2m reach, 270k engagement and 2k new fans with a single organic Facebook post, how?
- Technology, boundaryless cooperation and audience: triangular relationships for successful digital marketing campaigns
- Technology: leverage to help cultivate ideas to interact with the audience
- Boundaryless corporation: timely response to ride on technology and opportunity in rapid changing environment
- Know your audience: for the right content strategy and growth
Despite the fierce competition and the ever-changing Facebook algorithm with reduced organic reach, companies still ride on Facebook, at present still the world’s biggest social network with over 2.6 billion monthly active users as of Q1 of 2020 to reach current and new customers, gain loyal readers, and promote product or service.
As digital marketers, the key challenge remains to find effective ways to stay ahead of the competition, better engage with our audience, and increase followers.
Achieving 2m reach, 270k engagement with 2k new fans with a single organic Facebook post seems impossible, here is the secret behind this post and fans drive campaign:
- Leverage technology
Live feed poll was a trending Facebook polling format and back then, appeared and employed by only a handful of overseas Facebook Pages during the 2016 United States elections. The beauty of this format included:
1.1 Live video format, FB’s favorite and corresponding high organic reach
1.2 Notification on the post sent to reach the audience
1.3 The mechanism encourages the audience’s engagement
We saw the potential of the format to reach audiences and studied the mechanism. In addition to the voting, a real-time bar was added to help audiences to visualise the updated voting results, adding excitement to other concerned participants and encouraging comments and revisits for updated results. The uniqueness and unprecedented format has given a freshness approach to interaction and engagement
2. Agile and cross-functional teams cooperation
The timing was a critical factor that the post is based on a highly debatable court ruling that it must happen at the very moment the ruling was announced. Mastering the technology to use the format and the right design / content approach that makes the best use of the format were all key to success. Open, transparent, and close working relationships amongst teams of various related disciplines: Data Analytics, digital marketing, IT, Content, and Design Teams has led to the best outcome. This boundaryless cooperation was a team culture that flourished and founded on mutual understanding and knowledge sharing among the teams. These teams, based on their professional practice, provided inputs and came up with solutions and timely decisions and implementation work. They all functioned as one.
Another worth noted fact was the huge volume of web traffic we needed to handle due to this post. This slightly unexpected but foreseeable outcome was smoothly handled by the IT team to switch the boost of traffic to another web server, again cooperation flourished from daily interactions and exchange.
3. Always think from the audience’s point of view
As professional media, we had the advantage of having professional editors who provided input on a professional approach to handle the vote in the most professional way and that best utilised the mechanism, the incident and audience’s focus. To broaden the reach, a round of seeding was done at a specific Facebook Page and an online forum to bring in extra audience to help on the reach and engagement that had triggered Facebook’s auto mechanism of providing more reach to the post.
4. Optimization for the future Facebook posts
To maximize the impacts and benefit the entire businesses, we transferred the technology to other business units for their use of the format.
We have also made use of this format and made creative use of the format, not just for voting but such creations as Lunar New Year resolution that brings Facebook user’s comments onto the live video in the format of revolution written on sky lantern in the air with Hong Kong skyline as a background, resulting in 30 times engagement of an average post. We also extended it to daily economic news content creation. The interaction was six times higher than our generic posts.
Summary
Digital marketing is not only about posting, video shooting or ineffectively investing in media ads. It’s about understanding your audience’s interest, what they do, and embracing technology, understanding its essence, and making the best use of it by blending in your own content, product, service, or message to deliver the best outcome.
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About the author
Karen Lau is a Web3, Metaverse and NFT enthusiast. She has a passionate interest in applying the latest technology, such as augmented reality (AR), artificial intelligence (AI), NLP, and business intelligence (BI), to digital marketing for long-term growth. She successfully developed and evolved the company’s digital activities across online platforms.
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