The two-day Mobile and Tablet Gambling Europe 2014 summit kicked off at the Hilton Tower Bridge in London yesterday with a day of debate and presentation, with a significant focus on marketing channels, most notably social platforms.
Looking back at this summer’s FIFA World Cup in Brazil, Unibet’s head of social media, Pantelis Kotopoulos, said the tournament had been a “huge event” for the company, calling the social media activity an “absolute explosion.”
Tania Seif, Coral’s head of social marketing, said the firm had developed a two-part strategy for Brazil 2014, targeting player acquisition and then customer retention: “For acquisition, we would make a big talking-point offer such as ‘money back if Brazil wears yellow in the opening game’ [which it was guaranteed to do].
“Then we would focus on retaining the new customers who came to us through that offer.”
Joakim Nilsson of Social CRM said that during the World Cup, of 300,000 Paddy Power mentions on Twitter, 70 per cent were related to the tournament. When Uruguayan footballer Luis Suárez bit an Italian opponent during a match, Paddy Power reacted quickly and saw its resulting comment retweeted more than 7,000 times. “That’s an incredible level and rate of reach,” said Nilsson.
In his presentation, Facebook’s Aidan O’Connell said: “If mobile is eating the world, then Facebook is eating mobile.
“We have 703 million daily mobile users on Facebook, worldwide. In the UK, we have 29 million monthly active users on mobile and 23 million daily visitors.
“How engaged are they?” mused O’Connell. “They will on average log in to their Facebook account around 14 times a day - and that’s a conservative figure.
“When they’re on mobile and not using your apps, there’s a big chance they’ll be using Facebook.”
O’Connell said that traditional CRM channels are becoming less effective with people receiving as many as 400 commercial emails per month, 20 per cent of which never reach the user due to spam settings.
He urged delegates to consider using Facebook as a paid CRM channel: “You should test it,” he said.
