What can we learn from the biggest #edballsday yet? How did an innocuous tweet become an Internet sensation?

Ed Balls Day is becoming something of a worldwide cult. It’s the day when Twitter comes together to celebrate the anniversary of Ed Balls, then the MP for Morley and Outwood, tweeting his own name. Instead of searching for “Ed Balls”, Balls tweeted his name by mistake and Twitter responded. The rest is history. 

What can we learn from a study of Ed Balls Day? I’ve used Bloom’s Whisper tool to analyse the data from the last 5 years, to try to understand what turned a potentially innocuous tweet into a global Internet phenomenon.  At the same time, I've tried to pull out some key learnings for social media marketing.  

2016 was the biggest Ed Balls Day yet – with 30% more retweets of Ball’s original tweet and 19% more individuals taking part compared to 2015.

The original tweet came in 2011. It was Peter Newlands, @petenew, that has the honour of being the first person to retweet Ball’s tweet. It took him 13 seconds to see, read and share the tweet and it set in motion the phenomenon we see today. In the first hour following the tweet, it was retweeted 211 times. 

The spread of that first tweet was helped most by @caitlinmoran. Moran was the most influential account on day zero and was responsible for spreading the word of Balls. Less than a minute after it’s birth, Caitlin Moran was responsible for shooting the tweet into the next tier of Twitter conversation.

Twitter allowed the 1st anniversary to pass it by largely unnoticed. It took until 2013, the second anniversary, for Twitter to take Ed Balls Day to heart, properly.

The main focus to 2013’s celebrations was the anniversary itself, something which has followed in previous years.  If you study the graph closely, you'll see that the volume of tweets spikes at 4.20pm - the precise anniversary of Ball's first tweet.  We can trace the “hype” in 2013 back to articles like this:

https://www.thepoke.co.uk/2013/04/26/ed-balls-the-second-anniversary/

which encourage people to get involved.  Analysing the data from 2013, it is clear to see that this article was one of the catalysts for #edballsday becoming a "thing".

However, it took a General Election to send Ed Balls Day mainstream.

Ed Balls Day 2014 wasn’t as exciting for the Twitter audience and it didn’t live up to the highs we saw in 2013. There were individuals celebrating but not in the same numbers as in 2013. It was 2015, with the talk of the impending General Election, which really captured the attention of the nation.

Our analysis shows that 2015 had a 28% increase in volumes over 2013 levels. Looking at individual tweets, the influencers and the content that was shared we see that it was the nation’s interest for political comment, discussion and news which tipped Ed Balls Day from being an isolated Twitter meme into the mainstream. 2015 provided the critical mass for the day to become part of the establishment and 2016 saw increases over 2015.  All this bodes well for next year: 2017 – will this be the year that prompts the entire nation to bake a celebration cake?  Will the Queen record a TV message for Ed?

Now that #edballsday is mainstream, what can brands learn from it?  Here are the five things that stand out to me, having analysed the data.

1) The original is still best.

On it’s 5th birthday, the tweet was retweeted 11,367 times – recording 30% more retweets than 2015 - making it the most retweeted piece of #edballsday content this year. In the last year, on days when #edballsday couldn't be further from Twitter's mind, the original tweet still picked up an average of 35 retweets per day.  Older tweets still get retweets, if the content is relevant.

Don’t assume that it’s your new content that will generate brand mentions for you – you may well be getting a lot of volume from older tweets. Time and time again, we find historic tweets re-appearing to generate significant volumes for a brand, sometimes years after they were first tweeted.

2) To keep the legend strong, bake.

Ed’s timing, and his baking skills, were impeccable this year – helping fuel the legend for another year. This tweet, timed to coincide with the exact anniversary of our sacred tweet, received nearly as much Twitter love as the original.

The time of your tweets can be as important as the content itself. This tweet was perfectly timed to provide the right content at the right time – it’s likely that it wouldn’t have been as successful an hour later, as the audience would have "moved on".

3) 2016 was the year the brands wanted to help us celebrate.

There were many brands who got in the spirit to help us celebrate our special day.  Using Whisper, we've calculated the influence of brands over the #edballsday conversation.  Whisper’s view of influence is a measure of impact and it goes beyond counting the number of tweets or retweets. It looks at how the content is shared and passed around Twitter.  An account which is more central to the conversation will be more influential and this helps us uncover those important "bridging accounts" that connect conversations, and content, together.  These are just the accounts that you need to understand if you're wanting to help content spread quickly across Twitter.

Met-RX was the most influential brand over the Ed Balls Day 2016 conversation. They became the most influential brand by mixing funny content with a call to action.  They also tweeted a number of times, adding a mix of engagement alongside asking people for retweets.  Other brand tweets got more retweets in total, but Met-RX are the most influential because their content was shared by more people at the heart of the #edballsday conversation.

Just Eat were the second most influential brand in the #edballsday conversation – if they’d offered you the chance to order these Edible Balls could they have been the most influential brand?

Domino’s, who offered up TwistED Doughballs, were the third most influential brand. They received a large number of retweets but these were from individuals who didn’t engage further with #edballsday – so the “value” of these retweets is analysed to be much less than those received by Met-RX. The core #edballsday audience embraced Met-RX in greater numbers than they did Domino’s or Just Eat – hence the difference in influence seen by Whisper.

2016 was also the year that the mass media made a fuss out of #edballsday. The major news broadcasters were all covering events, with Sky News being the most influential broadcaster on the day. The other news broadcasters in the top 5 on the day were BBC Three, BBC News, Huffington Post and the Telegraph.

The graphic below shows the spread of #edballsday this year.  The position of Met-RX, Just Eat and Domino's is really interesting - and demonstrates the difference in their influence score.  Met-RX are more central to the conversation and hence are more influential.  Although we've not mentioned it directly, Cole Sprouse, the American actor, also got involved and his community can clearly be seen retweeting content.

Generating retweets is part of the social engagement journey. Generating retweets from the right people, at the right time, from the right content, is far more valuable for a brand.

4) "Real people" are the real spirit of Ed Balls Days

87 of the top 100 influencers about Ed Balls Day are “real people”. They are not brands, celebrities, news outlets or politicians. Crucially, they are also not brands – which tells us that the real spirit of Ed Balls Day is a group of individuals on Twitter coming together to celebrate in their way.  It is a group of individuals, supported on the fringes by comedians and other public figures, creating a day for themselves.

982 people have celebrated #edballsday for the last 4 years, each year, every year.   Laura Marcus, also known by her Twitter username of @misslauramarcus, is not alone in her on-going support for #edballsday. 981 others have joined Laura in a continued vigil, to ensure that the word of Balls continues to spread. These committed "Ballites" have tweeted each year for the last 4 years.   If brands want to get “into” this conversation, they must have something very relevant for this audience – something that adds something new, or creates an emotional reaction, for it to cut through.

Understanding your audience, and what they want to talk about, is key to successful engagement through social. You should aim to provide content which supports what the audience want to talk about – and, if that’s different to what you want to say – think twice.

5) In 2016, more people celebrated their first Ed Balls Day than would fit in Carrow Road.

This year saw 11% more individuals celebrate their "first" #edballsday than last year.  Given this number is now over 30,000 actual new people, if all of these "new" revellers turned up to watch Norwich City play, where Balls is now Chairman, at least 3,000 would be left at the gate.

Nearly 90,000 individuals have now celebrated by tweeting at one time or other in the last 5 years about #edballsday. You could just about fit everyone into Wembley, but there wouldn't be much room left.

Away from brands, politicians, celebrities and news outlets have jostled for position to get their views heard by a football stadium-sized group of individuals.

This year, in 2016, we find that Yvette Cooper is the most influential politician. This is no surprise – especially given that she’s Balls’s wife and cake provocateur. Nick Clegg is the second most influential political – not because of anything he said in 2016 but because people retweeted his tweet from 2015. This is a further reminder of the power of historic tweets.

After Cooper and Clegg, and the Labour party’s own account, we find a host of individuals in politics who have more influence than we might expect. A good example is @CllrAlexNorris, a Labour councillor in Nottingham, who is more influential than many other politicians in the conversation.

If we analyse the brands with influence over the conversation, we find some examples that we may not have expected. Boss Burgers, based in Leeds, appear far more influential than brands such as Coral, Unibet and Pizza Express. Boss Burgers offered the chance for their audience to engage with them, in return for a free burger.  It grabbed them a shot at generating more buzz from their marketing than others with much bigger marketing spends.  Social media helps make smaller brands more accessible to the right audience.

Social Media is a great leveller and allows people to have far more influence than we might ordinarily expect. People who have the right content, at the right time, can generate significant influence and this presents both a significant opportunity. Brands like Boss Burgers, or politicians like Cllr Norris, can find the spotlight focused on them – for their 15 minutes of fame - which can be used to great effect.  However, this brings with it a level of responsibility - and individuals need to understand just how quickly a comment they make can be shot into Twitter legend.  Just like Ed Ball's original tweet.

I've spoken a lot recently about how the analysis of social media data needs to move beyond counting and to focus on the "What?", "So What?" and "Now What?" process to extract insight from the raw social media data.  By analysing the last 5 year's data about #edballsday, and focusing our attention into what brands can learn, we understand the mood, mode and context of the #edballsday audience.  Brands have tried to generate lasting engagement from this year's celebrations, but most have failed to generate more than a handful of retweets.  Maybe next year will be different.

This analysis was conducted using Bloom's Whisper tool, a unique social intelligence engine which aims to describe influence in communities and help brands understand how to get the right content, to the right people at the right time.  If you'd like to know where you, or your brand, featured in the overal list of influencers, then feel free to send me a message or get in touch.

Main Image Credit: https://www.flickr.com/photos/london/902817172