Twitter's been making a huge come back as a social media network lately, and despite its ad network having a poor reputation for conversion, many brands are seeing great ROI from investing in organic content. One of those is MoonPie, who absolutely dominated the platform in 2017, and who are off to a great start again in 2018.
Getting Ready to Moon Everyone
Most Americans will be familiar with MoonPies - they're a marshmallow and biscuit covered snack that were part of almost everyone's childhood (we had Wagon Wheels in Canada). But, the treat has become more notorious over the past year for its efforts on Twitter, which according to FastCompany is all thanks to the Knoxville-based agency, The Trambos Group.
Engaging Trambos earlier in 2017 to help them build a campaign in the lead-up to the August 2017 solar eclipse, the agency quickly established an extremely unique "brand voice" for the account, which made headlines after they trolled the Hostess account when it tried to name one of its products the official snack cake of the eclipse.
This single tweet was apparently responsible for selling so many MoonPies that they had to shut down their Chattanooga factory because they ran out of raw materials. Insane!
Engagement is the Key to Engagement
And it didn't end there. If you've read through any of my posts or comments, you'll see a trend that I always talk about engaging with others being the key to creating engagement on your own account, and MoonPie is a fantastic example of that.
The brand has not only continued to troll other accounts, but has taken an extremely combative approach to anyone who tries to mess with it, often with hilarious results that keep making headlines.
Inserting Yourself Into Key Pop Culture Moments
In addition to the solar eclipse, MoonPie has also been great at identifying other popular culture moments that it knew would be lighting up Twitter... they've talked about Groundhog's Day ("If a MoonPie sees its shadow today, it will signal the end of times"), the US State of the Union ("Tonight I will be delivering the state of the moon-ion"), and even the Super Bowl.
During last week's game, they tweeted a number of scripts for ad spots that they would have run, if they had that kind of money to throw around.
The results were not only hilarious, but shared and favourited thousands of times.
Yes, but does this really sell tasty treats?
Well, according to Nooga.com, the company sold more MoonPies online during the 2 week campaign in August than it did for all of 2016, and FastCompany reports an overall 17% sales increase for the year - which apparently can't be attributed to new product innovations or additional TV marketing (because they don't do either of these things).
What can we learn from this?
I think the biggest lesson that we need to take-away here is that just posting to social media isn't enough.
So often, I see people who just treat Twitter, Facebook and other social platforms as a dumping ground for their content. Heck, even most of the "how to" guides talk about how to get your profile looking good, how to use the right hashtags, and how to optimise your content so it gets the most reach and engagement.
But posting to social media is not enough!
If you want to really win on social media, for your personal or business brands, then you absolutely need to be engaging with other accounts. Go comment on posts on hashtags relevant to your account, and engage with people that are engaging on those hashtags.
And the same goes with Steemit - you can't just dump content here and expect to be successful. You need to engage with other people.
Anyway, if you're looking for a laugh or some social media motivation, jump on over and check out MoonPie's Twitter account.