Commentary
REI's Brilliant #optoutside Campaign Lands On Twitter's Top Trending List
- by Laurie Sullivan , Staff Writer @lauriesullivan, January 7, 2016
Taking chances might not always be the marketer's first choice when laying out a strategy for a holiday campaign. Some want to play it safe, especially for those special events like Valentines Day. But stepping outside the box could become more fruitful than you might think.
For example, remember when the outdoor equipment retailer REI kept its 143 stores closed on Black Friday, giving employees paid time off? The move turned into a marketing campaign that drove the general Thanksgiving shopping conversation on Twitter, with BrandWatch reporting that #OptOutside made it to No. 11 on the Top 15 trend list. The volume of tweets reached 3,723, which included 620 retweets and 24,909,234 impressions.
In November, engagement from desktop computers on REI's site came in at 9.1 million visits, each spending about 5:35 seconds viewing on average 9.68 pages. The bounce rate was 33.05%, according to SimilarWeb
REI experienced a 10% increase in online traffic on Thanksgiving Day, and a 26% rise on Black Friday, per SimilarWeb data.
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Other brands did well during the weekend, too. BrandWatch reports Victoria’s Secret dominated the ranking despite a low volume of tweets for their hashtag #TisTheSecret. With just 63 total tweets in this specific opinion-based conversation, the lingerie brand’s hashtag managed to garner more than 254 million impressions.
The impressions were driven by high numbers of retweets on Victoria’s Secret’s owned Twitter channel. This strategy of executing a relevant and themed social campaign worked well for the brand, driving huge visibility to its followers.
Following Victoria's Secret, Apple, PlayStation, Xbox and Samsung rounded out the top five.
Laurie Sullivan is a writer and editor for MediaPost. You can reach Laurie at lauriesullivan@gmail.com.