Every year around the holiday season Honda ramps up their marketing efforts with the Happy Honda Days promotions.

This year they tried a new approach, giving customers a chance to instantly win prizes simply by retweeting Honda’s message. A Honda Accord Touring Model was on offer, as well as one Apple Watch and ten $20 gift cards each day.

In addition, Honda pledged to donate $1 to the Pediatric Brain Tumor Foundation up to $100,000.

The competition drove a lot of engagement, gaining 1221% more tweets than the following month of January. Using Brandwatch Analytics, we have undertaken a campaign analysis of the competition, diving into the data to see what can be learned.

Mention volume

Honda’s #OpenTheCheer campaign certainly drove a lot of Twitter engagement.

The entire month of December shows high numbers, gaining 17,692 tweets on the first day of the competition and maintaining a high level through the month. On only three occasions did the numbers dip below 10,000 tweets per day.

Once the competition had ended, the number of brand mentions dropped off a cliff, returning to fairly low levels.

Before the competition there had been a relatively low number of mentions, with the exception of the 16th and 23rd of November. Diving into the data shows that both spikes were another example of the One Direction effect.

The 16th of November saw the release of the #HondaCivicTour commercial starring the perky pop pups. 96.2% of the 14,084 Tweets that day were retweets of the video announcement.

Knowing they were onto a good thing, Honda released behind the scenes footage a week later, showing 1D’s Liam doing all his own ‘stunts’ for the shoot. Again, the spike of 15,113 tweets (a massive rise from 522 the day before) were dominated by 95.6% retweets of the video.

Gender analysis

Our analysis shows across the industry conversation is dominated by a male audience, with 71% of the tweets coming from male accounts.

During the #HondaCivicTour, Honda’s gender split was 70.2% female, perhaps driven by the 1Direction effect.

The #OpenTheCheer competition was similarly popular among the female audience, gaining 65.2% of the voice (below).

Since the competition ended at the end of December, that figure has exactly reversed, with 65.2% of the conversation now male.

Impressions

Honda replied to each tweet to reveal if the person had won, and while this quickly informed the user if they were lucky, it also increased the amount of conversation and impression earned.

In total, 772,143,101 impressions were gained over the month.

Share of voice

Share of voice is an important part of campaign analysis, and the Honda campaign demonstrates the results you would hope to see with a successful campaign.

If we look at share of voice across 48 automotive brands, we can see large fluctuations across November, December and January.

Honda grabbed almost a quarter of the total conversation in November, driven by the 1Direction faithful. While this was impressive, December’s #OpenTheCheer competition saw a total of 323,568 tweets, doubling Honda’s share of voice to 48%

To show how unusual this was, in January, without 1Direction or the competition to drive numbers, Honda gained just 6% of the conversation.

Entries and winners by hour of the day

The competition rules state that prizes were randomly seeded throughout the day, and once the prize was seeded the next entry received would win that prize. We wondered how this would affect chances of winning.

We segmented valid competition entries (below, left) and compared it to Honda’s Tweets confirming a prize, by hours of the day (below, right).

While the charts follow a similar pattern, the number of winners rises earlier in the day than the number of entries.

Despite the number of entries rising by 6am (UTC) the number of winners during this hour took a big dip, suggesting this was one of the worst times to enter the competition.

At the other end of the scale 5pm was one of the least popular times to enter, but received a disproportionate amount of winners.

Chance of success

Your best chance of winning one of the daily prizes would have been on 8 December, when 9,411 people entered.

This would have given you a 0.01% chance of winning an Apple Watch, and a 0.106% chance of winning a $20 gift card.

The worst day to enter was the first day of the competition, when 17,692 people retweeted Honda’s message. This equates to a 0.0056% chance of winning that day’s smartwatch, and a 0.056% chance of winning a giftcard.

In total we registered 338,874 valid competition entries, meaning the winner of the Honda Accord had a 0.000295% chance of winning the car when they sent the tweet.

Perhaps the real winner though was Honda themselves, along with the Pediatric Brain Tumor Foundation.

Our analysis of the campaign shows it was an undoubted success when it came to driving audience engagement and increasing Honda’s share of voice.

Honda also managed to engage a large number of female fans, bringing a section of the audience into the conversation that is normally underrepresented.

The competition drove hundreds of millions of impressions, with over 10,000 tweets almost every day for the entire month of December.

Campaign analysis is just one of the benefits that Brandwatch Analytics can bring to your enterprise. To discover the other uses, and see for yourself the power of enterprise social intelligence, get in touch with us for a free demo.