The U.S. State Department learned a costly lesson recently: They can't buy friends. And next time they should hire competent help for their online campaigns.
The Bureau of International Information Programs — that’s the State Department’s foreign communications service — spent $630,000 to enhance its social media presence through ads and better pages. But a blistering report by the department's inspector general says it bungled the project.
At first look, the bureau's initiative shows the two-year spending push propelled the bureau's English-language Facebook pages from 100,000 “likes” to more than 2 million. (Its foreign-language pages also reached 450,000 likes.)
Look again and see the most liked pages suffered from a measly 2% engagement rate, with few posts appearing on users’ news feeds.
Investigators said the ad campaigns “bought fans” who may have clicked on an ad or “liked” a photo but who had no real interest and never engaged further. Even fewer fans were from the target audience of older, influential people.
The report chided the bureau for having overlapping (and sometimes competing) social media accounts, an internal atmosphere of “secrecy, suspicion and uncertainty” and poor leadership. Just what social media was designed to overcome. We hope the department learns its lesson.
Is your social media in competent hands?
Read the original article here: http://goo.gl/1rA0YU
