Summary
INDIA'S FIRST LONG-TERM TREND JACKING Entered Twitter with podcasts and left by making people its fan.
Challenge
Our biggest advantage was the abundance of knowledge-based podcasts that were already available on Spotify. With genres like science and tech, history, motivation, personal finance, new languages, we had it all. So, our objective for 2022 was to: a. Make Spotify the default platform for audio learning b. Enable the discovery of self-enhancement titles
Objective
We're living in the golden age of podcasts. From true crime to comedy, the podcast industry is booming. India is already the third-largest podcast-listening market in the world. Every month new shows are launched, and new podcasters come into the limelight. Spotify, the world's most popular music streaming app is also the home to podcasts of different genres. But we aren't alone in this race, every other audio-streaming platform is out there promoting podcasts. So, to become the go-to platform and increase listenership in India, we needed to be disruptive and raise the bar. For that, we realized there was one category of podcasts, no one else was promoting, the knowledge-based podcasts.
Strategy
To communicate about the knowledge-based podcasts our key cohorts were: Knowledge-seekers – India's curious learners who look for information on their subjects of interest online and consume knowledge-based content in multiple mediums. Twitter Users – People who visit Twitter very regularly and follow national trends to keep up with the world and their knowledge about current affairs. Spotify listeners – Active and passive consumers who are listening to podcasts specific genres of podcasts on the app regularly or have listened to at least one podcast episode a month. Then, our strategy was to bring knowledge-based podcasts to learners having real-time conversations on digital. According to research conducted by Twitter, an overwhelming 83% of people on the platform said they believe themselves to be open-minded. One of the unique things about Twitter is that it attracts people with a Discovery Mindset. So, Twitter became our choice of platform for disruption. We partnered with Twitter to set up a specialized dashboard that uses AI and machine learning to bring knowledge-based podcasts to the top: Identifying potential trends – Owing to the custom dashboard's algorithm, we could map conversations that were gaining traction, even before they appeared on Twitter's trending list. Mapping relevant conversations – Before the activity began, we added over 200 podcasts to our dashboard's database. Then, it started mapping trending conversations to relevant podcast shows and episodes. For example: When National Sports Day was trending, we promoted the Indian History Podcast that shared stories of Major Dhyanchand. Tweeting real-time – We didn't have to wait for hours to enter trending conversations, as we fed in a database of keywords, tweets and podcast titles in the dashboard, from the list of over 200 podcasts on our app.
Data
With this technology, we became a part of 53 planned & 13 unplanned conversations (over 27 days) In no time, the dashboard's algorithm learned from our inputs and started recommending podcasts based on other trending conversations, which helped us leverage important learning-based topical days, such as #TeachersDay, #EngineersDay and #InternationalLiteracyDay. Apart from the key topicals, we also had fun with everyday trends on Twitter. For example, when #TuesdayTrivia was trending we shared the ‘Brain Stuff' podcast that talked about what the outer space smells like. For #WeekendVibes the ‘Stuff You Should Know' podcast revealed foods that release happy hormones! The month-long trend jacking activity made Spotify the first brand in India and the second brand globally to master real-time messaging on social media.
Solution
Results
We convinced curious learners of India, that podcasts are a great source of learning and Spotify is their destination. All in all, we exceeded all expectations and went to increase the podcast listenership for Spotify India. Daily active users increased 2x resulting in 70% incremental listeners and Monthly active users went up by 40% With a total 66 tweets (53 planned & 13 unplanned) we received 10.5M reach & 32M impressions!
