Integrating Twitter and Facebook Live Covers for Dynamic Live Updates
By
Nairrit Das
We’ve all heard about Live Covers and how people are now experimenting with Facebook Live Covers in an attempt to make it dynamic and real time.Following the wind, we too experimented with the concept, but what we didn’t know is that our idea would turn out to be the first of its kind. It gave us 300+ tweets with more than 1 million impressions and an audience reach out of 100,000+ followers, all in just three hours.
Keeping Live Cover as a base, we ideated on a possibility: if we could integrate an offline event and the number of tweets about it to dynamically change the Facebook cover page of the very brand.
Interesting, isn’t it? Ok! Here’s a little flashback: A few weeks ago we were heads down on our writing pads and running the pencils through our fingers. This time the brief was to propel an offline activity to gain good digital mileage, especially on the social networks.The idea of integrating Facebook Cover and Twitter sounded interesting and all that was needed was to put the right building blocks in place to get it up and running. “When I first heard the idea from my social team, I was a little skeptical on its successful implementation,” says Rahul Marwah, Vice President, of Interactive Avenues. “Though the concept was amazing, integrating the two platforms all at one go and making it work sounded tough. But, seeing the team’s confidence, I let them go ahead with their experiment,” Marwah added.
For this project we got in touch with a company based out of France called Le Grand Studios. We shared our concept with them. Like us, they too were pretty excited on the idea and opted to be on board as the developing team.
“We are very happy to announce that we worked with Interactive Avenues for their client Fiama Di Wills to unveil world’s first Facebook Cover, dynamically updated depending on a specific number of tweets, which was the first dynamic Facebook Cover as well in India. The number of tweets including a specific hashtag during the event progressively revealed, in 12 steps, the six trendsetting hairstyles of the upcoming season,” says Steve Oziel, Chief Technical Officer, Le Grand Studio.
With all teams working in full capacity, we stumbled upon a question: What could be our content for the Live Cover? Should it be photos or should it be something else?
We went back to our ideating stage to see if we could pick up something from the brief and we did. We came up with a plan to create the cover images with a collection of pictures showing what the event was going to unveil. This allowed the brand to unveil its hair trends of the season through live tweeting about the event, which changed the cover image of the Fiama Di Wills Facebook page—live.
While working on this project, we kept pushing ourselves, wondering, “Can we do more?” Now we thought, wouldn’t it be great if this activity could trend in India? Again, back to ideation: how to make it trend? Simple. We invited a mixed section of bloggers, photographers and social celebrities alike to take part in the launch, to experience a new concept as it unveiled.September 29, 2012, the day of the event, we launched the campaign with high hopes. We asked the invitees to tweet with the hashtag #Fiamafabhair as a new look was unveiled. And what a start—tweets started to pour in. People were not only interested in unveiling the looks on the FB cover, but were also excited to see what the new looks were.
This helped us to strike a balance between the offline and digital spaces. Neither of them overshadowed the other. And as soon as the tweets crossed the 15 mark, the cover image of Fiama’s Facebook page was automatically updated with the latest look.
At the end of the show we had successfully delivered the concept of changing the Facebook Cover Page using tweets, and became the first to do so.
Nairrit Das has more than 10 years of experience and has done his Masters in Journalism from University of Ulster, Northern Ireland, UK and is a Certified NCTJ (National Council for the Training of Journalists) & BJTC (Broadcast Journalist Training Council). In the start of his career, Nairrit worked with Mudra Communications, SUN Magazine and a radio channel called 107.8 Power FM. He has also been associated with Hindustan Times, Times of India, NDTV and BBC. He is currently the Head of Social Media for Interactive Avenues, a digital firm based out of India. He is also a guitarist and actively plays with a band called Ocean Blues.
