The overall aim was to increase the number of people seeing London Fire Brigade's safety messages and what the organisation does on a daily basis. This case study forms part of our social media strategy resource.
Objectives
Our overall aim was to increase the number of people seeing our safety messages and what our organisation does on a day-to-day basis. We also wanted to grow our social reach and engagement, increase the share of traffic visiting our website from social media platforms and increase the overall views of our website.
Audience
We focused on our current and prospective social media followers.
Strategy
Although London Fire Brigade had a large following on social media, the platforms were only being used when larger incidents happened in the capital. This would lead to occurrences such as in January 2014, where only nine posts were made on Facebook throughout the month. Our digital newsroom strategy was to:
- Post more often
- Produce more content
- Reuse and schedule content around our audience
- Include images, video and links to our website
Tactics
In order to post more, we had to produce more. This meant redefining what the organisation viewed as ‘news’. Previously only press releases went online but with firefighters winning world championships and taking part in the Olympics, internal news would inevitably be valuable external content that our audience would enjoy as well.
We now have a content calendar to help with producing the additional content that our strategy demands. This allows sufficient planning to take place so everyone has enough time to source their content.
Just like journalists, we now collate content and ask social media users if we can use their images with a credit to include photos with our tweets.
Free resources such as Tweetdeck (now Twitter dashboard) enabled us to schedule posts throughout the day or week. Along with reusing content – something we never used to do, we would tweet once and never again about that incident – we are now able to put content in front of our audience, when they are online.
A significant change we made to our website was to no longer allow ‘press releases’ to go online. Instead, we edit them to look like any article on a news website looks. This includes putting in sub-headings, removing ‘notes to editors’, adding any images or videos and crosslinking to other areas of the website.
Did it work? What were the outcomes?
In 2014 there were only 22 instances when social media provided more than a 10 per cent share of website traffic per week. Since implementing the newsroom changes in late December 2014/early January 2015, the share of website traffic arriving through social media has never dropped below 10 per cent. The average percentage share since January 2015 is 24 per cent - a quarter of all the traffic to our website now comes from social media.
This level of increase has coincided with a growth in visitors to our website. By the end of 2015, the website had achieved the highest ever number of sessions, users and page views in a single calendar year since the organisation began using Google Analytics (2011).
Social reach and engagement on Facebook increased 50 per cent between 2014 and 2015 and on Twitter, impressions were four times higher and engagement nine times higher over the same period.
What did you learn?
Let data prove your point. The London Fire Brigade already had a hugely successful social media account that had won several awards. As a result, suggesting what would prove to be the biggest change in strategy since the organisation launched on social media wasn’t a popular suggestion.
There was a lot of resistance and doubt cast over the ideas. This can make it easy to question if the changes will work but when the strategy is still achieving results almost 100 weeks later. The data has proved the point.
Would you do anything differently? We would use a short-term campaign as a testing platform for any significant changes to a strategy. This would allow any results to be demonstrated quickly and in a sizeable chunk for analysis, helping tackle any lingering doubt that may exist about the change in actions.
Want to know more?
Contact Richard Wilson via email or by calling 0208 555 1200 x30762