From March 2-30, 2011, Central Market featured a social media-based contest highlighting spicy foods. On their "In Stores Now" page, promotional content encouraged visitors to either "Tweet Their Heat" tolerance levels or share spicy recipes via Facebook. Participants were entered to win Central Market gift cards. As is true of other Central Market campaigns, this promotion accompanied spicy-related cooking classes. (And the promotion sought to encourage enrollment). However unlike most other promotions, Spicy predominately worked to increase engagement with Central Market's social media networks, and primary calls-to-action were to tweet or share via Facebook. To measure success, we focused on social media engagement rates. Specifically:

• An increase in likes, comments, impressions and average daily users on Facebook over the course of the campaign.
  
• Likes and comments on Facebook posts with product placement.
  
• A lift in Twitter engagement.
  

Facebook-melting Metrics

As with last year's Hatch Chile promotion, Facebook proved no shortage of fire-breathing, spicy food fans. Over the course of the campaign:

• Daily comments averaged about twice the previous six-month average — reaching their highest levels since Central Market's Hatch Chile promotion back in August 2010.
• Average Daily Users broke 3,000/day, which is the highest since their 2010 Holiday catering promotions in November and December.

Wall posts featuring spicy products helped drive these lifts, with posts on products like ghost chilies and bloody Mary mix receiving between 25,800-31,200 impressions, 30-45 "likes," and 11-17 comments each. As Central Market is a non e-commerce site, we looked to the performance of these product-based posts as a way to assess how well the campaign raised awareness on promoted items — understanding that increased awareness encourages sales. 

A Twitter-torching Performance

Traditionally, Twitter trails Facebook in referrals, and buttons on Central Market's site to share via Facebook outperform those to tweet. But Facebook also usually receives more predominate real estate. For this campaign, we changed that. We featured Twitter as a predominately as Facebook, and the community responded well. We pulled the click-through rates (defined as button clicks divided by total hits to the page) for all the buttons. 

• The Twitter buttons, "I'm a Fire Breather," "I'm a Heat Seeker" and "I'm a Slow Burner," received click-through rates of 9.333%, 4.98% and 3.35%, respectively.
  
• The Facebook button received a click-through of 4.44%.
  
• The total click-through rate on social media related buttons usually falls around or under 1% for the campaigns we've measured. This one totaled 22%.
  

While Facebook probably still overshadows Twitter as Central Market's most popular community engagement platform, it displays promising opportunity. (And if featured, could grow) Overall, these social media related metrics speak best to the success of this campaign, since fostering social sharing was the campaign's primary objective. Still, it's worth noting that the campaign also achieved its secondary goal — generating referrals to Central Market's Cooking School domain. Click-through from Central Market's main site to their Cooking School domain during Spicy came in average as compared to other campaigns we've measured.