Ultra Music Festival Twitter Marketing Report (Assessment)

Twitter as a Marketing Tool

Increasingly popular, digital media has significantly changed modern marketing strategies by offering a fast, comfortable, convenient and ‘trendy’ means of interaction with the customers. These qualities mean that Twitter can be more efficient at client-engagement than traditional advertising (Castronovo & Huang 2012). Marketing executives report paying significant attention to social media and intend to spend increasing amounts of money on developing relevant tools, for example, platforms like Twitter (Burton & Soboleva 2011, p. 491).

However, as the study by Burton and Soboleva (2011) demonstrates, due to the novelty of the tools and lack of consistent guidelines in their respect, companies are not consistent in their Twitter strategies, which shows that marketing managers still do not know how to use this tool (pp. 493-497). To address the issue, we shall discuss the effectiveness of Ultra Music Festival social media usage with the help of frameworks described by Barker and Barker (2012) and Castronovo and Huang (2012).

Choosing Twitter

Castronovo and Huang (2012) suggest that social media is suitable for connecting all the marketing communication efforts into a single “easily accessible, integrated consumer venue” (p. 124). According to the authors, social media platforms are the basic part of a marketing strategy. The first step of the marketing strategy development in this respect is the choice of a platform that corresponds to the goals of marketing.

According to Twitter, Inc. (2015), 78% of the users access the site with the help of mobile phones which demonstrates its convenience. The possibilities of Twitter communication include replying, retweeting, favouring a post, and applying hashtags; the post can be supplied with video materials, loops and pictures (Twitter, Inc. 2015). According to Castronovo and Huang (2012) as well as Curran, O’Hara and O’Brien (2011), Twitter offers an especially high level of engagement due to the ‘micro-blog’ format and the possibility of retweets. It fulfils the informative and communicative functions and offers the opportunity of monitoring the customers’ attitude and needs as well as advertising. The positive comments on Twitter may fulfil the function of recommendations. In general, it can be concluded that Twitter is a successful choice of a social media platform. However, upon creating a tool, its effective use must be maintained.

Marketing evaluation model

As stated in the work by Barker and Barker (2012), in order to evaluate a social media marketing tool and strategy, the key performance indices or KPI should be measured in consistency with the company’s goals and investments. The KPI can be quantitative and qualitative, and while the former can be easily expressed in the numerical form and measured, qualitative ones are more complex. Often, to get a picture of the emotional appeal of a tool, studies and surveys are required, although the feedback from customers concerning the tool can also be very helpful. As Barker and Barker (2012) point out, quantitative PKI are used to measure the content while qualitative KPI measures the emotion caused by this content.

Certain aspects of Ultra Music Festival Twitter Marketing are inaccessible for us (for example, returns on investment), apart from that, we are not acquainted with the specific goals set for the tool. Still, we shall attempt to illustrate the evaluation model by supposing that the primary goal of the campaign consists in boosting all the aspects of the event’s reputation, popularity and revenues.

Quantitative Data

Ultra Music Festival (2015) Twitter has been active since 2009. As of October 30th, the Twitter has got 8,632 tweets with photos, videos, and Vine loops (4.42M Vine Loops as stated in the event’s Twitter). UMF Twitter has 1.21 M followers. The number of tweets per day varies, but the Twitter is quite active, the number of retweets and favourites also varies and it may be used to evaluate the popularity of different tweet topics (which would already be a qualitative KPI). Apart from that, UMF occasionally retweets other festival tweets as well as personal opinions about itself and music.

Qualitative Data

In order to define the emotional response of the customers, we are going to introduce RiteTag, an agency that offers an analysis of Twitter tags to define their popularity. RiteTag (2015), takes into account a number of factors of engagement: ‘memes, influencers to tag, emoticons and more’, which makes the results of the analysis a picture of the emotions connected to the Twitter (par. 5). The RiteTag (2015) site defines the tag ‘ultramusicfestival’ as an underused one while the tags ‘untramiami’ and ‘ultra2015’ that are also applied to the festival are labelled as used by a limited amount of users but long-lived. The RiteTag’s (2015) conclusion is that the tags are not very popular, but here, it should be pointed out that the data needs further investigation, and the goals of the event’s marketing should be taken into account.

Conclusion

Still, it should be pointed out that, upon making a successful choice of the social media platform, UMF should effectively use all the opportunities offered by it. The RiteTag’s (2015) information is not connected to the event’s goal, which is why it may incorrect to suggest that UMF is misusing the hashtags. Still, it is logical to suggest that increasing the popularity of the Twitter would be a marketer’s goal. Therefore, by analysing the popularity of its hashtags, the Festival could gain the information that would be used increase its Twitter popularity and engagement, which is an opportunity that should not be missed.

Reference List

Barker, M & Barker, D 2012, Concepts and applications, Cengage Learning, Mason, Ohio.

Burton, S & Soboleva, A 2011, ‘Interactive or reactive? Marketing with Twitter’, Journal Of Consumer Marketing, vol. 28, no. 7, pp. 491-499.

Castronovo, C & Huang, L 2012, ‘Social Media in an Alternative Marketing Communication Model’, Journal of Marketing Development and Competitiveness, vol. 6, no. 1, pp. 117-134.

Curran, K, O’Hara, K & O’Brien, S 2011, ‘The Role of Twitter in the World of Business’, International Journal of Business Data Communications and Networking, vol. 7, no. 3, pp. 1-15.

RiteTag 2015, Popular Twitter hashtags for #ultramusicfestival. Web.

Twitter, Inc. 2015, Learn Twitter. Web.

Ultra Music Festival 2015, Ultra Music Festival Twitter. Web.