We fooled the Yandex.Navi users on April Fools’ Day!
Yandex Turkey had won the hearts of the users with its young perspective and jargon on social media. We couldn’t help but fool our target audience who mostly consist of young people. We wanted to be the first company to use Facebook’s then-popular ‘‘poking’’ feature so we brought the poking feature to Yandex.Navi.
On the micro site that we created, we told our users that the era of complaining has ended with the message ‘‘Don’t complain; poke!’’ The website which was fed by the traffic insight data made the users believe that this feature really existed. The users thought that was a brilliant idea and that the engineers of Yandex must have figured out the technical aspects.
With the posts that we published on social media, we announced the new feature on April Fools’ Day. The complaining is now over in traffic! The users tried to learn how to use the feature on the micro site by clicking the link in the post. People opened the app to look for the feature, updated it when they couldn’t find it, asked on social media how to use it, and even only downloaded the application just for the sake of this feature!
In addition to the users who have tried all these things, after a while some of the users who remembered that it was the April Fools’ Day began to post messages on the social media to congratulate us. Before the joke became known to everyone, we had already got an acceleration and enticed many users. So, we admitted that it was just a joke by posting an acrostic poem that we had prepared before. The positive reactions that we have received from the users such as ‘‘Good job!’’, ‘‘I’ll download the app just for this’’, and ‘‘You won our hearts’’ proved that we have created brand ambassadors by choosing a fun way.
