It’s the evening after Valentine’s day.
There you are; alone at your office desk, scrolling through your Twitter timeline, not really liking anything; when something catches your eyes. Someone just mentioned you in a Tweet. It says something about you being a motivation and how they would like to take you out for dinner sometimes.
So you perk up at the edge of your seat, but now you are wearing a smile. You know the person. You really admire them too. And you plan to take them up on the offer.
Across Nigeria Twitter on the day after Valentine, many Tweeps were getting these pleasant surprises. Secret admirers were tweeting love notes at them.
Happy Valentine’s Day baby girl. From your boyfriend @teelewah #ItsALoveThing @DiamondBankNG
— Ayodeji (@Ayo_d10) February 15, 2018
As part of Valentine's Day celebration, Diamond Bank ran a campaign that persuaded Nigerian social media natives to send love notes to their crushes and significant others with the hashtag; #ItsALoveThing.
These love notes would later be made into a very long crowd-sourced love song performed by Bez Idakula - easily the most versatile alternative act in Nigeria - and streamed live across Instagram, Facebook and Twitter.
For a Nigerian Twitter demographic obsessively enamoured with the idea of “shooting their shot,” the campaign was a fodder for an already popular idea.
And so naturally the Tweets flowed - a veritable flood of love messages tagging @DiamondBankNG, Bez and strung together by the hashtag #ItsALoveThing.
For one night, Twitter absolved Tinder of its match-making responsibilities. Twitter became Twinder, thanks to Diamond Bank. And it was glorious.
https://twitter.com/OgaPromoter/status/964119524105773057
https://twitter.com/Lyricalwizzy/status/964132072481869824
This is not a review as much as an unabashed admiration of the thought that went into this and the seamless execution of it.
If the reaction tweets are anything to go by, #ItsALoveThing is a resounding success.
We would be remiss to not give a material mention to the pure genius of Bez. How he strung the tweets into a soulful composition, backed by his delicate, light and breezy guitar work is a study in musical mastery and authority.
Diamond Bank’s flair for authentic human connections may be their greatest strength in a social media landscape where everything has been reduced to savagery and clapbacks. When a bank goes beyond “the bland and the expectedly savage social media template” to the realm of pure human connections, then you should know we’d be rooting for that.
Diamond Bank naturally has a list of events lined up for the year. We are sure about the Beauty Souk happening in March. We can’t wait for that and other things Diamond Bank has in store.
Meanwhile, enjoy this video compilation of selected tweets from #ItsALoveThing live performance and gaze, once more, upon the pure brilliance of Diamond Bank and Bez.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v7tnInibc_0
