Social Media Scavenger Hunt Is a Home Run for Louisville Slugger

A social media scavenger hunt helps Louisville slugger hit a home run

Swinging for the fences, a recent one-day promotion boosted Louisville Slugger’s Facebook likes by 143%, its Twitter followers by 161% and its Facebook “talking about this” number by 834%.

The sporting goods company, which makes the official bat of Major League Baseball  and is a brand of the Hillerich & Bradsby Co., has had a Facebook and Twitter presence for three years. But both were somewhat stagnant and the company searched for a tool to bring them back to life.

As reported by ClickZ,  in late October Louisville Slugger decided, with the help of the imc2 agency, to run a scavenger hunt in St. Louis after the Cardinals won the World Series. The plan called for having a Louisville Slugger team drive around St. Louis and hide 45 World Series commemorative bats at different locations, posting clues about their whereabouts on Facebook and Twitter.

The result? Near bedlam in a town famous for its baseball fanatics. The brand’s mobile team couldn’t approach a few of its planned destinations because so many fans had figured out the clues and were milling around the spot. But with the realtime nature of Facebook and Twitter, the team could pick a new location and tweet or post the change.

The Louisville Slugger team wrote 66 posts, averaging 23 “likes” and 20 comments per message. For the week prior to the event, its “talking about this” metric (which  includes the number of likes, user comments involving the brand, RVSPs, “@mentions” of a brand, Facebook Places check-ins, and photo-tags) for its Facebook page was 755 and jumped to 7,049 during the following week.

Excited by the success, Louisville Slugger tweeted out a new contest.  Last Saturday (December 10th), it hid 10 bats in the  Miami-Ft. Lauderdale area.

[tweet https://twitter.com/sluggernation/status/145528834647789569]