Case Study

Does your organization want to increase its social media reach by attracting more Facebook fans and Twitter followers, or is your primary goal to increase engagement among the social media followers you already have? In this one example, we’ve broken down the details to explain the strategy and execution of one super successful campaign.

Objective

The Central Carolina Community Foundation launched TalkAboutGiving.org in March of 2011 to encourage multi-generational conversation about philanthropy. Talk About Giving developed a web presence on top social media networks including Facebook, Twitter and YouTube and worked with Riggs Partners and KeelySaye.com to drive traffic to the newly designed website. Goal number one included building social media reach that would then pull traffic into the website by posting links to original blog articles regularly.

Audience

Understanding that nonprofit organizations had the most to gain from this concept, Talk About Giving targeted those nonprofits within the parent organization’s service area to encourage them to share the message virally. Simply asking people to “like” or “follow” a page wasn’t going to be enough, so we had to come up with something better. We broke down our target audience into persona profiles, and all content development centered around them in the campaign, on the blog, and in microblogs within the social media news feeds.

Strategy

Contests and sweepstakes tend to work well in social media, but some work better than others depending on the circumstances. Sweepstakes are great for increasing current network engagement rates while contests or competitions are proven to increase the networks’ reach by pulling in new fans and followers. Since our primary goal was to grow the networks, we opted for the competition to make a splash in our brand new Facebook, Twitter and YouTube accounts that had less than 100 followers total.

Campaign

In the summer of 2011, the Talk About Giving team launched the “Summer Grant Giveaway”. Any nonprofit with a 501c3 incorporation status within Central Carolina Community Foundation’s service area could potentially win $2,000 depending on which organization could garner the most votes. Using Wildfire App as the third party application to legally execute the campaign according to Facebook’s Promotions Guidelines, the “Summer Grant Giveaway” was launched with a traditional press release, blog article, micro-targeted Facebook ad and lot’s of online influencer outreach.

Results

• Facebook likes increased from 136 to 1,180
• Tab views totaled over 2,800
• Twitter followers increased from 0 to more than 250
• YouTube views totaled over 250