History TV 18's Greatest Indian campaign a trendsetter on Twitter

The Greatest Indian campaign was launched on social media platforms on 4th June, 2012, 10 hours before the show launched on television primarily to influence target audience on Twitter. The campaign has revealed various interesting findings, proving the credibility of Twitter as a powerful tool for marketers. Interestingly, the vote count for the greatest Indian reached the 10 k mark even before the show launched on television.

 

There were prominent influencers on twitter, and their subsequent discussion about the initiative with hashtags #TGI and #TheGreatestIndian who rooted for their greats and asked their ‘followers’ to vote for them. Thus, the two hashtags were trending on Twitter for a day.

 

The total count of unique votes reached 170000 plus mark within one week since the voting started, approaching the 2 million voting mark which is considered immensely successful .

 

India has always been identified as a cricket and Bollywood crazy nation, however unexpectedly Dr. B R Ambedkar led the poll with a huge margin followed by names like Kanshi Ram, A B Vajpayee. These names are much ahead of popular and current sensations like Sachin Tendulkar, Amitabh Bachchan.

 

The initiative has also led to fascinating development on Facebook and creation of fan pages, rooting for their icons. Within a week since the campaign, fans rooting for B R Ambedkar have created pages and have acquired an estimable number of fan base and likes.

 

Sangeetha Aiyer- General Manager-Marketing History TV18, said, “The Greatest Indian campaign recently reached an inflection point- we crossed an unprecedented 3 million votes in just ten days! The figure seems all the more impressive when put in perspective especially since the campaign has had minimal exposures & spends apart from in-house promotion and social media. The driver has been a stellar performance on Twitter. Great conversational content and early launch on Twitter have worked favourably for the campaign. What worked for us, as we had expected, was the targeting of influencers through the trending on Twitter. This created a ripple effect across board with key fan clubs getting active and taking ownership of the vote count for individual nominees. What we did not expect was the sheer volumes and the monumental scale and numbers. The success of TheGreatestIndian is a case study on effective use of social media."