Coca-Cola turns to social media to promote Christmas truck tour

Coca-Cola is embarking on its annual Christmas truck tour of the UK, stopping at 46 locations. But this year the soft drinks brand is focusing on social media to promote the marketing stunt.

The brand is encouraging people to upload their photos of the truck to social media site Twitter via the hashtag: #holidaysarecoming and by tweeting the company directly @CocaCola_GB.

Coca-Cola’s red truck, which has featured in the “Holidays are coming” Christmas advert for 20 years, is going on tour.

Coca-Cola Christmas truck tour, which will kick off on a nationwide tour on 20 November, will be stopping at 46 locations up and down the country.

The festive truck mimicks Coke’s famous “The Holidays Are Coming” ad from November 1995.

Coca-Cola launched the tour on Twitter:“Are we coming to your town? RT to find out! When we hit 500 RTs we’ll reveal all 46 stops.”

It is the first time the company has used social media to drum up support for the campaign in this way.

Four hours after the tweet, fans were able to see the full list of locations, which includes the cities of Edinburgh, Glasgow, Cardiff, Liverpool, Manchester, London, Leeds, Reading, Sheffield, Bournemouth and Nottingham amongst others.

On each stop, fans will have the chance to take pictures with the truck as it lights up and experience a snowy winter wonderland setting while enjoying a choice of Coca-Cola, Diet Coke, Coke Zero or Coke Life.

“Social media offers a richness of targeting that many marketers still under-rate. Beyond time of day and day of week, the precision of geo targeting and targeting based on known interests of each person is a game-changer”, says Danny Meadows-Klue, President of the Digital Training Academy that have been coaching marketers on social media for over 10 years.

Last year, Coca-Cola’s Truck Tour website received nearly two million hits in 2014, whilst 50,000 official customer photos were taken across the tour’s 46 stops last year.

On the future of social media, Meadows-Klue is bullish about the potential for paid brand exposures: “Facebook has made the process so effortless that many small businesses without agencies are now active social media players. It’s unlocking a similar effect to Google’s keyword planner, and that’s where Facebook will see some of its biggest growth. In the last few months Twitter has been dialing up its paid-for offerings and over the next two years we’d expecting to see more from Pinterest, Insta and the other key platforms. Tumblr may hold out longer because Yahoo can leverage their cookie, which unlocks the rest of their massive network and the programmatic opportunities”.