6 Strategies on Twitter — Case Studies from The Middle East

tl;dr Strategies from The Middle East The Middle East market is growing very fast, 3.7% of the internet users are from The Middle East, 123,172,132 internet users, which represents 53% of the population penetration

Mobile dominates consumers’ lives Every day!

EVERY DAY; consumers unlock their phones 110 times on average, to watch 1.5B loops on Vine and to Periscope 110 years of live broadcasting and create and consume 500M tweets

Strategies from The Middle East

The Middle East market is growing very fast, 3.7% of the internet users are from The Middle East, 123,172,132 internet users, which represents 53% of the population penetration — I’ve picked couple of case studies executed by pioneering brands and individuals from the region — moreover; here’s couple of statistics of Middle East’s biggest country in terms of Twitter usage

01. Dominate a Trending Hashtag using Promoted Trends

Mecca is the destination of millions of Muslims around the world, when Snapchat announced their “Live” day about #Mecca_Live, it quickly became the talk of the hour for many Muslim countries, In Saudi Arabia, Twitter is HUGE! 33% of tweets going from The Middle East comes from Saudi Arabia. Saudi Arabia is also accountable of 89% of the Arabic tweets globally. So yes, Twitter is really big in KSA!

STC_KSA knew this, and planning for the moment by promoting the #Mecca_live using their account — basically dominated the hashtag —

Mecca moments are usually “emotional” — STC didn’t miss that either, and by promoting an emotional campaign/tweet they dominated the hashtag completely (7.8k retweets — 3k likes)

STC benefited from 15 million impressions & 1.9 million mentions of the Promoted Trend #Mecca_Live

02. Young Audiences are more likely to accept changes

When re-branding — find young, tech-savvy people on twitter and communicate with them in the same way and language they use

MandolinEgypt perfected this using promoted videos

But that didn’t stop there, Mandolin have been in Egyptian market since the 80’s, being one of the generation, i can confirm that it was very popular chocolate bar for us growing up (80’s 90’s), our generation was not left-out — Mandolin Egypt made sure to communicate with that generation too using #MandolinOldies — #مندولين_اولديز

The campaign performed well above the KPIs set. It gained 4,602 followers, 40% over the KPI, at an average cost of $0.20 per follower.

03. Use Emojis to Increase Engagement

use emoji to get more engagement — @Mobily — a leading telecommunication company — used promoted tweets to promote an “emoji tweet” to create a game — Know the Saying using Emojis —and increase brand’s mentions, engagements and followers by asking followers to retweet + follow + mentioning the hashtag

They even used it to promote an offer

04. Lead Your Industry by Creating Your Own Custom Emoji

Lead your industry and connect to people with what matters to them —

حزامك امانك custom emoji

@ToyotaALJ the leading car brand in Saudi Arbia created their Custom Emoji around something really matters to everyone — Safety — The custom emoji represented a local man wearing seat belt with the hashtag your belt is your safety #حزامك_امانك

Toyota ALJ custom Emoji and hashtags

05. Hold “emotional” Contests to Get Organically Trending

Hold contest — and stay trending ORGANICALLY for the most important month in The Middle East — Ramadan — by ting your hashtag to an emotional campaign

@Khalid_BinTalal son of Prince Talal, Saudi Arabian Prince, remained trending for more than 30 days organically!

His son, Alwalid, got sick, so he started the hashtag #مسابقة_الوليد_شفاه_الله

The contest was about asking religions questions, to engage audiences and spread helpful tips for Muslims about their religion. In Islam, what he was doing is called “Sadaqa” as in offering for God to heal his son (the offering is both spreading the right Information about Islam + giving money)
The amount of money he gave on every contest is worth of $6k divided on 2 winners — daily for 30 days

Then he ran a one final big contest #مسابقة_الوليد_شفاه_الله_الكبرى

The prize was 100,000 SAR (around $27,000) — 10 winners!

Here’s how they randomly picked the 1st winner

He did the contest for the whole month of Ramadan (the holy month of Ramadan) and remained trending for the whole month! impressive results!

The translation is of the hashtag is “Contest of Alwaleed (his sons name) may God heal him”

06. Share the Experience — Broadcast Your Events Live

Mercedes Benz Saudi Arabia broadcasted their #MercedesEXP event live to their followers using Periscope showing the skills of Mercedes owners!

Twitter recently allowed viewing of the Periscope’s live broadcasting directly within Twitter itself — which was a great chance for their followers to watch their live broadcasting on the event

Conclusion

Twitter is the most dynamic social network, it’s live and public! Make sure you’re planning for the moment and joining the conversation

Also published on Medium.

About The Author

Amged Osman Avatar

Brand Strategy - MENA I help brands excel on Twitter Speaker ( Twitter for business - Periscope for Business)

Join +4200 Subscribers

Subscribe and we will send you password to our execlusive content.

You can unsubscribe at any time.

@

Leave a reply

Your email address will not be published.