Social Media Monitoring Project Part 1

What’s the most important holiday in February? In many western countries, the answer is Valentine's day. However, if you ask this question to your Chinese friends, their answer will be Lunar New Year (the Chinese New Year). Lunar New Year is the biggest festival of the entire year in China. Many Asian countries like South Korea, Thailand, and Singapore also celebrate this festival. For many companies, Lunar New Year is a great chance to develop more consumers in Asia and to build a positive brand reputation among the groundswell. Today, we are going to talk about Overwatch and its 2018 Lunar New Year Campaign. Before we start the analysis of Overwatch’s performance on social media, let’s learn some background information about the company and its social media platforms.

Brief introduction of Overwatch
Overwatch is a team-based multiplayer online shooter video game. It was developed and published by Blizzard Entertainment in May 2016. The game quickly became popular all over the world. According to the official data, it has more than 35 millions of players all over the world today.

Social Media Platforms
As a video game company, Overwatch used three social media platforms to conduct their campaign: Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube. On Twitter, the official account of Overwatch has 120K tweets, 7,211 likes, and 2.88M followers. On Facebook, Overwatch has more than 3 millions followers, and the data also shows that about 3.3 millions of people like the Facebook page of Overwatch. The official account of Overwatch on YouTube is PlayOverwatch, and it has 2.2M subscribers.
As we can see above, Overwatch has a large number of followers and fans on social media. These numbers indicate that Overwatch could be very influential if the company starts a campaign on social media.

Social Media Performance
Now, let’s have a look at details about Overwatch’s performance on social Media by analyzing their  Lunar New Year campaign.

The official name of this campaign is the year of the dog. The campaign includes two parts. The first part is updating the game in many aspects like their maps, skins, and rewards. These changes create an atmosphere of celebrating Lunar New Year which appeals to the Asian players who celebrate it. The second part is leading discussions on social media about the game, and this is what our social media monitor will focus on.

Twitter:
On February 8th, the official Twitter account of Overwatch posted a video of these new updates as the beginning of their campaign. The post got about 1.8k comments, 18k retweets, and 40k likes. They also created a hashtag for the event which helped to spread the news.

In the following days, Overwatch posted several tweets related to the game’s event and the year of the dog. As we can see in these screenshots below, these tweets got many likes and retweets. Although many of their tweets got a high level of likes and retweets, the amount of responses varied.

When we look at these responses on Twitter, we can see that Overwatch actively interacted with their followers. They answered many followers' questions, and they even used memes to reply followers. This is smart because it makes the company sound more friendly to consumers. They responded to 2 to 3 people under each tweet on average. And the followers' responses also revealed why sometimes the number of comments is low—because their tweets seem to be unrelated to the game, and followers cannot understand it and do not respond to it.

Facebook
On February 8th, the official Facebook page of Overwatch also posted the same campaign video. The post got 18k likes. Similar to what they did on Twitter, Overwatch also posted a series of posts related to the event on the Facebook page, and received many responses. When we look at the comment section, we can also see that Overwatch interacted with followers frequently. Unlike what they did on Twitter (leading discussions about the topic), Overwatch shared more photos about the game.

YouTube
On YouTube, Overwatch only put up the campaign video and an interview of the game director discussing game updates. The two videos have more than 900k views each, which indicates that the videos are popular. Unlike the previous two platforms, on YouTube, Overwatch did not reply the comments under the videos.

Google Trends Analytics
First, let’s have a look at the 30-day-trend. As we can see in the screenshot, there is a peak of web searches on February 8th, which is the day they started the campaign and released the updates for it. It means that the campaign did work, and it successfully created a trend on social media.

For the seven-day-trend, we can find that the trend regularly reached a peak of web searches around 6 p.m. to 8 p.m. No apparent evidence shows that these peaks are related to the campaign activities on social media. But a logical conclusion for the peak is that people get off work around this time and go on social media to see Overwatch's posts.

Social Mentions Analytics

One week later after Overwatch launched their campaign, the data shows positive social mentions. The strength is 73% which indicates that Overwatch was frequently discussed during that week. The sentiment is 3:1, which means that the positive responses about Overwatch are more than the negative ones. The passion is 13%, and we can see it is a low score. In this case, the low score of passion indicates that mentions were written by several different authors. It is a good sign that there could be various people talking about Overwatch on social media. And the reach is 62% which means that the topic of Overwatch spread over a large range.

Two weeks later, after Overwatch launched the campaign, the data shows a continuation of positive trends. It’s interesting to see that the score of sentiment has a significant increase. The scores of strength, reach, and passion are consistent with the previous week. Many reasons may lead to the rise of positive responses. We may assume that with the campaign going on, more people have joined the game’s event and have enjoyed the game. Or we can also assume that the campaign brought too many people to the game in the first week, and that the game servers could not hold them and crashed. This might have created a bad game experience for the players at the beginning. However, after fixing the bugs, all players might have returned to the game. This could be a reason for the higher score in sentiment.

Conclusions:

In the campaign of Lunar New Year, Overwatch used Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube to interact with their customers. Overwatch released several significant updates in the game aligned with Lunar New Year. At the same time, they led discussions about the topic on social media.

According to the data from Google trends and social mentions, Overwatch's use of social media has influenced a large number of people and successfully created a trend.