Earlier this month we became the first radio station in the UK to sign up to the Twitter promoted Trend service in a deal that saw us launch the digital initiative of our 2012 ‘Faces for Radio’ marketing campaign via Twitter. Using the popular hashtag #nowplaying our presenters asked listeners throughout the day to tweet using #nowplaying, @absoluteradio and also the song playing in a high profile 24-hour cash giveaway for Absolute Radio listeners. As a result Absolute Radio’s online listening went up 7% and nearly all artists organically trended on Twitter during the day!

Some would argue that this campaign was a bold move which was heavily reliant on digital technology, but we understand our audience and know that they’re technically savvy. Absolute Radio’s UK audience of 2.9m ‘reluctant adults’ are tech-savvy Smartphone users. Independent Media Research (EMR) demonstrated that 57% of our London listeners already own a smartphone with another 28% intending to get one. This meant they’d be more likely than other radio listeners to have mobile access to Twitter and be engaged with the concept.

Tweeters entering the competition became brand ambassadors, sharing the live updates of our playlist with all their followers. The vast amount of tweets led to 41 different artists trending on twitter across the UK and over 76,000 mentions which reached 23million tweeters plus more than 100,000 tweets were sent on our #nowplaying trend day.

This meant that we saw bands like the Rolling Stones, Primal Scream, Snow Patrol and Blur trending and replacing the usual suspects of One Direction and Justin Bieber – a very welcome side effect of our campaign, and something that even Twitter had never seen happen before.

Natural discovery benefited the overall awareness of the campaign as Tweeters clicked on the trending columns to explore why certain bands were trending. Their responses sent the campaign viral!

See what NMA are saying about us here