#RubikTuesday was the second fun viral campaign organized by +Plus Your Business that ran on 28th March 2014 (the 40th anniversary of the Rubik Cubes invention by +Erno Rubik.
NOD3x data mined all the posts as they happened in Real-Time and analysed the results.
NOD3x is a real-time data mining (content discovery) and SNA (social network analysis) that is free to the Google+ community. It tracks and indexes all posts talking about a specific topic on Google+ posted to the public timeline and/or public communities from either personal profiles or Google+ pages. We also index posts made to Twitter, Facebook, YouTube and 250k media sites across the web.
Once we have the data we analyse:
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All of the data is then visualized within a real-time infographic dashboard, where a user can see at a glance what is taking place.
In an additional visual, NOD3x.com analyses relationships between people posting content and the engagement taking place on those posts. These are visualised through coloured dots (nodes) and lines (edges)
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Orange for a +1
Without a doubt, you can see that #RubicTuesday struck a chord with people on Google+. But what caused this amazing amount of engagement?
140 original posts were made on Google+ during the #RubikTuesday campaign, with 112 individual people posting that content.
48 of those posts contained links to external content.
But that is just the beginning of the story…
Those 140 posts created a flurry of engagement:
Total Activities: 6310
Activity Relationships: 7351 (re-shares, Comments and +1’s)
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To put things into perspective,
1:7 posts to reshares
1:6 posts to comments
1:31 posts to +1’s
Some posts obviously received a higher proportion of that engagement – in fact 5 posts (and one re-shared post) generated 80% of the activity, the following graph shows all the 140 posts and 976 re-shares.
We identified that those five posts followed the Viral 5 W’s and because of that received higher levels of engagement:
+Martin Shervington manually inserted the #RubikTuesday hashtag into his post. This hashtag then went on to trend in G+ and subsequent posts were auto tagged by Google+
+Wilco Wings’ post was auto hashtagged by Google+
+Bill DeWitt’s post was also auto hashtagged by Google+
Even the +European Commission got on board with the 40th anniversary of the Rubik Cube
The re-share by +Beyond Rubik’s Cube (https://plus.google.com/u/0/+BeyondRubiksCube/posts/LKjCKukpwGD) is the anomaly here, as they didn’t include any additional commentary with their re-shared post. However, they do have over 1.9 million G+ followers who are obviously very engaged with the content they share!
As with the #PlusTheZuck campaign, some posts hijacked the #RubikTuesday in an obvious attempt to create visibility to completely unrelated content. But as you can see, their attempt to generate interest failed: no engagement whatsoever!
These attempts by spammers are futile on G+.
What is particularly interesting here is that even though this campaign ran on a Tuesday, the majority of the engagements took place on the Friday!
There are of course questions that come to mind:
Why did this happen?
This is how it looked throughout the campaign:
For those of you that like statistics, we've implemented various metrics now into NOD3x that include Google+ View Counts.
From the table below, you can see each posts individual stats as well as the reach of their post – along with a summary of how much engagement each received AND how many times each of them engaged with other content that we indexed.
As any good mentor should, +Martin Shervington leads by example. Not only does he receive high amounts of engagement but also engages on other peoples content as well!
And finally…
So what can we learn from all of this? The Rubik Tuesday campaign was very carefully schedule to coincide with the 40th Anniversary of +Erno Rubik’s invention of the cube. He himself also took part – I mean c’mon… it doesn’t get better than that!
If you're planning on a running a viral campaign on Google+:
We hope you found that useful and get in touch with us here to discuss using Google+ for business.