#LastSelfie a metric success for WWF

In previous weeks I have blogged about the use of Social Media in various aspects of a business.  Companies are turning to this ever so popular medium as a way to increase their Employee Involvement , find new ways to Engage Customers , use crowdsourcing to generate Product development and Design  and even digital applications for Supply Chain Management .  However, none of these new uses for Social Media within a business matter if a company does not set goals and measure its successes.

I recently came across the #LastSelfie campaign (launched by World Wildlife Fund) during my weekly research binges and decided to share this with you as the perfect example of  how to launch  a  successful social media campaign with the use of social media metrics.  The video below shows WWF working in collaboration with Hootsuite to inspire change during this campaign.

According to the ebook Practical Social Media Measurement & Analysis which is published by cloud computing company Salesforce , “For measurement to be effective, it has to align directly with the measurable objectives you’ve set. Those measurable objectives should be specific, measurable, actionable, realistic, and timed (following the SMART methodology), and directly correlate to your organization’s big-picture goals for this program.”  The ebook is a great reference point for any business looking for ways to implement social media metric strategies.  I won’t go into too much detail on its contents but I will highlight an important fact they bright to my attention, “50% of active users log on to Facebook on any given day- meaning only half your fans are even likely to see your status updates, and that among the rest of the posts they view. So, you might only be able to account for a 20%-30% view rate from your total following”.

Having read that, whether you have a statement to make, a post to update, a blog to publish or a campaign to run you should do so by choosing the right platform for your piece.  Here are some tips:

1. Choose the vertical that already has a large following of your customer base.  (hey if you have already done the work to get those customers why start from scratch ?)
2.  Then look at the daily or monthly peak times and volume statistics for that site and determine, “what percentage of your friends/fans/followers you can reach with a single post,  then a week’s worth, and a month’s worth, etc.”
3. Find a top post and study the reach you got from it such as its retweets and shares.
4. Tally the friend/follower counts from your shared content to estimate your potential reach for that piece.

My twitter follower Cesar Avila and creator of Libertyflow101 shared his thoughts with me recently, “As simple as metric means. everything in life we need to messure, from how mcuh money does a house cost to how much salt on the food we use. Special metric we measure the engagement, and how much contact we make with our viewers so in a near future we could turn them into prospects and even better, our clients.”

Listen to the Soundcloud file below to hear more about which medium WWF chose to partner with for their #LastSelfie campaign and to find out how the successful the end result was.

Lessons for Others

What was the impact of the #LastSelfie campaign you ask? Check my video below for the astounding results!  Snapchat  also contains a feature called Snaplytics which provides users with real-time metric tools such as the number of opens for your posts, number of screenshots that were taken and shared, your completion rate for your story  and the tap rate  for your video or picture.  My contact Mick at Snaplytics shared some insight on this feature, “Snaplytics offers story performance metrics like views, screenshots, retention rate and skip rate (whether viewers actually watched your video or not).  On top of that we also let you monitor your daily follower growth, including how your new followers added you (snapcode, deeplink or username).  You can see the metrics and more in action in our live demo http://snaplytics.io/demo which showcases our analytics app for a real snapchat account.”

I also received some feedback from Donor Relation Coordinator  at WWF, Jody Hewitt, regarding how they measure their social media campaigns.  Jody states, “In terms of how we measure the success of our social media campaigns, we look at post engagement (likes, clicks, shares) as well as reach and impressions. If we are running a campaign that drives to a website, we also look at referrals from social.  Our 3 biggest platforms are Facebook, Twitter and Instagram. Facebook is our largest audience with about 205,000 page likes for our English page and 22,000 for our French page.Most of the traffic to that page comes organically. When we have a post do really well with a lot of shares we see a huge spike. Sometimes we run ads which would also attract new followers to us. We also include links to our social networks on our website homepage, in e-newsletters, and blog.”

WWF proved to us that investigating their customers social media habits led to their decision in using Snapchat.  The “ third most popular social media platform” was their medium of choice and thus the key to the success of the #LastSelfie Campaign. If you were impressed by this campaign and its success you can also check out the video WWF made in partnership with Coca-Cola for their Artic Home Campaign to drive more awareness to the issue of endangered species around the world.  Jody also provided me with some  metric tracking information on a much more recent campaign that WWF ran this past November called #WeAreAllWildlife, “We track hashtag and keyword use from social media and other news sources. Metrics that are important to us is number or mentions, reach/impressions, notable people talking about it, sentiment, and where people are talking about it. We also look at how our own posts/content performed to see what really worked. For this particular campaign, we had our most successful social post ever. Our video was shared 132,000+ times on Facebook and viewed 9 million+ times. During a span of about 1 month, we gained 30,000 new followers – about 30 times our typical monthly growth.”

Robert F. Kennedy once said, “Few will have the greatness to bend history itself, but each of us can work to change a small portion of events. It is from numberless diverse acts of courage and belief that human history is shaped. Each time a man stands up for an ideal, or acts to improve the lot of others, or strikes out against injustice, he sends forth a tiny ripple of hope, and crossing each other from a million different centers of energy and daring those ripples build a current which can sweep down the mightiest walls of oppression and resistance.”

So let me share with you the feedback this campaign got as well as some few tips to create a successful Snapchat campaign that I came across from fellow blogger Kelsey Alexander. (please view in full screen mode for full impact)

If you have concerns as to the accuracy of anything posted on this site, please send your concerns to Peter Carr, Program Director, Social Media for Business Performance.

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