How Spotify Created a Social Media Phenomenon

Social media campaigns are one of the most important parts in increasing brand awareness. Setting goals is the first part in any campaign. These goals will hopefully drive traffic to your brand, and encourage your audience to share your brand’s content. Ultimately, this will allow for your brand to increase revenue and boost brand engagement.

Spotify Wrapped has become a “global phenomenon” every December, however, this campaign has evolved over the past few years. It was debuted in 2015 and started off by showing user’s their top songs and genres. A year after that, it began to include personalized end-of-year playlists and was branded as “Wrapped,” which became a campaign. Finally, in 2017, Spotify began to share year-end data with their users, which essentially compiled their most listened to songs, artists, and albums in a personalized manner.

The campaign was a success which led to their 2019 campaign that shared a summary of the user’s listening habits over the past decade. This showed each user how their music preferences had evolved in the past ten years. The summary snapshots were in the perfect format for users to screenshot, and ultimately share across all social media platforms like Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram.

I personally remember being an active part of the campaign, and seeing so many of my Instagram, Twitter, and Facebook friends participate in #SpotifyWrapped. I remember it feeling incredibly necessary to share the summary snapshot with my followers. “The irresistible nostalgia combined with the fun of personalized data made for an incredibly sharable campaign, which is why your feeds were probably dominated by #SpotifyWrapped posts in December” (Cyca, 2020). It was a fun way to share personal interests with my followers, and compare these interests with those of my friends. In hindsight, I think there were a few goals that Spotify had in mind when rolling out this campaign in 2019.

When I look back at this campaign, I automatically think this was the perfect way for Spotify to get thousands and millions of users to fundamentally provide their brand with “free marketing.” I believe Spotify planned this campaign with the main goal being to get new individuals to become Spotify users. However, the brand engagement that Spotify had with their audience is like nothing I have ever seen, and per Social Media Today, boosting brand engagement is the most important social media goal that a brand can have. The #SpotifyWrapped campaign felt like a community of people who all supported and engaged with the brand in an exciting and never-before-seen way.

I think this campaign did a spectacular job in achieving this perceived goal of gaining new users. In fact, “In the first week after Spotify Wrapped 2019 went live earlier this month, Spotify told Forbes, more than 60 million users engaged with the in-app story experience that racked up nearly 3 billion streams from Wrapped playlists” (Swant, 2019). It also was a tremendous hit across all social media platforms, and was mentioned in at least 1.2 million Twitter posts during that period of time. I personally feel that it made Apple Music listeners a bit jealous because their musical history wasn’t accounted for in the same way. This could be seen as an example where “FOMO” comes into play, and could have possibly had individuals make the switch from Apple Music over to Spotify.

Key performance indicators are important for brands to know whether they are on track with their goals. KPI’s allow brands to understand if their strategies need to be adjusted. As far as the key performance indicators go for Spotify, I think the best fit ones for their campaign would be impressions, audience growth rate, and amplification rate. Impressions are the number of times you showed up in a feed. We know from the data above that Spotify was plastered all over social media in December during the #SpotifyWrapped campaign. Seeing that the campaign was so successful, I would assume that the audience growth rate also increased. The amplification rate is how your followers care and share your content with people. Considering the above examples, we know that Spotify’s audience was certainly sharing their content with their followers.

I think Spotify’s Wrapped campaign is a great example of how social media goals can have a tremendous impact on a brand. I feel as if the brand has grown in the past few years, and as a personal user of Spotify, I hope to continue supporting an overall wonderful brand.

Sources:

Cyca, M. (2020, August 19). 7 of the Best Social Media Campaigns (And What You Can Learn From Them). Retrieved September 16, 2020, from https://blog.hootsuite.com/social-media-campaign-strategy/

Sentance, R. (2018, November 30). The genius of Spotify Wrapped, the only marketing campaign I add to my calendar. Retrieved September 16, 2020, from https://econsultancy.com/spotify-2018-wrapped-personalised-data/

Swant, M. (2019, December 17). Spotify Rolls Out New ‘Wrapped’ Campaign To Help Users Remember Their Decade Of Music. Retrieved September 16, 2020, from https://www.forbes.com/sites/martyswant/2019/12/17/spotify-rolls-out-new-wrapped-campaign-help-users-remember-their-decade-of-music/