Planning your FIFA World Cup 2018 social ad campaigns? Here’s why Twitter is a must!

If you’re a football (or soccer) fan, you’ll know the World Cup is just around the corner, taking place in Russia from the 14th of June! It’s not just an exciting time for fans, but also for brands, who leverage the world’s biggest single-event sporting competition in a whole host of ways.

Social media activity soars during large-scale events like the World Cup! And not only does it increase, but behaviour also changes as people start to base their activity and sharing around key moments of matches, for example.

Twitter is a great example of that, and they’ve just published a blog post entitled ‘8 ways brands can create Twitter content around the World Cup’ which details some of these stats.

Did you know that during the last World Cup in 2014, 672 million Tweets were created, making it the most Tweeted-about event in history? Thats about 500 million more Tweets than the #Rio2016 Olympic Games!

Here are a couple of keys to success with your World Cup Twitter ad campaigns:

Timing is crucial

Getting the timing right doesn’t mean just pushing your ads during matches! While, according to Twitter, 80% of twitter-using football fans will engage with the platform during matches , 82%  plan to interact with it in some form before a match and 84% will use it afterward.

Do some thinking about how your brand can tap into the excitement or memories associated with matches, rather than just the match itself. Reese’s ‘March Madness’ College Basketball campaign successfully tapped into the emotional highs and lows during March Madness, with the message that Reese’s is the perfect treat for any mood swing. They were able to capture attention around particular things that happened during games and the results of games afterwards, to create messages that resonated with their audience.

Make sure it’s relevant

This is especially important if your brand’s product or service is not particularly related to the World Cup or football. Think creatively instead of just including the relevant hashtags and going with a classic “buy our widget” message. Like the Reese’s example above, what sort of quirky similarity is there between your product or service and what fans are experiencing during the World Cup?

Added to that, to ensure you keep it relevant, we recommend organising your social activity during the World Cup into three buckets:

Planned

what do you know will happen for sure? You know there will be an opening ceremony and you know when and where all the fixtures will be taking place. Pre-produce assets and publish when the moment unfolds in real-time.

Anticipated

what might happen in a game (or outside of the game) that you could leverage? A goal from a particular player, a big upset, an injury? Create A/B assets and publish one according to the outcome, making sure you build in participation with tools like polling.

Reactive

during a World Cup the unexpected will happen – that’s why we love sport right?! For these ones, you’ll need to be on stand-by, ready to pounce on something big as it happens. Create templates for responses that are flexible but keep the brand message front and center.