Spotify Wrapped Campaign Wraps Up Social Media
December brings Christmas every year, but on social media, it also brings back the Spotify Wrapped campaign. This campaign has been a success since its creation in 2015, and by improving it year after year, it has been coming back stronger instead of boring its audience. The campaign compiles each user’s musical listening data and gives a summary of it.
It offers a fair exchange of value for usage data for both listeners and artists. In 2019, additionally to the end of year report, the campaign shared a summary of the user’s listening habits over the past decade showing the evolution of their music preference over the past ten years. The summary is presented by Spotify in a sharable format so that one can post it to their own social media accounts and show off their listening results, compare with friends, be reminded of the past and be part of a trend with little to no effort.
Spotify had several goals in mind for this campaign. Even though the main goal was to acquire new individuals to become Spotify users, Spotify has also been growing this campaign year after year because boosting brand engagement is one of the most important social media goals that a brand can have. Spotify Wrapped achieves both of these goals spectacularly by implementing the following strategy. The key to the campaign was to create content that people actively want to share. By offering personalized data along with fun insightful data visualizations, the campaign became extremely sharable and let users do the work of promoting it. By analyzing social listening data and acting upon such, Spotify raised brand awareness and engaged with its audience in an indirect and natural way.
Spotify Wrapped is an extremely inclusive campaign making the target audience anyone who listens to music and is active on social media. That is an incredible pool of people. According to Alex Bodman, Spotigy’s Vice President and Global Executive Creative Director, the goal was to make it relatable to everyone regardless of their music tastes.
Artists also posted their statistics for the year including how many countries their music was played in, how many fans listened, and for how many hours their songs were played. They also included interesting facts associated with the statistics.
People love to associate themselves with influencers and celebrities. This trend allowed people to feel connected to them in sharing the same posts as their favorite stars.
The feeling of belonging and being with a trend is an impulse of social media users. By providing value back to a consumer in exchange for its data that is representative of that individual, he generates the content and encourages product usage organically essentially transforming the majority of Spotify users into unpaid influencers. It also affects the non-Spotify users who are not able to participate. June Sauvaget, Spotify’s Global Head of Consumer and Product Marketing talks about the power of the feeling of not belonging, “This also creates this FOMO effect that happens and that inherently entices new users to consider Spotify, so it’s a flywheel effect.” This fear of missing out created within Apple Music and other music streaming users fostered a feeling of wanting to convert to Spotify not because of the app is better or anything that has to do with the music itself, but simply to be part of a community and being able to participate in its activity.
By implementing this strategy, Spotify achieved its goals. The following KPI’s demonstrate that: audience growth rate, impressions, and amplification rate. The number of followers that cared and shared Spotify’s content with their people illustrates a clear picture of the successful amplification rate achieved by this campaign. Spotify told Forbes that more than sixty million users engage with the in-app story experience that racked up nearly three billion streams from Wrapped playlists. The number of times a post mentioning Spotify Wrapped showed up in a feed made it a viral topic on social media being mentioned in at least 1.2 million posts. The audience growth rate resulting from these was also impressive.
This campaign and its success took over the social media world without it becoming annoying. Since Spotify has been improving it year by year, the anticipation builds, and its users are excited for it. I know I will be sharing mine.
