by Kate Bentham
At the beginning of May 2012 the FIS ran a weeklong multi-platform social media campaign called #WeAre12 to commemorate 12 years since the service was first launched.
It was hoped that #WeAre12 would:
The events which took place during #WeAre12 were:
Family Information Service Blog
As part of delivering information online we launched a blog to easily share information, comment on news and also be a go to place for not only parents but other working with children, young people and families.
We also wanted the blog to feature guest blogs to showcase and highlight the work of other services which supported families, especially community and voluntary sector organisations.
More importantly we wanted the blog to also include articles from parents who felt able to share their experiences of being parents and to act as a peer support for other parents experiencing similar situations.
Launch of Google +
We had undertaken research on Google + and assessed the potential of the platform for the service. The statistics showed that it was a growing platform and that the highest proportion of users were male. We saw this as a good way of sharing information with dads, who currently only accounted for 8% of service users. Also the wait and see approach to Google+ wasn’t a strong enough argument not to deliver through this channel. We were prepared to give it a go.
Live Question and Answer Session on Facebook
We have a well-established Facebook Family and wanted to host an event especially for Facebookers. We issued a poll to see if people would want a live question and answer session, and if so when would be a good time. The poll said yes, and evenings would be better – once the children we in bed. We checked when Corrie was on and posted the event on the page. Again we weren’t sure if it would work, after all parents might not want to ask us a question about their family in a very open forum.
Live Tweet of Enquires
The service responds to a wide range of information requests. It really is anything and everything to do with family life. We wanted to show how no two requests for information were the same, because no two families are the same. It was hoped that by showing the nature of requests it might help parents to understand that the service really is there for them too. No question is out of the question. We tweeted the question and also tweeted our reply.
Infographics and Wordles
The last day of the campaign was really to provide some information on the service, through infographics and wordles, which were placed on the blog – to drive traffic there. We wanted to show the feedback we’d had from parents, number of enquiries we’d had since we launched (76,800 fact fans) and also information on childcare provision in Shropshire. We also posted some of the headline stats alongside the images. The posts generated our second highest page views for the week.
Facts and Stats
We were constantly gathering evidence throughout the week, screen grabs and analytics, as a way of evaluating the campaign as it ran. We may not know the impact of the campaign for some time but by the end of the week the stats were as follows:-
Blog post
Mon Tues Wed Thu Fri
Page Views 60 65 374 94 135
Facebook referrals 8 9 166 35 27
Twitter Referrals 10 4 89 20 27
46% of #WeAre12 tweets were replied to by followers
45% of #WeAre12 tweets were retweeted
Number of followers increased by 5%
31,442 accounts reached
157,977 impressions
Weekly total reach up by 118%
Number of new likes up by 3%
People talking about this increase of 40%
Google +
Number of pluses up by 57% increase
The Good
We used the #WeAre12 hashtag for the whole campaign. Having an overall campaign hashtag was essential. For the live tweet of enquiries we used #FISLive and when we distributed the infographics and wordles we used #FISFact.
The Bad
The Cake
Kate Bentham is an officer for Shropshire Council's Family Information Service