The Giants of Africa Festival 2023 was the first-ever large-scale youth basketball festival in Africa.
Giants of Africa brought 250 youth from 16 African countries to Kigali for 9 days full of life skills development, basketball, and team and community building. Highlights included a celebratory opening ceremony, a closing concert, a basketball clinic, and partaking in a basketball tournament, including an all-star game and championship competition.
The goal for Social Media was to reach audiences far beyond those attending the festival. For African youth across the continent to feel proud, united, and empowered to Dream Big* even if they were not able to attend the festival in person. Although the Giants of Africa social accounts were already successful, on a monthly basis, our goal was to recreate the energy of the festival on the digital stage, reaching an even larger audience on social media.
As a 100% organic campaign, we needed to create real hype with compelling, sharable content, along with a clear messaging approach to foster continuous positive sentiment on our social channels. The festival was an opportunity to significantly grow both social engagement and following — but we had to maintain the Giants of Africa community’s spirit of mutual empowerment through sports.
*Dream Big is the Giants of Africa slogan and was a recurring message used across platforms.
The Strategy:
"Social Media should become an extension of the event, a space for a three-way conversation between us, our followers, and the kids at the Festival."
To reach and engage more African Youth during the Festival, then keep them engaged in the months to come, our strategy began with preliminary research into which platforms that audience was using the most. Unsurprisingly, the answer was Instagram and TikTok.
Instagram was already GOA’s primary social media platform, and could be used to drive Festival content, but we had yet to launch TikTok. Rather than abandoning the platform, we integrated a TikTok launch strategy into our plans for the event. It would build on the content created and filmed during the Giants of Africa Festival, and give us the opportunity to hit the ground running on a new platform — where early growth can be painfully slow.
No matter the platform, we wanted to drive engagement through real emotions rather than text prompts.
To do that, we opted for a raw and unedited approach to our photos and videos, working to make our social media audience feel like they were part of the Festival and live behind the scenes. Getting creative up quickly, rather than focusing on polish, would keep our audience in the loop and excited.
Another layer of the strategy was to have a Major Tom team member attend the event in Rwanda. This would let us respond to comments/DMs and share stories in a timely (and time zone-appropriate) manner, reinforcing our conversational, authentic strategy for the event.
The Execution:
Instagram:
As planned, we shared mostly unedited photos and impactful videos, showing daily life at the festival and offering insights into what was happening behind the scenes. Every post should drive engagement by carrying the hype, and spotlight real people, real emotions, and real opportunity.
We published multiple feed posts a day, and even more to Giants of Africa’s stories, to really reinforce the “all-access” virtual experience.
TikTok:
We launched the account during the Festival and published 1-2 videos per day. Our goal was to create buzz for the event across the continent to rapidly build the following of the new account (and accelerate that early growth).
100% of results were achieved by organic posting, and driven by the enthusiasm of Giants of Africa’s community. No ad money was spent on this initiative.
These results were achieved from August 11th to 20th, 2023.
Instagram:
126 posts and stories posted
We achieved 100% positive sentiment with no audience fatigue for Festival content.
A very small selection of public comments:
TikTok launch performance (August 15th to August 20th, 2023):
Giants of Africa used the hype from the Festival to jumpstart their TikTok launch, surpassing all growth expectations.
