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American Express drives transactional and brand value through Twitter - Top social media success campaign 

Amex, one of the largest credit card services company serving millions of customers worldwide conceptualised an extra ordinary Twitter based campaign. Amex leveraged the social commerce trend by letting the card member sync their credit card on social media sites like Twitter, FB, Foursquare to name a few in early 2011 to bring their customers closer to social media. Capitalising on their 163rd birthday, ensuring and committing on all protective measures Amex successfully engaged its members to just hashtag their preferred product and Amex would ship the product after confirmation. They even flashed a virtual Twitter party to endorse their brand organically by sharing personalised images for members to wish the brand, using hashtag #163Candles and #Amexarchives.

Sharing the steps taken at every point by Amex to deliver some cool and fascinating results.

1. Set clear goals for the social media campaign 

It is important that a brand like Amex enjoying considerable amount of brand equity ( estimated brand value at $15 billion ) wanted to embrace digital transformation to connect with its members who are increasingly available online than offline. 

They explored innovative ways to leverage Twitter and chose to go ahead with a campaign directly, impacting the no of transactions and the organic push it could give to the campaign and brand as a whole.Achieving sales was indeed a challenging goal set by Amex for their curated list of product ranging from Kindle to Xbox machines. However this was clearly defined within its closed loop business model.

2. Performing content 

Testing content is what social media platforms provide you to choose the best to promote and nurture for long term results. Design content and recognise those resonating with the followers by the number of shares and clicks.

Amex would've posted various content based posts to seek followers interest and the organic push it earned. #AmexArchives had saved images that celebrated their over 150 years old legacy with their long term trusted customers.

Few shares from their archives.

3. Target audience 

Twitter allows to target users based on demographics, device used, behaviour, interests etc, however Amex had a pool of their member data and hence connected more personally with them. It was also an attempt to help the merchants of Amex in reaching out to the right customer for their products. 

Using their CRM effectively it was a ready list of global customers to translate their Amex love on Twitter. Twitter could segment the data based on their age group, gender and location corresponding to their product list or merchants willing to participate in the campaign.

4. Design and build ad

In early 2011, Amex introduced the card sync technology to enable the member securely connect cards onto social media accounts. This became even more accepted when Amex launched the campaign in 2013 for letting members wish for their 163rd birthday, share a hashtag for their preferred product and ending up purchasing it with the simple confirmation.

Streamlining it with their world class customer service handle @AskAmex to assist members resolve queries then and there. 

5. Budget 

Amex didn't spend anything significantly high to achieve the desired results as they could by organically targeting their customers. This was an award winning campaign for Amex by proving that even commercial targets could be achieved through social like Twitter other than the increased brand awareness.

6. Track performance and Optimise 

Primary metrics that Twitter experts track are the retweets, impressions, click-on-links and conversions. In the context of Amex, they could successfully achieve 160% spike in retweets and remarkable sales through the products offered. Besides they saw a 50% increase in followers by the end of 2013 itself.