Welcome to the 3rd blog of this 4-Part series on online analysis of Brand South Africa.Â
In Part 2 I addressed the question how is Brand South Africa’s social media performance compared to another African giant – Brand Kenya?
In this blog I ask:Â
Has the online performance of the Nation Brand’s flagship programme – Play Your Part (PYP) – been satisfactory to date?
Here we go.
Table of Contents
About Brand South Africa's Play Your Part ProgrammeÂ
In line with its mandate, Brand South Africa has been running a flagship programme called Play Your Part to encourage South Africans to become active citizens, and thereby inspire others to do the same.
In Brand South Africa’s words, ” a nation of people who care deeply for one another and the environment in which they live is good for everyone.”
Play Your Part is a nationwide movement created to inspire, empower and celebrate active citizenship in South Africa.
Source: Brand South Africa Website
This initiative has been in place for several years.
The Nation Brand has used mainly video format for communications.
The last campaign was a 26 episode TV series that broke on SABC 3 in August 2017.
Given the objective of the programme, content formats and supporting media; my key performance indicators (KPIs) would include tweet volumes, impressions, engagement and video views.
I am assessing the performance of PYP in this blog using the highlighted KPIs above.
Analysis of PYP Videos
I analysed PYP videos found on Brand South Africa’s Youtube Channel for the period August 2011 to December 2018.
The Nation Brand published 126 PYP videos for the period under review.
Aggregated views came to 59,441, with an average of 472 views per video.
Here is a graph of the number of videos and views, broken down into annual totals and contributions.
My findings:
- 2012 contributed the largest number of published videos (33%) and views (38%).
- 2013 and 2018 contributed the lowest numbers of videos (3%) and views (0.4%) respectively.
- I noted that in 2017 – the year when the 26-episode TV series broke – only 9 videos were published on Youtube.
Below are the top 10 videos, measured by video views, and identified only by publishing dates and not titles:
My findings:
- Cumulatively, the top 10 videos contributed 57% to the total views.
- Of the top 10 videos, 4 were published in 2011, 4 in 2012, and 2 in 2014.
- Notably, none of the videos from the 26-episode TV series in 2017 appears in the top 10.
My findings, based on the two graphs above, are indicating that Play Your Part has not been firing in all cylinders, especially in the last 4 years.
In an attempt to understand the reason, I decided to assess performance of the support provided on social media, using Twitter as the proxy.
Analysis of PYP Tweets
I analysed #PlayYourPartSA tweets for the past 2 years from March 2017 to February 2019.
This was with a view to gaining understanding of the social media strength of the programme, using a hashtag that the Nation Brand should appropriate as part of its brand properties.
My hypothesis was that there has been an effort to grow the programme online using the relevant hashtag.
In the graph below, I tallied tweets with #PlayYourPartSA mentions and broke them down into quarterly batches.
I also compared tweeting frequencies (measured by average number of days it takes to publish a tweet) per quarter.
Here are the results:
My findings:
- A total of 40 #PlayYourPartSA tweets were published by 27 Twitterers during the 2 years under review – that is an average of 1.5 tweets per person, and 1 tweet every 18 days.
- The dedicated Brand South Africa handle – @PlayYourPartSA – published only 1 #PlayYourPartSA tweet during the period.
- The quarter with the busiest tweeting activity was Jun-Aug ’17, and this was mainly linked to the 26-episode TV series. Read with the finding above, seemingly this was not due to @PlayYourPartSA’s tweeting activity using this hashtag.
- The last quarters earned the highest engagement per tweet, but the tweeting frequency was low at 1 tweet every 30 days.
My key takeout
The results of Twitter analysis show that there has not been much focus on building #PlayYourPartSA as one of the online brand properties of Brand South Africa. ​
