The Urn Returns Commonwealth Bank Social Media Hat-trick

It was near impossible to even occasionally glance at any of the matches without noticing the presence of the Commonwealth Bank. From naming rights, to signage, to uniforms, to TV ads and so on. CommBank’s involvement with Australian cricket stretches back over 25 years but this year marked the start of a four season partnership with the Test Team and the Test Series.

Given this partnership it made absolute sense for CommBank to extend their alignment with The Ashes to their social channels particularly Facebook and Twitter. On December 5 CommBank published 4 photos of cute cats miniature scenes from the 2nd Ashes Test Match on their Facebook page. This marked the start of what was to be a highly successful series of Ashes themed posts delivering CommBank on average 8x higher engagement on Facebook than their non-Ashes posts.

The beauty of these posts was their ability for CommBank to be topical and comment on memorable moments as the Test Series unfolded. Importantly it brought a bit of personality to an otherwise, relatively straight and predictable corporate brand Facebook page.

Best of all, people loved sharing this content. In fact CommBank’s top 10 shared posts in the last 2 months were ALL Ashes themed. Of course shares is a vital user action sought after by Facebook marketers. When fans share posts, this increases the content reach to friends of fans. Besides paying for reach, creating highly sharable content is currently your best bet for increasing the reach of your content on Facebook.

In the last 2 months, nearly half of CommBank’s posts were Ashes themed. The rest were mostly Product related and a few Community related posts. Naturally product posts don’t do very well on Facebook, but many brands use product posts immediately after high-performing posts where they can reap the benefits of slightly higher increased reach whilst delivering a brand or product message.

So how did CommBank’s posts perform overall in the last 2 months? The average post engagement rate for their Ashes themed posts was 0.585% and for their non-Ashes themed posts 0.072%. In other words, The Ashes posts delivered 8x the engagement over the last 2 months – indeed a great result for CommBank.

These top-performing posts didn’t just go out on CommBank’s Facebook page but also on their Twitter profile delivering rich media into the Twitter stream that really resonated with their followers:

Congratulations Mitchell Johnson! A superb five wicket haul in the Boxing Day test! pic.twitter.com/j4cTePoiU1

— CommBank (@CommBank) December 27, 2013

One step closer to a clean sweep! Aussie, Aussie, Aussie... #Ashes #uniteAus pic.twitter.com/7CAhURckfB

— CommBank (@CommBank) December 29, 2013

Also, make sure to check out Jonno Simpson’s great recap of the broader cricket discussion on Twitter around the #Ashes, #TheUrnReturns and a particularly great execution by Cricket Australia of the #CongratsPup hashtag in The Sunday Times:

Please click to congratulate Pup on 100th Test. We're using everyone's @ names for a special tribute https://t.co/OtXsbZRGZu #CongratsPup

— cricket.com.au (@CricketAus) December 11, 2013

Here's the ad in The Sunday Times with your @ handles to say #CongratsPup for his 100th Test. pic.twitter.com/03J7O2zAqq

— cricket.com.au (@CricketAus) December 15, 2013