Building opt-in database with facebook activities

Manchester City player of the month vote on facebook

Manchester City and Etihad Airways decided to let their fans vote for the player of the month. The campaign had some pretty interesting results. Let´s take a closer look at the campaign.

Campaign goal:

• E-mail newsletter sign-ups for  Manchester City 
• E-mail newsletter sign-ups for Etihad Airways
• General fan engagement

Campaign creation:
As a incentive for the campaign Manchester City teamed up with their main sponsor - Etihad Airways. One UK winner was invited to the Manchester City FC training ground to present the award to the City player and pose the opening question of their choice in an exclusive mcfc.co.uk video interview. One overseas voters won a personal message from the winning City player.

Campaign Period: 1.October -7. October.

The campaign itself was created with the Fanbooster widgets Tab-in-tab with picture, multi editor, registration and comment.

More than 70 % signups to e-mail newsletter

The campaign created the following results

• A lot of votes (we are not allowed to tell you how many, but promise it was a lot)
• 69,8 % of the participants signed up for Manchester City newsletter 
• 67,0 % of the participants signed up for Ethaid newsletter 

The Facebook app was a great way of connecting to our global fan base. 

We were delighted with the results from the vote and the level of sign-ups we achieved.

Andrew Gilligan 

(Data & Insights Manager, Manchester City Football Club)

Break-down of the campaign

Some interesting statistics from the campaign includes:

Total like growth doubled during the campaign

• Two weeks before the campaign: 17957
• One week before the campaign: 25269
• During the campaign: 48256

Entries peaking at day 2

Over 70 % of users/voters chose to sign up for City email and Offers from Etihad Airways:

As with most campaigns on Facebook the first three days are usually the most active days - and this was the results in this campaign also with the entry peak hitting on day 2 with 56% out of the total amount of unique votes.

Effect of comment field

Manchester City added a Facebook Comment field to enable the users to debate, promote and share their opinion with others and thus creating a viral effect.

The application got 960 comments spreading the story with another 19.820 impressions.

Young adults most involved

With the Fanbooster app insights we are also able to determine which demographic was the most active in this campaign.

Key learnings

It is always difficult to generalize based on only one case, but there are some interesting aspects with this case:

• Fans were willing to sign-up to the newsletter from both Manchester City and the sponsor Ethiad.  This may indicate participating in a quiz/vote that has a good price or with a brand you are fan of, dramatically increases the willingness to sign up for a newsletter. 
• The difference between sign-ups to Manchester City and Ethiad was just a fraction (2,8%). This may indicate that what you sign up for after a quiz/vote is less important than the content in the quiz.
• Using interaction and involvement on Facebook is a pretty nice way of increasing your opt-in database. If done right.

But, yeah. This is one case only and Facebook only. But the results are pretty cool anyway and gives us inspiration to dig more into this and other cases.

What do you think we can learn from this case? What other kind of data would you like to know about this or similar cases?