PreSchool California
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Preschool California conducted an experiment using social media to establish relationships with journalists, increase their Facebook fan base, and engage their target audiences. They found some success in gaining brand exposure and feedback through Twitter, but saw fewer media opportunities and email conversions than hoped. Moving forward, they would adjust expectations, target journalists better, conduct more research, and integrate Facebook more thoughtfully with other communications efforts. Key revelations included using Twitter for listening and Facebook as a forum, and moving social media efforts beyond just retweets and responses.
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PreSchool California
- 1. Deb KongAshlee TranPreschool California Social Media Lab: July 9, 2010 Preschool California in the Social Media Sandbox : An Experiment Image courtesy of flickr user hidelafoglia
- 3. objectives establish relationships with journalists track media coverage offer tips, pitches and content to journalists increase the number of Facebook fans increase fan participation
- 4. twitter audience journalists early learning advocates parents providers and teachers early learning advocates and organizations facebook audience
- 5. integration with our communications plan Tracking media coverage, upcoming events, policy updates and advocacy opportunities Reaching target audiences through traditional and new forms of media Increasing web traffic ande-list
- 6. tactics follow engage track
- 7. tactics #preschool #earlychildhood #prek #earlylearning #ECE
- 10. results
- 16. feedback and retweets from clips
- 17. new method to track media coverage(:
- 19. tweets are less time consuming than email(:
- 22. 6% Before Experiment: Average Monthly Growth of Facebook Fans
- 23. 8% During Experiment: Average Monthly Growth of Facebook Fans
- 24. 100% Increase in Average Monthly Interactions After Experiment
- 25. If We Could Do It Again… adjust expectations target journalists better conduct more research use Facebook more thoughtfully, including integration with email and advocacy efforts; using existing content and materials; and posting an interactive activity for subscribers
- 26. revelations 1. Twitter as a listening device
- 27. revelations 2. Facebook as a forum Image courtesy of flickr user marfis75
- 28. revelations 3. Beyond retweets and responses
Editor's Notes
- DK:What was our experiment? Combined listening and Twitter experiment, mini-Facebook experiment
- DK: Objectives
- AT: Twitter Audience: Journalists, early learning advocatesFacebook Audience: Parents, providers and teachers, other early learning organizations, advocates
- DK: Reaching our target audiences through both traditional forms of media and social mediaShare media coverage, upcoming early education events, policy updates and advocacy opportunitiesResults; increasing participation in advocacy campaigns, website traffic, and number of email list subscribers
- DK: Followed 30 education journalists/media outletsTracked coverage trends, education developmentsScanned tweets for media coverage and engaged/responded. Thanked journalists for coverage, retweeted posts of interest, posted relevant or interesting coverage
- DK:Used special hashtags, keywordsPersonalized tweets
- AT: Unique URL and special registration pageGather data—Insights, google analytics to target and segment facebook
- AT: Facebook Tactics 2:-Use @tags to encourage interaction and exposure on other’s facebook walls-Add photos-Create events and invite fans
- AT: - A mixed bag
- DK: Beginning was successfulRelevant articles were posted Able to engage with journalists, including additional resource for a journalist who wrote about our bill
- DK: However, later, fewer relevant articles = fewer opportunities to engage meaningfully with reporters
- DK: We still found successPreschool California still retweeted and commented on a number of articles responses from other advocates and interested Twitter users = increased brand and message exposureClips = lots of feedback and retweetsFollowing journalists = good way to track media coverageJournalists’ usage of social media varies widely
- DK: Twitter offers another channel to communicate with journalistsTweets are more informal, less time consuming than email, so journalists may be more likely to readSlight disconnect between journalists who produce written content and journalists on twitter
- AT: Unique URL and special registration pageGather data—Insights, google analytics to target and segment facebookSuccessfully incorporated tracking, including unique URLs and analytics
- AT: Unfortunately, did not add as many facebook conversions as we had hopedLikely because many of our facebook fans are already subscribed to our email listHowever, we did see a small increase in facebook fans due to increased postings and interactions, use of tags may have contributed
- AT: OvFans – increase in fan growther previous 3.5 month period, we saw ~17% growth, vs. the less than 3 month period of April through June, we saw ~21% growth
- AT: Fans – increase in fan growther previous 3.5 month period, we saw ~17% growth, vs. the less than 3 month period of April through June, we saw ~21% growth
- AT: ChartInteractions: Average of 13 interactions a month, from Dec to March, April to June was averaging 26 interactions a month
- DK + AT:Adjust expectationsMake sure we targeted who we were following—at the beginning of the journalist experiment, we had far too many journalists to follow, many of whom were only pushing out content for their newspaper.Conduct more research on hashtags used by journalists and tag tweets more thoughtfullyConduct more research to organize and structure our project before executing the experiment—create stronger scaffolding that needs fewer edits throughout the experiment. This way we can dedicate more time to executing, rather than implementing.Conduct more research: create a list of organizations with which to engage in order to increase exposure on FacebookMore thoughtfully use existing content and materials to post on FacebookBetter integrate Facebook sharing with email messages and advocacy campaignsInclude an interactive activity for our Facebook users, such as “Post a picture of yourself at Advocacy Day”
- DK: Understanding the value of checking our Twitter feed and journalists list as an overall piece of our communications strategy—many articles were on Twitter that we would not have found otherwise
- AT: Facebook is not necessarily the best way to attract email subscribers, but is instead a highly effective method of keeping existing supporters engaged and involved on a more interactive and regular basis. Additionally, some subscribers may even prefer Facebook to email, as we found with some of our supporters.
- DK: Recognizing that even if the specific target audience does not always respond to your content, there is much value to other users seeing and responding to it. Pushing out content, retweeting and posting frequent Facebook updates are all ways to expose others to your branding and messaging. It also reminds followers that you are active and engaged, which is already a great return on investment.