INSIGHT
SOCIAL MEDIA SHOWDOWN:
BATTLE OF THE OPERATORS
With the gap of social influence between operators narrowing in 2014, David Donaldson of Blueclaw
Media analyses the shift in social strategy by arguably its highest-profile exponents in UK betting, Paddy
Power, Betfair and Coral.
WE’RE LIVING IN a digital age where
Paddy Power
consumers are willing to digest content
through more creative and diverse
channels than ever before. At the forefront
of this era lies social media marketing,
and with social media ad spend increasing
by 285% over the past three years (IAB,
2014), this communication channel will
continue to present both challenges and
opportunities for gaming operators.
Getting the right social content in
front of the right audience at the right
time has never been more important
for those brands in today’s competitive
gambling market.
Differentiation is key, and from this,
we’ve seen a shift in social strategy from
operator powerhouses such as Paddy
Power, Betfair and Coral.
Social media is no longer a standalone
marketing tool. All three operators utilise
images, data, video content and social
graphics across social platforms to trigger
user engagement and create a platform
for themselves to achieve their bigger
marketing objectives.
Here, we study the effectiveness of the
social media techniques used by Paddy
Power, Betfair and Coral and measure
them against one another.
When it comes to innovative, tongue-incheek and viral content, Paddy Power are
a step above the rest. According to
@TwitterData, there were a staggering
35.6m tweets about the 2014 Brazil V
Germany (#BRAvGER) World Cup semi-
More often than not you’ll see Paddy
Power publishing visual content through
their social accounts in the form of vines
and Photoshopped images. Sometimes
this content is relevant to the nature of
the marketplace, sometimes not…and
that’s the beauty of it.
“The most promising factor of Betfair’s ‘This Is Play’
campaign has been its evergreen capability, as it still
remains an active and trending hashtag to this day.”
final – the highest ever recorded tweets
for a single sports game. When Brazil
were 7-0 down, Paddy Power identified
an opportunity to ‘trendjack’ and posted
an image of Brazil captain Neymar
holding a 7UP drinks can captioned
“Well, this is awkward…”. The tweet
received almost 1,000 retweets in a
matter of minutes and highlighted the
powerful role real-time, topical content
has to play on social media.
Paddy Power’s ability to create truly
compelling, viral content doesn’t stop
there. It’s been reported that the use of
visual content in Facebook campaigns
generates 65% more engagement than
text-based posts (HubSpot, 2014).
Whether it’s the comical five-second video
clip of a horse falling over an inflatable
ball titled: “A visual representation of
Man City in the Champions League”
that got 2,000 shares across Facebook,
or a picture of a rooftop trampoline on a
10-storey building captioned: “What could
possibly go wrong?” gaining almost 9,000
Facebook likes, Paddy Power have found
potentially the optimum mix of pushing