Photo credit: Wikimedia Foundation, Wikimedia Commons
Have you ever been curious about the mechanics behind social media campaigns that promote a company’s products or services? If not, do read this blog post to understand how Wikipedia did it.
Facebook Campaign
In May 2022, the Spanish Wikipedia launched its first digital marketing campaign on Facebook to attract Wikipedia editors. The main objective of the campaign is to increase account creation by 5%. The campaign was mainly focused on Spanish speaking countries in North America, Central America and South America. They had a budget of $14.6K. The campaign ran for a month targeting the audience in the age group of 18-45.
They hired Monsoon Brand Studio, a digital agency to design ads. The lower part of the ad has a button , which leads to a special account creation page. On the page, they showed a short video by active member of the community. They have reached about 7.5 million people and induced about 3,33,000 to click through. The cost per click was $0.03 which was far lower than the media agency’s benchmark of $0.15. The click through rate was 1.15%. The account opening was only 0.078%, which is 0.025% more than the traditional account opening. Thus, they could not meet the goal. They suggest that campaign could be more useful for engaging in initiatives like public policy.
Email Campaign
The objective of Email campaign was to encourage people who have created accounts in Wikipedia to become active editors. They had a goal of 20% active editors. They used Mail Chimp for sending mails. The campaign ran for three months with a budget of $393. The email contained a thank you note, few suggested simple editing tasks. The total number of mails sent were 5554. 1297 people had opened the mails, which means unique opening rate 16.8%. Though there was not much response in the first week, there was an increase in the user retention by 20% in the first month. There was also an editing productivity increase. Thus, the email campaign helped was successful.
I feel that there is a disconnect between Wikipedia editing being a social service activity and Facebook being mostly a self centered activity, which might have led to the failure of the Facebook campaign. Narrowing down the target audience based on their social service interests would have been helpful.
What do you think? Please share views
