CocaCola’s digital marketing chief saw “phenomenal” results from the company’s first use of paid advertising on Twitter, as reported by Yahoo’s Financial Times. CocaCola is the second brand to sponsor a “trending topic” (Disney’s Pixar was the first), using Twitters “promoted tweets” to tap into online discussions about the World Cup this week. The brand saw 86 million views of the ads in 24 hours, and an engagement rate of 6%, which is very successful compared to the 0.02% of people who click on a regular online advertisement.
Twitter introduced its advertising system in April, first allowing companies (including Starbucks and Sony Pictures) to pay to display their postings on pages of search results for popular topics. Unlike search results, a trending topic appears on the main page Twitter users see when they are logged into the service, at the bottom of the user-generated list of the 10 most popular talking points on the site.
Coke chose to become the second company to sponsor a trending topic during Wednesday’s final qualifying matches, when teams from the US and England – two of the biggest nations on Twitter – go through to the next stage of the tournament.
“We have formed fabulous relationships with Facebook, YouTube and Twitter,” said Carol Kruse, vice-president for global interactive marketing at CocaCola. “We get a lot of first looks and we jumped on that one [promoted tweets] immediately.” Such enthusiasm from a large advertiser will come as a boost to Twitter’s efforts to generate revenues from its 190m monthly visitors.
Although Ms Kruse did not reveal how much Coke spent on the campaign, she indicated the test was not expensive compared to other forms of online advertising.
