Social Media Marketing

This week, Twitter cruised on the surface of Pluto, shopped on Amazon, celebrated the 2015 ESPY awards, and made a toast for Novak Djokovic’s big win at Wimbledon.

Twitter had a full event calendar this week, from celebrating a historical moment when NASA's New Horizons spacecraft returned its first new images of Pluto, to finding many sweet deals on Amazon's Prime Day. Twitter also made a toast for ESPN's annual celebration of sports and cheered for tennis player Novak Djokovic's victory at Wimbledon.

On Wednesday, NASA released the first zoomed-in image of Pluto, a day after its spacecraft cruised about 7,700 miles over the planet's surface. #PlutoFlyby was perhaps the most popular subject on Twitter this week. As of this writing, the hashtag has been used ​more than 877,000 times and received around 5.4 billion engagements, according to social data intelligence company Talkwalker.

Big brands like Disney, Google, Windows and Lenovo wasted no time to initiate social conversations around this historical moment.

Disney created an animated post to show how the media conglomerate saw Pluto. This tweet received a whopping ​4,508 favorites and 4,343 retweets, according to Talkwalker.

In celebration of New Horizons' Pluto flyby, Lenovo and Windows also came up with fun tweets. Talkwaler's stats show that Lenovo's post gained ​756 favorites and 932 retweets, while Window's tweet received 529 favorites and 425 retweets.

Although Google was not performing as well as Lenovo and Windows, in terms of engagement, the company was smart to feature Clyde William Tombaugh, the astronomer who first discovered Pluto.


While Twitter was celebrating NASA's big achievement, it didn't forget to check out big sales on Amazon's Prime Day. Amazon offered deep discounts to Prime members, commemorating the company's 20th anniversary. The special savings day was promoted as having "more deals than Black Friday." The #PrimeDay hashtag has been used for around 5.4 billion times, received ​more than 90,000 engagements, according to Talkwalker.

Tapping into the fear of missing out, GQ compiled a list of things to buy on #PrimeDay.

Harvard Business School was more serious about this shopping festival, taking an academic approach to analyze the thoughts and decisions behind #PrimeDay.

Also on Wednesday, TV network ESPN hosted its annual Excellence in Sports Performance Yearly Award (ESPY). Google aired an ad about transgender athlete Caitlyn Jenner during the ceremony and shared the video on Twitter. This tweet gained 1,966 favorites and ​1,046 retweets, according to Talkwalker.

While Google was focused on the transgender issue, brands like Reebok and Bud Light shifted their attention to Ronda Rousey, who won the Best Fighter award. During her brief acceptance speech, Rousey verbally pummeled boxing champion Floyd Mayweather, who has a history of domestic violence. Ouch!

Another Twitter star of the week is tennis player Novak Djokovic, who defeated Roger Federer and won his third Wimbledon title. Congratulations, Djokovic!

 *Homepage image via NASA.

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