About Shopper‘s stop
An Indian retailing company promoted by the K Raheja Corp Group, started in the year 1991 had its first store in Andheri,Mumbai and by 2013, Shoppers Stop have had 73 stores in India. Shoppersstop.com offers a truly remarkable shopping experience on the Internet. On April 10, 2008 at Barcelona, Shopper’s stop was awarded “the Hall of Fame” and “the Emerging Market Retailer of the Year Award”, by World Retail Congress. Shopper’s stop always set benchmarks, cross limits, achieve the impossible and celebrate their success. Their customer centricity and relentless pursuit to set new benchmarks in retail has made them the leading chain of department stores in India.
Twitter marketing strategy
The brands these days would go to any extent to get their hashtags go trending including launching a tweet store. Shopper’s stop joined Twitter on December 2008 as @Shoppersstop. Later, @Shoppersstop introduced an amazing hashtag based competition that was quite unique as compared to rest of the hashtag based competitions. The contest ran on June 12th and 13th, with prizes including a set of headphones, makeup items and gift vouchers, to name just a few. The contest wasn’t about how good the quality of tweet is or how creative of the tweet is or the number of tweets, it was about probability of the tweet . Their main aim behind this Twitter contest Tweet using #sstweetstore was to create a buzz among existing and prospective followers. However The casino-like tweeting game succeeded in creating a frenzied stream of tweets. In less than 30 hours it garnered over 22500 tweets.
How did Shopper’s stop made it go viral?
Ever sinceShoppers Stop announced the #sstweetstore contest on Twitter, there had been a traffic jam on its specially created microsite. The retail brand that thrives on its tagline ‘Start Something New’ had indeed started something new. This was perhaps the first time in India that a brand has leveraged Twitter along with a microsite to weave a fun tweeting contest that is entirely based on chance.
They built up an tweet store which was virtual or external store, first of its kind in India with an inbuilt twitter API that served it up in a neat tweet counter that tracked and displayed the tweets received in real time basis. @Shoppersstop announced give aways for every 850th or 1000th tweet or is picking up lot on different giveaways at different numbers for tweeters tweeting with #SStweetstore.
For example the one displayed in the picture, 409 is the number of tweets remaining for the 800thtweet. The tweeter with the 800th tweet wins the displayed prize – Flying machine headphones! Later, the prize was a gift voucher worth Rs.1000 for the 1000thtweeter. Makes one feel like an individual is in a casino!.The application is smartly built, it tracks and displays every tweet with #SStweetstore. Each and every tweet was counted with a serial wise number allocated to each tweet displayed on the tweet store. As the tweet would reach its bidding point or the number announced the tweeter is declares the winner.
Results
Many marketers started tweeting about the contest, thought leaders and social media enthusiasts tweeted about how they are loving the application and the innovation in the Twitter marketing tactics by the brand.Thousands of people started tweeting with #SSTweetstore. There are about 6,000+ tweets made regarding #sstweetstore. The contest created a “traffic jam” on the specially created microsite around five hours after launch, generated 7,154 tweets within that short time period, and the hashtag was trending for a short while on Trendsmap Mumbai. Most of the tweets were highlighting craziness and excitement with reference to winning or appreciating contest. The contest went pretty viral. There was an observation that #SSTweetstore was becoming a trending topic of the country and that was increasing the chances of more conversations and participation using #SSTweetstore. In 30 hours they recorded 22568 tweets.
Learnings
Shoppers Stop had put their contest very smartly and the application is quite uniquely.The competition was quite timely and thus the involvement of third party decision maker or judge was not much needed in order to announce the winner. This contest was based on probability and luck. The quality of tweet was neglected. That didn’t help brand spread the Word of Mouth about the contestvalue nor it gave any value to the brand .The contest had become so viral and this led to increase in the chance of #SSTweetstore becoming the trending topic. It is very crucial for a brand to encourage some quality tweets and increase the number of giveaways to increase the pace of tweeting. The contest did not involve much efforts for tweeting with any innovation or creativity and Tweeters don’t really have to fake in their tweets. Though Brand should have included tagging of friends, encourage Influencers or hire them to tweet to reach to mass and thus making the topic more conversational. Nevertheless, this strategy of leveraging Twitter to make the brand viral did make the tweeters crazy through #sstweetstore.
Image credits : lighthouseinsights.in, soravjain.com
This is such an innovative campaign! Loved the idea used by Shopper’s Stop.
Yes I totally agree with you Hrucha Mehta. This
campaign is one of the most creative social media marketing strategies.