Social Media Campaign Review: Pepsi IPL Hashtag Contests

Introduction:

Pepsi India is pulling out all stops to dive into the cricketing madness and the title sponsorship of IPL has given it a great leverage to tap into the Indian social media ecosystem.

Objective:

By using hashtag contests on Twitter, Pepsi Indian wants to keep engaging with its fans over the entire course of the IPL. It wants the tempo to be maintained and keep it interesting.

Execution:

Pepsi India has made smart use of hashtag campaigns to keep the IPL momentum going on Twitter. It has devised several hashtags that have managed to bag a great audience and buzz online.

Over the last few weeks, following are the hashtags that have been used by @PepsiIndia:

• #FavPepsiIPLTeam
• #IfIWasAtPepsiIPL
• #PepsiIPLFan
• #ILovePepsiIPLBecause
• #MyPepsiIPLPlayerIs
• #IWatchPepsiIPLFor
• #BestPepsiIPLMoment

The basic essence behind these hashtags to get the community talking and create a buzzing chatter on Twitter.

Pepsi India would tweet using these hashtags and ask their community members to join in and contribute their tweets using the hashtags. The best ones get a chance to watch the match live from stadium.They also roped in several key influencers in disseminating these messages as well.

The brand didn't stop here. It engaged in conversation with people taking part in the contests apart from retweeting their responses.

People responded to these hashtags entusiastically and almost all of them managed to trend nationwide.

Positives:

To keep the buzz alive for the duration of the IPL is a difficult ask but Pepsi India managed to do it and how! Not only were these hashtags were relevant, they were quite fun as well.

Also, it was really interesting how the brand engaged in conversations with people who were using this hashtag. I don't see many brands doing this. They merely Retweet the responses. But Pepsi went one step ahead and talked to them.

The best thing I like about these hashtags is that they are all branded. A lot of times we see brands trying to trend hashtags that have no mention of the brand name at all. This results in the hashtag getting hijacked by others. But all the hashtags by Pepsi were branded.

A little digging helped me come up with stats that really impressed me.

For example, the hashtag #IfIWasAtPepsiIPL had 2171 contributors and saw 3 million Timeline deliveries while reaching out to 1.03 million people.

Another hashtag, #MyPepsiIPLPlayerIs saw 1000+ contributors with 2.05 million Timeline deliveries. The rest of the hashtags had a similar response.

Following is the reach of individual hashtags:

• #FavPepsiIPLTeam – 450, 651
• #IfIWasAtPepsiIPL – 1.03 million
• #PepsiIPLFan – 188, 763
• #ILovePepsiIPLBecause – 542, 183
• #MyPepsiIPLPlayerIs – 334, 821

These stats give us an idea as to how huge the impact has been in terms of engagement, reach and branding. And it is these campaigns that have shot up the community size of @PepsiIndia from 6500 to more than 48,000.

Scope of Improvement

Haven't seen Pepsi India run one such campaign off late. The last one was in late April and that's about it. Would love to see them come up with more such campaigns till the IPL fever is alive.

Conclusion:

Other brands should learn from these campaigns on how to run a hashtag contest. There were no calls for 'Follow Us and ReTweet'. Neither did Pepsi India ask people to Tweet a lot in order to win.

A nice healthy way to run a campaign on Twitter.