Had you been a Facebook fan of Reynolds Wrap prior to last week, chances are you were being served content like this:
If, however, you were like hundreds of Facebook users who jumped on board in the last week, it’s because you saw content like this:
In an effort to promote his new album, Weird Al Yankovic partnered up with the likes of College Humor and Nerdist to create eight music videos that would be released over the course of eight days. The third video released was “Foil,” a parody of Lorde’s “Royals” that praises aluminum foil’s food preserving abilities before spiraling into theories about the Illuminati, mind reading and world domination. Reynolds Wrap wasn’t in on the joke, but as soon as the music video featuring Patton Oswalt, Thomas Lennon and Robert Ben Garant, hit the Internet, they saw an opportunity.
Taking advantage of some great real-time marketing, the Reynolds Wrap social team shared the video on their own Facebook page with some clever status copy, and boosted it with some advertising dollars. The response they got was overwhelmingly positive. Users went out of their way to compliment the post, like the page, and say they appreciated the brand’s sense of humor.
In addition to a number of page posts and comments congratulating them on their clever marketing strategy, they also saw their fan base increase by 850 likes in the span of a few days.
Why did it work?
The timeliness
The team became aware of the video and shared it the same day it was released. Had they waited even one day, they would have risked being ignored. Because Yankovic had said he was releasing one video a day for eight days in a row, any delayed posts or responses to a given day’s video would potentially be buried and ignored by people focusing the next day’s new release. They acted quickly and it paid off.
The tone of the post
Sharing the video is one thing, commenting on it is another. The tongue-in-cheek tone of the post reflected, to an extent, the tone taken by the video itself, making the post cohesive. More than that, the post’s tone left Facebook users with a lighthearted, good impression of the brand, making them more inclined to engage with the brand and ‘like’ the page itself.
The content of the post
The combination of the video itself (which users could play in Facebook without being redirected) and the inclusion of the official music video hashtag #8videos8days made it more appealing to users and opened it up to a potentially bigger audience.
The continued theme
The fun, cheeky tone the account adopted for the initial “Foil” post has continued. Today, the brand used their social mascot to continue to the tone and the theme.
They know they’ve gained some new fans, and to help ensure they keep them (at least for the short-term), they’re continuing to cater to them.
Now that they’ve won these new fans, it will be up to the Reynolds Wrap social team to keep them interested and engaged. They know what kind of content grabs their attention and interests them. Their job now is to create content that follows that initial post and time it so that their fans actually see it. Will they succeed? Share your thoughts with us in the comments below.
