BU Lunch Madness

Case Study: Using Social Media to Capitalize on Current Events

March Madness: A point in time where a handful of lucky schools have the opportunity to capitalize on being thrust in the national spotlight. Their schools garner attention from millions on social media — it’s a time of great excitement and a heck of a lot of work for social media managers. So, what about those of us who aren’t a part of the “madness?”

Unfortunately, our Boston University Terriers weren’t gifted with a berth to the NCAA tournament this year. So, for March Madness, we decided to take advantage of bracket fever by creating a bracket everyone on campus could get on board with: A food bracket.

The purpose of the bracket was three-fold:

1. Highlight Boston University as an urban campus, with a diverse array of great, affordable, unaffiliated dining options at our doorstep.
2. Gauge engagement level of students on Twitter; as Twitter struggles internally and other apps gain popularity with our target demographic, we started to wonder, “are our students still active on this platform?” To test it out, we ran the contest solely on Twitter in the form of polls. Each “matchup” was calculated using a daily Twitter poll lasting 24 hours. All external awareness efforts drove users back to our Twitter.
3. Have some fun!

So, what happened? Our first matchup, got 670 votes — a respectable showing and an encouraging sign. Maybe our students are still active on Twitter, after all!

By the end, our final poll received over 1,000 votes! In sum, our Lunch Madness polls received nearly 10,000 votes.

Restaurants got in on the action and began lobbying for votes:

Comparisons were drawn to the real March Madness:

And brackets were drafted…

In the end, our attempt to engage our students (and show some love to Twitter’s new features) was a success! Our Lunch Madness tweets garnered nearly 300,000 impressions and students are already asking for a repeat. Until then, enjoy the crown Sunset Cantina!