April 15, 2008

Tweet Success

Social Media Strategy Case Study:
Using Twitter to Promote PBS' THE NATIONAL PARKS

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People are spending more time online each year, however, increasingly, their time is spent not on individual websites but involved in social media activities. Traffic to popular websites such as Disney.com and ESPN.com has decreased over the past two years, while traffic to social media websites such as Facebook, Twitter, and others has soared. See Geoff Northcott's blog posting for more on the "decline of the destination web."

Social networks promote sharing of information between friends and people with similar interests. To reach the people on social media websites, non-profits need to develop a social media strategy suited to their goals, and that complements their other communications strategies. We provide a sample case study below for how we used Twitter to promote a recent PBS documentary.

Organizations may not be posting about their last meal, what song they're listening to, or complaining about the bus they just missed, but they can certainly use Twitter to promote their organizations and activities. For a recent website project for The National Parks: America's Best Idea, Ken Burns's recent documentary for PBS which aired in September 2009, we used Twitter in a number of ways to promote the documentary:

• We set up a PBSNationalPark account that promoted the preview website for the documentary in April 2009. This gave us 6 months of opportunity to spread awareness of the upcoming documentary.
• We "followed" other Twitter accounts that were related to national parks issues, as well as PBS stations and other PBS shows. Many of these Twitter accounts "followed" us in return, and because they had similar interests, they were more likely to retweet our postings than random accounts.
• We set up an automated email sent to users who followed us, asking them to retweet a specific message promoting the documentary. We made it easy for followers to retweet the message by making it the appropriate length and format for a tweet.
• We tweeted about a variety of different subjects:
  • Upcoming chats with the director, writer and editor of the documentary
  • New features, videos and other content on the website
  • Articles written about the documentary
  • Requests for retweets to reach a certain number of followers
  • Countdown days to the documentary airing
  • Fun facts about the national parks
  • A reminder of the hashtag #nationalparks to be used to discuss the documentary during the broadcast
  • Contests held by documentary partners
  • Reminders to watch the documentary episodes
  • Post-airing reminders of the documentary's availability in the PBS Online shop and on iTunes
• We set up URLs for each tweet using a URL-shortening service, which allowed us to both save on the number of characters needed to include a URL, as well as allowing us to track the number of followers who clicked on the links.
• Each tweet was formatted to be attention-grabbing, and also short enough to be retweeted easily.
• We tracked which tweets had the most success in being retweeted, and also tracked success based on how often we tweeted.

As an example of the information we were able to track about the success of each tweet, we posted an item that was targeted to people who enjoyed the scenery in the documentary:

"SPECTACULAR! If you watched The National Parks and want amazing parks images for your desktop, visit http://bit.ly/LPEP2"

We were able to track that within the first 5 days after the posting, the item was retweeted at least 27 times, and over 650 people clicked on the link. At the time, the Twitter account had about 3,000 followers, so this meant that the posting was both relatively popular and very viral: a .9% retweet rate, and roughly a multiplier of 24 for each person who retweeted the link. Since the Download Wallpapers page contained promotions to buy the series DVD, and to make donations to PBS, the tweet helped drive users to the website where they could take actions that were beneficial both to PBS and to the filmmakers.

Each organization using Twitter needs to find its own best practices, based on the interests of its audiences, as well as the internal support they can afford to provide. Putting together a plan that can be followed on a consistent basis can provide measurable results and increased attention to an organization and its mission.

If you'd like to discuss developing a social media plan for your organization, please contact us.

— Megan

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