Editor's note: This is the eighth of an ongoing series profiling the 2018 SIPAward winners. See links to the others below.

On Tuesday, OPIS (Oil Price Information Service) tweeted this from Tom Kloza, one of their top analysts: "Biggest oil market impact from Hurricane Michael comes next Wednesday when EIA inevitably shows a sharp drop in US crude production numbers. Otherwise, it's a demand destruction event - not behind most recent WTI or Brent rally (Hint, it's Iran that matters)."

That's really important information, showing the value OPIS is putting on Twitter. But they also want a mix. Just before that sounded a tweet advertising their Mexico Fuel Week later this month. "Attend #MexicoFuelWk and learn how to jump start your success in this new marketplace while avoiding potential risks. Register now!"

For a company that didn't have much of a Twitter and LinkedIn following in early 2017, OPIS has social-ized quickly. Since June, when they started with Hubspot and tracking was implemented, they've gained 2,600 followers between the two platforms, revenue of over $6,000 and 177 new leads between paid and organic sources. 

It was this kind of growth that won OPIS a 2018 First Place SIPAward in the category of Best Social Media Marketing Campaign.

Here are examples of how Katlyn Greeves, social media & public relations manager at OPIS, boosted their social media presence in less than a year.

Use innovative ways to engage your audience. Greeves' ideas ran the gamut from Twitter polls and industry fun facts to #FreeTrialFridays, DOE Stock Wednesdays and Blog Mondays. "Strive for 3-to-1 (3 content 1 promotional) per day strategy."

Find a star vehicle. Theirs was the OPIS Outlook Forecast, a free downloadable whitepaper that offers expert analysis and trends for the upcoming year. It also gives an exclusive overview of the upcoming year's petroleum landscape, with expert commentary from top OPIS analysts. In just two weeks this campaign converted more than 5% of social traffic into leads, mostly from Twitter and LinkedIn, with organic outpacing paid on Twitter.

Make your landing pages special. For OPIS, nearly 70% of organic social traffic coming to the page were converting into tangible leads. A standard benchmark for landing-page conversions is around 20%. Most impressively, 42 of the new contact conversions came from Twitter (32 from organic tweets), and one received 69 clicks and 11 interactions. On average, Twitter's engagement rate is 4.9—OPIS doubled the average.

It's good to tease. A month before that report was officially launched, Greeves teased it by offering a handful of "Coming Soon" posts on Twitter and LinkedIn. Those linked to a pre-registration landing page as well as to a blog that linked to the Outlook Forecast—showcasing "Hits and Misses" from last year's Forecast. This showed customers how important this report could be for their business.

Tag, you're it—now add commentary. By using a mix of a specific hashtag (#OPISOutlookForecast) and tagging the prominent industry-influencing authors—Kloza and Denton Cinquegrana—and hashtagging sub-topics like #gasoline, and #HurricaneHarvey, Greeves built credibility and extended the posts' reach. From there, Kloza, Cinquegrana and other OPIS employees shared these posts and added their own commentaries.

Keep the momentum going. Once the report was officially launched, Greeves pinned it to the top of the @OPIS Twitter feed and scheduled close to 10 posts over the next month and a half. Due to the increase of engagement over the organic posts and the market "buzz" that was happening, she launched paid campaigns on both Twitter and LinkedIn.

Test. For Twitter, they A/B tested two tweets, one with the author's pictures but no tag, and one without their photos but with their accounts tagged. The results proved that tagging influencers is critical to social strategy for their audience.

Incorporate paid social in your mix. Overall, they garnered more than 190,000 impressions at a cost of $1,250 and over 3,000 clicks – all within 4.5 weeks. For the tweet that invited customers to download a copy of the Outlook Forecast, 103,000 of the 116,000 impressions were promoted.

Previous 2018 SIPAward profiles:
January Spring – Best Editorial and Marketing Collaboration
EB Medicine – Best Use of Video
AAA Northeast – Best Product Launch
Access Intelligence - Best Conference Marketing
Behr's Verlag – Best Video Product
Cynopsis – Best Awards Program Marketing
Simplify Compliance - Best Lead Generation/Nurturing Campaign

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Ronn Levine began his career as a reporter for The Washington Post and has won numerous writing and publications awards since. Most recently, he spent 12 years at the Newspaper Association of America covering a variety of topics before joining SIPA in 2009 and SIIA in 2013 as editorial director…