Spotify Wrapped and why it’s authentic - Triggers

 

Description

How Spotify uses data in their social media strategy to turn customers into advocates, generate leads and grow their brand.

Reverse Series: How Spotify uses data in their social media strategy to turn customers into advocates, generate leads and grow their brand.

The Reverse Series is where we select ideas that could’ve been easily sparked by our Triggers Cards. One case study and one card. 

We recently launched our Social Media Strategy Deck and as the end of year is slowly coming we wanted to talk about Spotify’s popular social media campaign strategy: Wrapped. This campaign happens every year around December and the base of it is data. In summary, they use their users' information to create personalised data visualizations to share with their followers and this campaign has proved to grow its effectiveness every year.

Today we will be talking about

  • Impact of the campaign

  • Why it was successful

  • Triggers Card time

  • Conclusions

The impact of the campaign

This content is shared on a massive level and floods all social media channels during that time in an organic way. We honestly haven't seen a branded content campaign that has had this amount of exposure on social media… 


This campaign manages to increase app downloads significantly every year. According to data from 2020 alone they peaked in the first week of December where they increased downloads in the US by 20%, India by 19% and Russia by 16% (Source: Apptopia) proving the success of the campaign.

Why it was successful 

It’s safe to say that the base for this campaign is data. We all know all companies collect it and record our every single action: when we click on something, how much time we’ve hovered, what we purchased and how long we’ve taken to do so… The best part is that the large majority of people are genuinely worried about data practices, however, in this case, the users didn’t and don’t care. 

Knowing the target audience had a whole lot to do with this - mainly Millennials and Gen Z. According to Kayla Sredni, Strategist at R/GA: “Privacy is less of a concern for this generation because they expect and demand customization and personalization.” We believe they actually viewed this campaign as a gift, a gift of transparency. 


On the other hand, these generations have a constant need to show how unique they are on their online platforms and comparing yourself with others is part of human nature after all. As a result, these posts were massively shared across all social media platforms like Twitter, Facebook and Instagram.

Spotify manages to create a sense of competition and achievement for their users. They achieve this amount of success creating content that people actively want to share. 

Ideation Cards time

When we are creating new decks we analyse great ideas. In this Reverse series this is the part where we showcase a card that would have sparked this amazing idea. What card in our deck could fit in this case study?

Card number 28: What if you were more authentic? This about showing parts of you that your audience doesn’t normally see. Stay true to yourself by sharing honest content.

We believe that in some types of services data collection the fact that data is collected is often forgotten due to it’s perfect integration. You don’t listen to music and necessarily think about how they are collecting your data. This campaign really shows how modern and smart they are about their business and brand. They create content that people actively want to share, staying authentic to what they do: music and data.

Conclusion

Let’s remark the importance of not only being in touch with social media trends but general consumer behaviour trends is key to success. The best time to post on social media doesn’t really matter when your campaign revolves around everyone posting your content all the time. All in all, great idea, impeccable execution. 

Want to come up with out-of-box social media campaign ideas? Maybe you could try our deck?

Oh wait, do you already have the deck? Here is a social media strategy template that can help in your next strategy ideation session!

One more thing… We actually do have a Spotify channel where we post playlist that ignite more productive sessions to use individually or with your team.

 
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