The Hangover sees 4,000% social growth
Next time someone asks you why everyone is freaking out over social media – don’t tell them about the Iran crisis, clue them in on The Hangover…the highest grossing R-rated comedy of all time. How did they achieve this feat? I would argue that social media (particularly the Facebook platform) had a little something to do with it. As you can see in the numbers below, the beginning of June started off typical with a little over 1,000 fan interactions per post, and ultimately sky-rocketed to over 40,000 fan interactions in a matter of 15 days! If that isn’t ROI, I don’t know what is…
This explosive growth can be directly attributed to two things: 1) The enormous media budget this movie had behind it, and 2) The exponential networking power of social media – specifically Facebook’s news feed. I guarantee you people were not seeing TV commercials for this movie and then rushing to their computers to hurry up and become fans of this movie… no, it was much more organic than that…
These fans (now approaching 2 million) were prompted by their friends, co-workers, family members, neighbors, and old high school friends. The Facebook Fan page for The Hangover did right what over fan pages do wrong – they enabled users to post their actions to their news feed… subsequently alerting their entire network of their actions. It is safe to argue that with this tactic alone The Hangover probably received well over 10,000,000 “free” digital impressions (or $10-20k in free digital media @ $1-2 CPMs) – and that is a safe guesstimate…
The moral of the story: Anyone can make a fan page – but is your brand man enough to leave the power of exponential sharing and growth in the hands of your humble fans? Only you can answer that…
-Kevin Planovsky
