This year we decided to throw together a quick April Fools’ Day joke.
The joke was that the government were introducing a new national registration and number plate scheme.
As the joke was targeted at custom number plate owners, the hook was that all personalised and custom plates would be replaced when the scheme was introduced.
All we did was publish a fake press release on a newly registered domain at NationalRegistration.com.au and then shared it on our Facebook page. The general public did the rest…
First up we shared it on our Facebook page:
Although the likes and comments on this post weren’t super huge, the 550+ shares resulted in hundreds more likes and comments as the post was shared by various people and pages.
One of the most impressive numbers was ‘people reached’, which is basically just the number of people who saw the post.
A whopping 228,000 people saw the post! And whilst the post was ‘boosted’, it was only a $30 boost and as you can see, the overwhelming majority of views were organic rather than paid.
One of the more impressive shares was by Custom Plates, which is the Victorian State Government-run issuer of custom number plates:
Again this post didn’t result in many likes or comments, but did pull in another 500+ shares, which again resulted in many more likes and comments.
Aside from the Facebook success, there was also plenty of action away from Facebook.
The link to the press release was shared on a number of different websites and forums, which generated plenty more commentary from people who didn’t pick up on the joke.
Traffic to the website we set up was very strong, with over 20,000 visitors to the website on the first day.
Not a bad result for launch-day of a brand new website!
The traffic continued to flow for the next couple of days, and at the time of writing (6 days after launch) the site has received over 67,000 visits, of which just over 53,000 were unique.
Although we didn’t share the media release on Twitter, a number of other people did the job for us.
Overall the results were quite pleasing.
A couple of hundred thousand people saw our post, over 50,000 visited the website and ultimately we ended up with a big spike in traffic to our real website at numberplates.com.au.
Not bad for about two hours’ work and thirty bucks.
Now we need to start thinking about what to do next year…