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The Economist, London (The Economist Newspaper, United Kingdom). |
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Project name |
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The Economist 1 million fans/timeline campaign
March 2012
http://www.facebook.com/theeconomist
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General Publication Info |
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The Economist is an English-language weekly news and international affairs publication owned by The Economist Newspaper Ltd, covering topical issues such as politics, business, finance, science and technology. It was first published in 1843 to take part in 'a severe contest between intelligence, which presses forward, and an unworthy, timid ignorance obstructing our progress.
Today The Economist has a circulation of 1.5million and 7 million unique users via its website: The Economist Online.
The Economist has developed some of the largest and most engaged social audiences within the publishing sector worldwide, with over 4million followers in total, 1million of which are signed up to its Facebook page: www.facebook.com/theeconomist
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Content |
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Content published via our Facebook page:
• Economist Articles
• Exclusive or preview content
• Q & A forums with Economist journalists
• Content programs curated purely for the Facebook channel
• Photos / videos / polls
• User generated activity
In more detail:
Our Facebook page is primarily a tool to allow readers to sample, engage with and recommend our content. We drive page views and create and build stronger relationships with our readers using Facebook. We are successful by listening to our fans, incorporating their feedback and always presenting user value.
To offer value / reward membership, all links to Economist articles posted via our Wall are free to view for users. We include content postings from our weekly printed edition as well as daily editorial content from our website. Our postings are all manually crafted to allow each one to provide an overview of the article and compel users to share, comment or click back to our website to read the full article.
Another way we add value is via exclusive or preview content postings. For example, each week Facebook fans can see the cover of the new weekly edition 4 hours before the cover is officially released.
In addition, Facebook fans often receive free or exclusive access to Economist events and conferences around the world to again reaffirm the value proposition for our Facebook community.
In addition to content postings, we provide ways for our audience to interact with The Economist. An example of how this is accomplished is via periodic hour-long Q & A forums with an Economist editor where users can pose questions to an editor via our Facebook page. In addition, we have also developed Facebook specific apps to allow users to more easily engage with us and with fellow Readers. An example includes our Debates, Economist Radio and ‘What the world thinks’ apps.
We encourage user interaction by inviting our community to share or participate in page activities. We’ve had users send playful, user-generated photos related to our covers. When our page was reaching the 1million fan milestone we invited fans to submit photos of how they like to read to their Economist – be it on holiday, at home, in print, on the web or on digital.
In addition to our regular content, we programmatically publish specific content to Facebook such as archives related to a recent story, end of year voting on favourite covers, and other interactive outreach. For example, The Economist covers dictators around the world exceptionally well, and last year when Bin Ladin was killed and Kim Jong IL died we collated photo albums of Economist covers featuring the leaders and shared with our community. These were highly popular as they were timely and highly relevant. We also have a weekly quiz related to our weekly content that we have developed into a Facebook app.
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Implementation and Working team |
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The Economist Facebook page was launched in 2007 and our audience grown organically. The Economist has not run recruitment drives to acquire fans, which has allowed us to maintain an interested and engaged audience (an engaged user is much more valuable than a user who signed up and then never returned).
Our Facebook page serves a number of purposes for our business:
• Drive traffic to our website
• Increase brand awareness and reach
• Build interaction with our content
• Support activities of other businesses within The Economist group, such as Events and Conferences
• Provide a forum to allow Readers to interact with the brand (and for us to interact with Readers)
• Introduce readers to our Economist content through referral
The social media team sits within our Audience Development department and is split between two locations – London and New York. This is done to allow us to maximise our coverage window during the working day and to allow us to respond and update social postings in a timely manner. We work closely with our editorial colleagues to allow us to deliver relevant content at the most appropriate times as well as generating ways for our editors to engage with Readers in real time - something that is not that easy to accomplish on other channels.
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Additional comments |
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One initiative that best represents our use of Facebook is our 1million fans/timeline campaign in March 2012.
The campaign’s objective was to increase interaction and awareness about our page as well as a relationship building activity, where we would thank our fans and provide exclusive offers to reward fan loyalty. This was done by combining a user-generated activity with the launch of Timeline upon reaching 1 million fans.
Campaign consisted of:
• Creating an event page to focus interest and build buzz. View: http://on.fb.me/y53OwZ
• User generated activity: Inviting users to share photos of how like to read their The Economist. All photos could then be voted on by other fans via the Like button
• Shortlisted photos would then be used to create a collage image of fans on Timeline
• We activated our new Timeline page after reaching the 1million fan marker
• Editorial curated key events in history (WWII, the sinking of the Titanic) our initial coverage of important topics (the first time we mentioned the world-wide web) and interesting points in The Economist history (our first colour cover).
Campaign success:
• We developed a sense value for our fans and increase loyalty
• We received over 60 user generated photos
• Facebook page engagement levels increased 8%
• We increased page sign up rates by 15%
• Our campaign was praised in industry press including:
Folio magazine: http://bit.ly/MeptvF
Ad Age (Creativity-online): http://bit.ly/MeqoMF
Music-valley group: http://bit.ly/MeqOTe
• Internally within our organisation the campaign was well received including celebrations in our NYC and London offices and promotion throughout all of our internal channels.
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LINKS |
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Our page can be viewed at:
http://on.fb.me/OzZ0t4
Million fan campaign Facebook event page:
http://on.fb.me/OzZfUP
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General contact and feedback address:
Ms. Raquel Meikle
Programme Manager Events
WAN-IFRA
Darmstadt, Germany
Phone: +49-6151-733.927
E-Mail: raquel.meikle@wan-ifra.org
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