In a previous post, I described how social media can provide millions of unearned impressions for brands. In this post, I’d like to show how Target did just that as part of its Bullseye Gives campaign.
To raise awareness of its charitable programs, Target wanted to give stakeholders the ability to decide how the company would divide $3 million between ten national charities. Context worked with Target and AKQA to build an interactive voting application on Target’s Facebook page that allowed users to vote for their favorite charity once per day.
Diving traffic both within Facebook and from external sites, a media buy kept new users coming to the page. The application’s viral elements, specifically the news feed items, gave Target a huge lift, leveraging their media buy with social advocacy.
To give an idea of just how effectively social media leveraged Target’s campaign (and do so without disclosing proprietary information), we can use publicly available information to estimate how many additional impressions Target earned through its use of social media. There were approximately 290 thousand counted votes, (also meaning 290 thousand possible news feed items distributed). We also know that the average Facebook user has 120 friends, and that 50% of Facebook users visit at least once daily, so we can estimate that each of these news feed item were seen by 60 of a user’s friends. Assuming between 50% and 70% of people whose vote counted (that 290 thousand) actually chose to publish their results (a conservative estimate, given our experience), we can calculate that Target earned between 8.7M and 12M additional *advocated* impressions.
That’s not a bad ROI for a small technology investment.
