Peter England ‘Scores’ with #TweetAGoal: First Ever Twitter Football Match

The Football World Cup set the tone for the Football fever to kick in and a host nation like Brazil, was taking the fever a few notches up! Twitter was populated with #VanGaal, #NedVsGer, #BraVsCol, #ArgVsNed, #Neymar, #TheflyingDutchman and at a time with big names flourishing Twitter Trends and Tweet streams, ‘Brand-oriented’ Social Media had a plan of it’s own.

Peter England being no exception in joining the festivities, invented a version of Football of their own, with a “Twitter Twist”. A micro-site with a Peter England stadium, an integrated tweet stream and a bunch of Twitter-hungry footballers was all it took to get going. #TweetaGoal was all ready for kick-off.

Objective

Following form were the objectives of #TweetaGoal:

• Brand Awareness
• Participation
• A connect with the audience and the world around
• Leveraging the power and craze of football at the time

Execution

When it’s digital you’re talking about, it all comes down to that big idea followed by the execution. And 10 out of 10 to Peter England for that.

The idea of the first ever Football match via Twitter was played up. A microsite that lay all its emphasis on Twitter was created. All the possible rules of the lovely game were incorporated but with a “Twitter Twist” added to it.

Here’s a quick guide:

The ‘goal’ of the game was to keep possession of the ball – Possession was equivalent to tweeting the most. So the only way of being in possession of the ball was by being one up on anyone else who was also tweeting at that time. The more you tweeted the higher the possession of the ball.

In the middle of the game, goals were scored and the tweeter in possession of the ball at the time of the goal, stood a chance to win some Peter England goodies.

Pretty neat and simple ha?

With an average of a tweet every 2 seconds, Tweeters were frantically tweeting to maintain possession of the ball. Becausein case a goal was scored, possession was the key!

Fouls in the form of ‘Red’ and ‘Yellow’ cards were given to tweeters who would spam the Tweet stream of #TweetAGoal.

Tweeters NOT tweeting about football were considered as an ‘Offside’.

This way rules of Football were implemented and violators of the rules of the game were penalised ‘Football’ style but on Twitter!

The game could be watched live on Tweetagoal.com.

Winners were declared through a live tweet stream on the Peter England timeline.

A total of 25 goals were scored in a span of 8 matches. These tweets were in real time as the match went on and gave tweeters a real time perspective of the real game and Peter England’s #TweetAGoal.

The football craze got a hashtag - #TweetAGoal which was trending on Trends Map and the results were as follows:

• 26 million+ Impressions
• 19,110 Total tweets
• 1,679 Total Retweets
• 5,17,808 as the total reach

 Positives

• Implementation of Real-Time mechanism
• Effectively using a universally trending topic of Football.
• Reaching out to Football lovers who also are the Peter England TG.
• Engaging them through a crowd-puller marketing strategy.
• Engagement driven well-targeted campaign.

Scope for Improvement

Though the above strategy worked in favour of the brand, there was scope to put forth a campaign with a wider reach:

• The campaign primarily was targeted to football viewers and those who know about the game.
• Peter England’s TG extends well beyond the targeted audience of the campaign.
• Limited Facebook Outreach.

Conclusion

To sum up, the idea revolving around football, its concepts and its incorporation via Twitter and a microsite was quite an innovation. Here’s a video that’ll take you straight to the game as it happened.