What happens when you combine Lipton Iced Tea with National Iced Tea Day? A total Twitter takeover. Run start to finish by ICUC’s social strategy team, Lipton Tea was able to flip a nationally named day to one of its own, #LiptonIcedTeaDay, and trend #1 on Twitter throughout the day on June 10, 2021. We interviewed ICUC’s Senior Strategist Katie Gillis and Customer Support Associate Chad Klass for the inside scoop on how our client collaboration rocked the day.
First, can you give a brief description of the roles within the Lipton Tea work at ICUC?
Katie: As the Senior Strategist here at ICUC, my role with Lipton is to manage all aspects of Lipton’s presence on social media, from high-level strategy direction to publishing content. I also happen to create most of the content on social media from start to finish: Styling, photographing and copywriting. After the content is live and has had time to bake, we pull data, derive insights and present them to our client teams with learnings and opportunities. It’s really the full cycle of social media work in an agile framework.
Chad: I’m a Customer Support Associate and am responsible for bringing the brand voice to life in real-time by leading and coaching our Content Specialists. I also manage client communication, strategic insights, and reporting. In short, I handle main client comms and assure quality control to our community management.
What specific challenge(s) were you encountering that needed a solution?
Katie: We first asked ourselves, ‘How can Lipton own National Iced Tea Day in the U.S. market?’ We created a Twitter party and a sweepstakes around the day to create buzz with the goal of landing in the top 10 trends. National Iced Tea Day was our 4th Twitter party sweepstakes of the year, and each one we’ve landed in the top 10 in the United States, so we had a benchmark goal to aim for.
This year’s Iced Tea Day campaign was the first time we landed #1 on trends. We started at #5, quickly bumped up to #1, and maintained it for several hours, staying in the top trends the entire day, 7 hours or so. This was a big moment for the team and of course, the client. This was amazing because there was no PR support behind the day, this was a 100% organic content strategy, created specifically for the Lipton audience that we have come to know well.
Can you give us a quick outline of the “win” for that day?
We took over #NationalIcedTeaDay, literally, by renaming it #LiptonIcedTeaDay, and reaching #1 on Twitter for several hours while trending in the Top 20 all day. We also saw engagement 300% over the industry average. But the real win was Lipton’s channel becoming a catalyst for connection, where strangers not only bonded over Lipton Iced Tea, but also introduced themselves to one another, finding similar interests, and becoming friends. The day was fun and everyone participating did so with kindness, which is always a beautiful thing to see on social media.
This is major for the Lipton brand. It’s a tea company that changed the national tea holiday ????. I’d imagine it falls in line with Lipton’s brand ethos as well…
Chad: Definitely. Lipton is rooted in connecting with family and friends, enjoying precious moments over tea. The Twitter party helped us amplify the work we do in bringing people together over tea. The party also helped us educate our audience about the heart-health benefits of tea. We were able to connect on an even deeper level with our audience. For example, many responded to our heart health posts by showing us healthy foods they were pairing with Lipton unsweetened black and green teas, and many others responded with exercises and other steps they were taking to improve their heart health. It was so fulfilling to engage with our audience and root for them! To Katie’s words of connections made, several of our audience even began cheering for each other.
Katie: Our engagements and content created within the Twitter party were developed through a lens of Lipton’s core values.
From a business lens, has ICUC been able to save Lipton Tea money with this organic strategy?
Katie: To put the #1 Twitter trend result into perspective, it would have cost $340,000 to buy the #1 trend through Twitter’s ad offerings. The secret recipe isn’t a secret, really. Knowing what your audience cares about, pushing content they find relevant, and staying true to the brand values is all it takes. Strategic organic engagement is still highly effective if you know how to do it right. And we do.
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