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Branding Twitter Blue Monday

How brands forced smiles (and transactions) for #BlueMonday on social media

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By John McCarthy, Opinion Editor

January 18, 2016 | 17 min read

It's Blue Monday, supposedly the 'most depressing day of the year'.

In fact, what started as a marketing concoction by a holiday company has now been adopted by many other brands promising to help you beat the winter blues.

Before we start, let's leave this here.

Now things get real, here are the tweets that won the day,

Virgin Holidays surprised customers with puppies, hand-warmers and other prize giveaways in a bid to eradicate ‘Blue Monday’ woes.

Comedy Central

Mercedez Benz

Boots

Ford UK

Angry Birds

Star Wars UK

Netflix UK & Ireland

Doctor Who

Superdrug

House of Fraser

O2

Disney UK

BBC Three

Very

Three

EasyJet

Carphone Warehouse

Manchester City

MTV UK

BMW UK

Yorkshire Tea

River Island

Jeremy Kyle

Team McLaren

Lionsgate UK

Rimmel London

Carphone Warehouse

Barclays Access

Wicked UK

Boohoo

Topshop

Scope

Morph

Richard Jones, chief executive and co-founder EngageSciences analysed the top Blue Monday trends on Twitter, these were #win, #purplemonday, #competition, #mondaymotivation, #sunrise and #giveaway.

The top buzzwords were blue, cheer, follow, today, beat and brighten. More than half of the consumer engagements were retweets and the peak engagement time was 2pm.

Jones said: “John Lewis, Three Mobile and Moonpig are simply using the day to humanise their brand with cutesy animals to cheer up consumers.

“Why? Animals are authentic and true in their affections. They represent our best selves - full of happiness, excitement and playfulness; these are emotions we connect with regardless of cultural background.”

He noted that many of the campaigns (notably WilkinsonSword, Very.co.uk, ProtectYourBubble and EasyJet) offered competitions in their tweets and Tesco offered free food to consumers at many of its stores across the UK.

If you wish to compare this year's glum tweets against Blue Monday 2015's, hit the link.

Branding Twitter Blue Monday

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