into #SFBatKid from a marketing perspective using Hashtagify’s various features.
Related Hashtags
Using Hashtagify’s “Related Hashtags” feature, one can see that due to the hyper-local nature of this story, many related hashtags were also San Francisco specific, such as #SF, #SFGiant, and #BayArea. It’s always important to check related hashtags so that you can increase the influence of your tweet. By adding on some additional related hashtags, your reach will be greater.
Usage Patterns
Usage patterns is a great feature on Hashtagify that allows you to take a deeper look into how a particular hashtag is trending over time. For #SFBatKid, you’ll see that this hashtag really grew in popularity around the timing of the event, and then tapered off. You’ll find similar usage patterns for news topics that peak during the week of the event, and then dip down again.
In-Depth Intelligence
Using Hashtagify’s Premium version CyBranding Hashtag Intelligence you can dig even deeper into the analysis of the hashtag, for example getting a detailed analysis of the top 50 influencers
Totally trending!
Using Hashtagify’s Top Influencers feature, we can see that the top influencers for #SFBatKid are news networks, and major blogs such as Time, and The Huffington Post. This is when you know that your hashtag has really sky-rocketed to virality. So, what have we learned from #SFBatKid?
Social Media Tips From Clever Girls Collective
In the end, these are the tips we can learn from the #SFBatKid campaign:
Scour blogs and RSS feeds daily for new happenings. Remember, the Clever Girls Collective found Miles’ story on a random blog, and turned it into something big!
Social good and other inspiring topics have a great potential to go viral.
Planning, executing, and tracking your campaign is essential for success.
Hashtagify’s multitudinous resources can give you invaluable insights on your hashtag, monitoring your campaigns, and your campaigns’ success.
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