Clean Energy Ministerial - Digital Media Year+ in Review

Editor's Notes

1. CEM’s communications strategy features a wide range of PR, positioning, and event-focused communications activities, in addition to stakeholder outreach.
2. Six digital media platforms provide a foundation for stakeholder outreach. Specific activities include: Publishing content & building discussion on Twitter Publishing content & building discussion on Facebook Maintaining a library of videos on YouTube Moderating a LinkedIn discussion group Designing, developing, & distributing a quarterly CEM e-newsletter Publishing initiative and ministerial meeting information, news articles, blog posts, & a comprehensive library of CEM tools & resources on the CEM website. Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube are our social media platforms, while the e-newsletter and website are additional digital media platforms. Target audiences for stakeholder outreach: CEM participating governments, policy makers in CEM countries NGOs (working in clean energy, energy efficiency, energy access) Climate change constituencies The energy-interested public Private-sector and industry representatives The targeted outcomes of this outreach include: Increased awareness of the CEM & its work Increased use of CEM information & tools Year-round discussion about CEM and its work Extended reach for CEM communications – secondary exposure gained by other organizations’ & individuals’ reuse/sharing of our content
3. Exposure is about who sees your content, how many new or secondary audiences are exposed to your content, and whether your content is reaching your target audiences. Awareness: Users that take action with your content – giving it the thumbs up or sharing it with their friends/followers – are demonstrating awareness. They have seen your content and recognized its value, choosing to like it or share it. Discussion is about who is talking about you, and to what extent they are doing so. Use is about getting users to access your content – to read the news article, click to view the PDF, watch the video, etc.
4. Fan growth is a broad gauge of how healthy your community is. A rising number of fans and followers can indicate two key things – growing interest in your page, and/or growing use of a particular platform. Facebook’s rate of growth is slowing, for example, which could in turn reduce the fan base for our Facebook followers. Among the 3 social platforms that allow users to like or follow us, twitter has shown the most explosive growth – lifted by our Jan. 2014 decision to repeat tweets in the early-morning hours (to reach audiences in Europe, etc.), as well as growth in overall use of twitter. On May 31, twitter was approaching 1,000 followers; Facebook was approaching 300 fans, and LinkedIn was approaching 200 members. We often notice a rise in new followers after a large organization (WRI, Power Over Energy, UNFCCC) shares or comments on our content. The rate of growth will slow in the summer. Social media/website use tends to decline in the summer overall, and all of our platforms will lose a little bit of steam, now that the spike of interest/attention around CEM5 has passed.
5. Impressions is a measure of how many followers could have seen your content, but in reality, only a small portion of that potential audience will actually see your content. For this reason, it’s more important to pay attention to how your impressions are trending (i.e., rising or falling) than the actual number of impressions. We’re doing well. Impressions include your fan base + the fan bases of other twitter accounts that share or comment on your content. We doubled our number of tweets per day beginning in January 2014 (repeating tweets in early morning hours to appeal to our audiences in Europe), which doubled our baseline number of impressions (8 tweets per day X 900 fans = 7200 impressions, vs. 4 tweets per day X 900 fans = 3600 impressions). Even with this increase, impressions have accelerated in the first half of 2014, boosted by a growing number of retweets overall & a few retweets by groups with particularly large fan bases (such as WRI, UNFCCC).
6. Much of the value in social media comes from the community –who are you connecting with. Our active community on twitter – those retweeting us and mentioning us – includes a mix of individuals and organizations. Looking at the organizations, those retweeting and mentioning us span all of CEM’s target audiences and include major influencers like the IEA, IRENA, UNFCCC, etc. This is a partial list of accounts that have retweeted our mentioned us/our content between Feb. 2013 and May 2014.
7. Twitter generates more shares per post than Facebook (or any of our other digital media platforms). On twitter, a “favorite” is the equivalent of a “like” on Facebook. On twitter, a “retweet” is the equivalent of a “share” on Facebook.
8. Our twitter community is talking about us and chatting with us in a variety of ways. Discussion (both positive and skeptical) is growing. Twitter is our top social/digital platform for discussion. Comment on/repackage our tweets
9. On Facebook, we have had approximately 100 organizations or individuals like or share our content. About 20% of the accounts liking and sharing our content are organizations, with about half of that being from target audiences such as energy NGOs, industry groups, and climate constituencies. The other half includes embassies, causes, consumer outreach campaigns, and green/environmental campaigns. The Clean Energy Solutions Center is one of the leading sources of likes and shares for our page. About 80% of the accounts liking and sharing our content are individuals – members of the energy-interested public. This is a partial list of accounts that have liked or shared our content between Feb. 2013 and May 2014.
10. The goal of connecting with a community is to then have them interact with your content – like it, share it, etc. This is key to your mission (raising awareness), but also drives greater exposure for your content, introducing it to new (and potentially large) new audiences. On Facebook, Vickie Healey & the Clean Energy Solutions Center are by far the biggest source of interaction – regularly liking & sharing our content. If that were to stop, our Facebook numbers would drop off steeply. Facebook has the highest likes per post.
11. The most liked on our own page is the Model CEM post from May 2014. The UAE Sustainability week post (right) had the highest number of secondary (viral) likes, comments, and shares. The post was shared by Power Over Energy, a large consumer-facing energy literacy campaign. With 100,000+ followers, their share gave this post great visibility.
12. Strengths Provides a home for our videos Enables us (and others) to easily share them via social media
13. 28% of members identify themselves as members of the renewables & energy sector.
14. The newsletter is a solid source of clicks – averaging 300 clicks or more per issue. The newsletter links users to CEM website content almost exclusively, while social media refers users to both CEM and non-CEM content.
15. See longer presentation (which accompanied this Highlights presentation) for more information about page views.
16. Period shown: Feb. 2013 through May 2014. PDF clicks: 2013: 972 per month Jan - Apr 2014: 1163 per month May-14: 1603 per month Link Clicks 2013: 718 per month Jan - Apr 2014: 814 per month May-14:1028 per month
17. Twitter: It’s good twitter etiquette to reply/respond when audiences interact with us on twitter (via comments, replies, etc.) Our latest analysis shows top Facebook days are Tuesday, Thursday, and Friday, which is a change from a prior analysis that showed weekends as the top day. We will continue to evaluate this over time and make adjustments to the content schedule as needed.
18. Website objectives could include increasing traffic to entire site, increasing traffic to particular pages, etc. Each possible objective requires a different marketing strategy, so it’s important to determine our top priority and then tailor a plan to address it.