Last week thousands of protestors descended on Wall Street to send Mayor Bloomberg and the banks as simple message: It’s time for millionaires to pay their fair share. The occasion was the release the new budget in New York City, a budget that would cut teachers jobs and social services for low income families.
We started working with the groups organizing the protest just three weeks before May 12. Our plan was pretty simple: leverage existing social media channels to build a strong fan base. In this case, the obvious choice was Facebook.
We put up the On May 12 Facebook page and immediately began a fan ad campaign. With such a short window (18 days) we knew we had to build fans quickly and to prime the pump, sort of speak, we knew fan ads would be the most effective way to quickly grow the group to a size where some real organic growth could occur.
The groups involved with the On May 12 movement focused on creating high quality video and blog content to share on the page. This steady stream of rich content gave new fans a better idea of what On May 12 was all about. And the frequent churn of content also gave fans a reason to come back to the page and more content to share with friends.
As we approached May 12, the day of action, we began shifting resources to advertise events on Facebook to existing fans. We wanted fans to RSVP to the May 12 events to help generate newsfeed items.
On the day of May 12, we also added a sponsored story ad to our campaign in Facebook. This would ensure that On May 12 posts would not get lost in our fans newsfeed items. We knew there would be a steady stream of protest related posts and we wanted all the fans to see them.
Overall, in just 18 days, the On May 12 group picked up more than 6,000 fans. It’s impressive for most organizations to pick up 6,000 fans in less than three weeks, but to go from zero fans to 6,000 is pretty incredible.
A lot of factors contributed to this impressive growth, like all the groups involved who emailed their large email lists and let their own social networks know about the movement. The power of unions in and around New York who leveraged their bases to grow the network, and the rich content that produced were also driving factors. But Facebook ads were a critical element to jumpstarting this campaign. We were able to bypass what is normally a stagnant period of growth and build a strong community in less than three weeks.
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Joan Walsh
Kerry Lauerman
Salon.com
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