Case Study: Lady Gaga raises engagement rates

Record label Interscope Records promotes a Tweet from Lady Gaga’s Twitter account; achieves 30% engagement rate for her Born This Way album launch

The Challenge

As one of the top music labels, Interscope Records has access to some of the most powerful voices on Twitter with its roster of artists including Black Eyed Peas, Eminem and Lady Gaga. The record label uses its own Twitter account to promote its talent but for Lady Gaga’s new album, Interscope wanted to drive music downloads and video views in a way that leveraged her tremendous influence and reach.

The Solution

In the month leading up to Lady Gaga’s Born This Way album launch, Interscope used Promoted Tweets in search with its Twitter handle, @Interscope, to tease the album. The record label ran 18 Promoted Tweets to maintain a steady presence in front of its audience. The Promoted Tweets all had a clear call to action that drove users to download the song, retweet the message or to watch a video.

On the day of the album release, Interscope promoted a Tweet from Lady Gaga to announce its launch. Twitter account holders can give permission to other accounts to promote their Tweets, which allows advertisers to leverage another person’s or brand’s influence to broadcast their message. (i.e. @ladygaga gave permission to @interscope to use her organic Tweet as a Promoted Tweet from its account).

In a separate campaign several weeks later, Interscope also drove views to Lady Gaga’s Yoü and I music video using a Promoted Tweet from her account. To maximize buzz, the company simultaneously promoted a Tweet from its own @Interscope Twitter account.

The Results

“We had exponentially higher engagement rates for both the Promoted Tweets from our own account and from Lady Gaga’s account compared to benchmarks for other types of online advertising,” says Chris Mortimer, Director CRM & Social Media at Interscope Records.

“The Born This Way album launch Tweet from Lady Gaga’s account may have expectantly performed better than the Tweets that preceded it because it occurred on the day of the release; however, when we simultaneously ran the two types of Promoted Tweets for Yoü and I, the Promoted Tweet from Lady Gaga also performed significantly better,” explains Mortimer.

BORN THIS WAY CAMPAIGN

• Promoted Tweet from Lady Gaga: 30% engagement rate, 110,881 clicks
• Promoted Tweets from Interscope (18 Tweets overall): 12% engagement rate, 157,452 clicks

YOÜ AND I CAMPAIGN

• Promoted Tweet from Lady Gaga 24% engagement rate, 31,853 clicks
• Promoted Tweet from Interscope: 14.5% engagement rate, 16,455 clicks

“We’ve also used Promoted Tweets from our other artists’ accounts and have experienced similar results,” says Mortimer. “Leveraging an influential figure to help promote your message can sometimes be a high effort and logistical challenge but it is much easier to do it on Twitter — we just had to get their permission to promote their Tweets. On Twitter, it is also much easier to react quickly or to be proactive in broadcasting real-time and relevant messages — many of our artists already have an installed base of millions of followers who are receptive to that type of content.”

Tagged Twitter; Social Media; Case Study