The GDR Retweet Challenge Review

We recently launched our Retweet Challenge for Sport Relief.  As well as raising money for charity, our aim was to demonstrate the power of Twitter and its huge potential within the pharmaceutical world. Here’s how we did it.

We launched our first ‘tweet’ at 2pm on Tuesday 16th March with the words; “The Grace Digital Relations Retweet Challenge: Exercise your thumbs for Sport Relief here: http://is.gd/aSM6i please RT.”  This link took visitors to a simple landing page that pledged a penny a click donation, made by Grace DR to Sport Relief.

By the end of the first day, 358 people had visited the link.  Wanting to exploit the growing volume of traffic, we added a Twitter 'follow us' button to the landing page and by the end of the day, our following doubled.  We also gave a link to Sport Relief itself and showed a constant counter of the donation amount.

The next day we released variously worded tweets, reminding our followers of the purpose of the challenge and by the end of Wednesday, numbers had reached an impressive 732 unique visitors.  

As the week progressed and Sport Relief increasingly dominated TV and airwaves, things really took off on Twitter.  At 10.15am on Thursday, BBC Radio 1 DJ Scott Mills ‘retweeted’ our link to his 96,234 followers.  The ‘Mills Effect’ meant that by the end of the day we had added an incredible 29,894 visitors to our site. 

From that one tweet, we later managed to attract the attention of other high-profile tweeters including Emma Freud, Chris Evans, Lorraine Kelly, Simon Mayo, Kirstie Allsopp and Claudia Winkleman.  The following day – Friday – another 32,513 people clicked through to our site. 

At the time of writing this article (just 8 days since our first tweet) we have seen a combined total of 86,195 visitors click on our link.  That is £861.95 accumulated for Sport Relief, in just 7 days. Which we doubled for the sake of charity.  Below is the final donation page, which we're really proud of.

And we only launched our campaign on Twitter.

Just think what that sort of power could potentially do for your product.

Imagine what would be possible if you made more of what social media has to offer. 

Consider the facts:

If Facebook were a country it would have the world’s 4th largest population between the United States and Indonesia.

The fastest growing segment on Facebook is 55-65 year-old females.

The second largest search engine in the world is YouTube, expected to be number one in 6 months.

There are over 200,000,000 Blogs. 54% of them are updated daily. 34% of bloggers post opinions about products & brands.

78% of consumers trust peer recommendations.  Only 14% trust advertisements.

The Retweet Challenge gives an insight into the power of social media.  Why not let us help you harness that power for one of your brands?

Written by Chris Wilson (@clutterances) 

Thank you to Erik Qualman (@equalman) for the statistics

Introducing....Grace Digital Relations!

The Grace Digital Relations blog is up and running, and this is it.  Not all of it, obviously, but the adventure begins here.  We are the digital arm of Grace Agency, a healthcare communications agency based in the UK.  We are fully aware that the nature of communicating is changing, and that the pharma world is considered by some to be a long way behind many other industries.  Our aim is to help bring it into the new era, the digital era.  To find out more about Grace Agency, please visit www.graceagency.co.uk                 

We have a strong combination of pharma and healthcare knowledge and innovative creative minds and have already generated many successful campaigns.  This blog is designed to update anyone who may be interested on our thoughts about the industry, and our take on current, relevant, affairs.  We will look to discuss anything that interests us with regards to the healthcare and pharmaceutical industry, but also the wider world of digital marketing and what the online marketplace can do for business. 

The growth of social media has been nothing short of incredible and seems not to be slowing down.  In fact, numbers are steadily growing as more and more people are realizing it is not a ‘fad’ but a genuinely important means of networking and promotion.  There are many restrictions, many taboos and many unanswerable questions, but there is a world of opportunity out there that the healthcare industry is just waiting to conquer, just as we are.

Our blog will attempt to offer advice, help, insight, reviews and discussion on a variety of healthcare and digital related subjects.  We welcome all comments, whether they agree, or disagree with us.  However, we retain the right to remove any contribution that we consider to be distasteful or inappropriate. 

Opponents of the power of social media suggest there is little evidence to support the claims that one can reach a potentially huge audience.  We decided to put this to the test using Twitter, and we have proof that will silence the doubters.

If you are a tweeter - if you’re not, perhaps you should be? - follow us at @gracedigi and find out when the evidence is released.

If not, just come back here soon to find out what we're on about, exciting isn't it?

Written by Chris Wilson (@clutterances)