Twitter Case Study

Great Clips leverages #sharknado trend

Disclaimer: I work for Great Clips. Discovery Channel, producers of Shark Week, is a strategic partner of Great Clips.

By now, you’re all well aware of Sharknado. If not, consider yourself lucky. Unlike a lot of brands and marketers, I love sharing data and results of my marketing efforts. Fortunately, this was one a rounding success.

Great Clips partnered with Discovery Channel for its 2013 airing of Shark Week. Great. Exciting. Live every week like its Shark Week.

Plug: Tune into Discovery Channel at 9 p.m. ET to catch all the great Shark Week action.

Part of our partnership with Shark Week included giving away a trip to Atlantis in the Bahamas — the Great Getaway. To help drive awareness, and ultimately, to drive sign-ups, we leveraged the #sharknado trending topic on Twitter. Through a number of Promoted Tweet campaigns, we targeted users who were talking about Sharknado, as well as those who were using the #sharknado hash tag.

The results: We saw a huge spike in conversation and engagement around our partnership. Twitter engagement was in the high single digits, and spiked as high as 30% on certain tweets. Sign-ups for our contest spiked during the 24-hour period when our campaign ran.

Looking forward: We’ll measure the number of sign-ups who visited a Great Clips salon within 30, 60 and/or 90 days after signing up and the number of new customers vs. repeat customers.

In my eyes, this short-lived promotional push was a huge success. On the most basic level — impressions, engagement, follows, etc. it far exceeded expectations. The total cost of this campaign was a fraction of what it would have cost to deliver the “coverage” we received on any other medium.

This is a great example of why I continue to increase my investment in Twitter and how they routinely outperform other platforms.