2014 has been an unpredictable year for international security, placing the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) in the spotlight. The public has wanted answers about their security, NATO's position on recent attacks and events of unrest, and about the organization more broadly. Managing active and engaging social media outreach is one of NATO's strategies to satisfy this information need and maintain visibility in a cluttered media landscape.
Through Facebook, NATO has been able to deliver its messages through stories and photos, educate its public with infographics and animations, connect with youth ambassadors by hosting competitions and clarify misunderstandings about the military alliance through visual information campaigns.
NATO's small social media team has challenged itself to keep up with the pace, listen to the feedback and conversations of their audiences and deliver content that best appeals to their community's interests. Through clearly communicating and visually representing technical information and political jargon, NATO's social media team has bridged the gap between the Alliance and its public audiences, connecting with a growing community of informed global citizens.
The hard work has paid off, with 2014's online engagement reaching record-breaking highs for the Alliance. Their outreach effort on Facebook has allowed NATO not only to join the conversation, but also to drive it.
NATO's social media team is committed to building brand awareness while increasing online engagement. They work tirelessly to adapt technical content, provided on short notice, to effectively deliver NATO's messages to key opinion formers and a youth audience simultaneously.
Unlike social media teams at other large institutions, NATO's team consists of only two people, with the support of an external consultant and occasionally, a temporary team member. Despite this, the team ensures that their content is interesting and at times even humorous, developed in a short turnaround period. The small team manages seven social media platforms (Facebook, YouTube, Google+, Flickr, Twitter, LinkedIn, Pinterest), and created 526 posts on their Facebook page alone in 2014.
In building brand awareness, education plays a significant role in NATO's communications strategy. How does one explain joint intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance to a multilingual, youth (18-35) audience? NATO's social media team created an 81 second animation explaining how this vital tool for military operations works (see it here: JISR video). The post reached nearly 81,000 people, generated 4,214 clicks and received just under 1,900 interactions. Using a multimedia approach, the team created visuals and graphics to educate its public about similar themes such as 'Collective Defence' (Collective Defence DYK) and a key military exercise 'Unified Vision' (UV14 infographic). These two visuals boosted reach by 222,336, number of interactions by 4,382 and total clicks by 17,265.
A key success factor in their social media strategy is to adapt existing content to best reach their target audiences. When presented a six-paged .pdf document intended to clarify 'myths' circulating about the military alliance, NATO's social media team created a visual campaign comparing the 'myth' with factual information, paired with an effective image. The campaign was hugely successful, generating a combined 36,617 interactions, generating 56,742 clicks and reaching 1,009,952 people. In doing so, NATO's social media presence contributes to controlling the message around NATO's activities.
Making NATO as accessible as possible to the public is another key element of NATO's social media presence. In April, NATO invited their Facebook community to answer the question "What is NATO" in an infographic competition. The two selected winners were granted press access to a high-level meeting with 28 foreign ministers, including U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry. This prize offered a rare opportunity for members of the general public to visit NATO's secure headquarters in Brussels.
To achieve their online engagement goals, NATO's small team scans the web daily using social media monitoring tools, seeking relevant and interesting content to share with their audience. They strive to keep their posts reactive and timely, according to the media landscape. For example, to show how NATO commemorates the anniversary of 11 September's tragic events, NATO's social media team timed a post to best reach their US audience. The post was well received by their Facebook community, driving the most page views in a single day (2,960,094 views).
Finally, the social media team works hard to educate their colleagues on the importance of being social, and of providing a personal and human voice to NATO's rigid public personality. The team constantly pushes the boundaries of a bureaucratic system to deliver content that supports NATO's public diplomacy goals while appealing to their audiences. An unexpectedly humorous post celebrating the success of their Facebook outreach efforts (see the post here: kittens), reached over 76,000 people, generated 5,277 clicks, and received over 3,800 interactions.
Through these efforts, NATO's Facebook performance in 2014 was record breaking:
-a more vibrant conversation with 657,757 interactions
-fanbase growth of 123% from 2013 (721,231 total page fans 31 December 2014)
-2,789,164 engaged users, average of 2,486 engagements per day
-45,508,183 total views
