ADV231 – Techniques and Strategies for Implementing a Social Media Campaign
Airbnb was first to start the home-sharing rental business (Mildenhall, 2017), and has been so successful, it has become a synonym for holiday rentals. The brand has a fun, bright and inviting tone of voice across its social medias. The target market for their spring 2016 campaign ‘#LiveThere’ took a new direction including families as well as their normal, millennials. (Ghosh, 2016)
The campaign was created to run alongside and advertise the release of an update for their website and app with a new range of features ‘experiences’, ‘guidebooks’ and a bespoke matching function to give the customer an experience outside of the tourist chaos and into what it is like to live like a local. To promote these new features, agency TBWA/Chiat/Day, created the largest global brand campaign Airbnb had ever attempted with :15, :30 and :60 second TV spots as well as digital, out-of-home and print advertisements. (Airbnb, 2016) Obviously for this essay, I will be focussing on the digital executions of this campaign.
They released their TV ad ‘Don’t Go There. Stay There.” on the 19th April on Youtube (Airbnb, 2016) and on TV, with the main narrative centring around the idea of not doing the ordinary when on holiday, and statistics show that this is a new emerging desire from tourists. 86% of its users say they have chosen the platform because they want to experience the destination away from busy areas (Richards, 2016), only 13% wanting to mainly take part in tourist activities, 23% mainly wanting to ‘live like a local’ and 55% wanting to combine the two. (Airbnb, 2016) These statistics show that Airbnb is addressing this weak place in the travel market.
Starting on their Twitter, they released four gifs on Tuesday 19th April 2016. The first did not highlight the campaign, but they all shared the same style of gif and tone of voice in the text. The three to do with the campaign are:
‘The no.1 reason why people travel on Airbnb? To live like a local. #LiveThere’,
‘Introducing “Matching”: Connecting the right guest to the right host. #LiveThere airbnb.com/livethere’ and
‘Meet Guidebooks: 3 million local tips from hosts that actually #LiveThere airbnb.com/livethere’
All posted within 7 minutes of each other to the official Airbnb twitter page, Sprout Social tells us that this was a medium optimum time to post to Twitter comparing 6pm on a Tuesday to 12pm on a Thursday being the optimum. (Alex, 2017)
As soon as one minute later, they begin re-tweeting articles from TechCrunch, Mashable and TWN. This proof from other credible sources gives a possible customer validation on the brand.
According to Google Trends, Airbnb’s most active days that week was the Monday and the Tuesday (see image 1) coming in at a close second. Choosing maybe to begin the campaign on the Monday at 12pm would have been more effective than the 18:10 – 18:17 post schedule they used on the Tuesday (Airbnb, 2016). Three hours later at 20:59 they post the shortest edit of their TV ad. This received 930 likes (as of 11.11.2017), a vast improvement to the 610 likes the four initial gif posts starting off the campaign combined. At 21:44 they are interacting with bloggers with ‘@ replies’ associating the #LiveThere with their tweets. This piggy backing on the bloggers social means that Airbnb is spreading the hashtag as well as the brand with the followers of the blogger.. (Airbnb Twitter, 2016)
The following few days, the feed continues to promote the #LiveThere by retweeting articles and bloggers as well as encouraging interaction through a pole. They also tweet about topical events such as National Earth Day with tweets relevant to Airbnb such as ‘89% of European and 61% of American hosts recycle. #EarthDay airbnb.co/Urq35K’, as well as current news posts about the refugee crisis in Europe and how Airbnb is helping the cause. (Airbnb Twitter, 2016) The brand most likely uses a software that schedules posts across all its social media channels such as Buffer, which makes planning and posting content extremely easy, however, commenting on current events such as these means having to disrupt the software manually, as addressing these topics and including emotional, sympathetic topical tweets like this improves brand likeability and sense of humanity with the consumer. From then on, tweets about the campaign are sporadic, a tweet and a few re-tweets on the 28th to 2nd May, then a current tweet on 4th May: ‘After a long day of travelling the galaxy, it’s nice to come home. #MayThe4thBeWithYou #LiveThere’ with a video in Airbnb’s style of a polaroid of a shot of Tatooine (Star Wars reference) to link back to the print executions. (Airbnb Twitter, 2016) This combination of campaign line and national days with a humours tone increases brand likeability with a humorous tone.
On the same date, their Instagram started to post the modern style photography inspired images with the hashtag ‘#LiveThere’ also, keeping up with the brand’s aesthetically pleasing and trendy atmosphere which are more likely to be liked, commented and shared. The first three posts include stories of local barber shops, juice bars and artists all highlighting the little bit of unique culture that business brings to the community. Then a post includes a typical activity to do in Paris which is their famous cafés that inspires you to find ‘your café’ and posts about the actual hosts of certain locations with a link in the bio to a blog post about that certain host. All these posts pull out of you a little bit of familiarity in the community that you are just visiting, for example, a post showing the front of a quaint pale pink town house in Paris with a dog perched outside with the caption: ‘You haven’t lived in Paris until you’ve met Fido and scratched his belly. #LiveThere’. Scientific America states that content such as this provokes a strong emotion like happiness, awe and nostalgia are more likely to be shared and take off online. (Jones, Milkman & Berger, 2015) This particular post hits on a human truth that you can refer back to in your life to a particular dog you might see every morning on the way to work and stroke as you pass by, evoking a positive emotion within the audience and increasing probability of likes and shares.
There are multiple posts similar to this, but you aren’t overwhelmed by the campaign or the hash-tag as there are little stories called ‘Host Stories’ about certain hosts and their community spread over two or three posts carefully interjected into the Instagram feed to not overwhelm the consumer and let the advertising campaign become more native. Promoting certain hosts within your own brand means you are using the strategy of ego baiting but keeping it within the company meaning you have this enclosed circle of promoting each other, solidifying buyer confidence in the brand and not including other competitors in the process, keeping purchases within Airbnb. The campaign becomes less frequent, about once a week when it reaches October and the end of the popular holiday season before ending in November. (Airbnb Instagram, 2016)
According to Chief Marketer Jonathan Mildenhall, the objective of the campaign was to increase global awareness and consideration with travellers from all over the globe with a single message that resonates. The effect of the campaign in France, the US and South Korea allowed Airbnb to exceed their annual goals mid-year with a 17% shifted awareness away from US competitors. (Mildenhall, 2017) The campaign has been its most successful in the brands existence. (Effie, 2017)
The combination of Airbnb providing a service that speaks to a large untapped portion of the travel market which is living like a local and giving travellers the ability to do so, combined with a campaign that speaks to this human truth and executions completed in a stylised way that appeals to both sectors of their target market is how they came up with such a successful campaign.