How Sonos used Twitter First View and Promoted Trend to break through the pre-holiday tech launch clutter

Sonos’ (‎@Sonos) wireless speakers and home sound systems have built a loyal following since the company’s founding in 2002. In October 2017, ‎@Sonos launched Sonos One, a voice-controlled smart speaker designed for music lovers. Because the consumer tech market gets very competitive in the pre-holiday months, ‎@Sonos had to make a big splash to drive mass awareness around its launch. As a challenger brand, they had to prove their value against larger voice-controlled speaker brands with bigger marketing budgets.

‎@Sonos partnered with Twitter to reach our leaned-in tech audience who love to be the first to know about new products. In fact, our audience is so clued in that two out of every three non-Twitter users say that Twitter people are among the first to know the latest news and information.

To reach this savvy crowd, ‎@Sonos first created a short launch video that introduced the Sonos One using Twitter’s creative best practices. Then, on launch day, it promoted the video using two Twitter products: First View, which takes over the first ad slot at the top of the timeline, and Promoted Trend, which appears at the top of the trending topics list. Together, these tools generated top-of-mind awareness of the Sonos One with every person who logged onto Twitter over a 24-hour period.

The Sonos One launch video was designed using Twitter’s creative best practices, helping ‎@Sonos achieve success on launch day and garner 13.5M views and counting. How does this video adhere to best practices?

1. The video immediately showed the product.
   
2. The video was short (15 seconds), autoplayed, and had subtitles.
3. The Tweet copy was clear and purposeful. The first word was “introducing,” which screams “new product!” to rapidly scrolling consumers.
   
4. The pulsing beat in the video encouraged people to enable sound — a clever and thematic way for a speaker brand to engage with customers.

The Sonos One launch was a huge success. ‎@Sonos broke through the October tech launch clutter and increased its share of voice and brand impact.

The company saw a significant lift across all metrics among people who engaged with its content on Twitter, even outperforming normative benchmarks. The strongest lifts seen across all metrics were among people who were exposed to or engaged with the First View Tweet. For people who received an impression, but did not necessarily engage with ‎@Sonos content, the brand saw significant lifts in recall and familiarity.