Western Union customers are so much more than customers; they are heroes. Most left their country of origin to make better lives for themselves and their families. We wanted to position Western Union as a beacon of trust and inspiration to its customers, as well as an enthusiastic cheerleader, rooting them on toward their goals.
We worked closely with Western Union to create global social posts that were meaningful to its customers and designed to serve as touchstones, connecting users with Western Union in an emotionally impactful way. For instance, we created a post with an image featuring two hands touching, one of an elderly person and one of a baby. The overlay copy read "Greatest Moment: Fingers Touching" and the post copy read "Whose hand do you miss holding?" The passionate responses from users were overwhelming. They shared stories and pictures of their loved ones, telling Western Union what those special people meant to them. This is just one example of many of how this content gave Western Union the opportunity to respond to and inquire more about what matters most to its customers, humanizing the brand and turning loyal customers into brand advocates.
We complimented this emotional content with posts that included recognizable landmarks, ethnic foods and promotional and educational content about Western Union. The response was an increase of over 2 million followers and over 1 billion impressions, making Western Union's Global Facebook page the fastest growing page in the financial services vertical.
A dual-belonger is someone who was born and raised in one country and is currently living in a different country. These people set out on their own, seeking opportunity to make a better life for their families in their home countries. For these customers, Western Union is not just a financial services brand. Western Union is the way a father can send his children to school and a daughter can pay for her mother's surgery. Western Union serves as a lifeline to these brave individuals - a brand customers can trust to ensure their hard-earned money is transferred quickly and reliably across borders.
Social Control was tasked with making a global financial services brand engaging in social media, as well as helping Western Union to forge deeper relationships with its customers. WU wanted to extend its brand promise beyond safe and easy money transfers to being a daily source of inspiration and connective tissue between families living across continents. This challenge was not necessarily about increasing the number of Western Union customers. WU wanted loyal customers, and for those loyal customers to become brand advocates.
In order to create a global social media content strategy, we first needed to answer one simple question: What does the Western Union customer care about most? The answer to this question was just as simple. WU customers care most about their families. For this reason we structured the editorial calendar on a foundation of emotional content, uniquely relatable to the dual-belonger. We started with impactful taglines such as "Greatest Moment: Looking at the same moon," "It's not what you have; it's who you have" and "Today he changed the world for one person." We paired these taglines with powerful imagery typically featuring people from diverse backgrounds connecting with family and enjoying the simple pleasures of life.
As a compliment to emotionally impactful posts, we also included three other content categories: Connective Tissue, Inspiration and Promotions.
The Connective Tissue content focused on the things everyone misses when they are far away from home – food, holidays and cultural traditions. From a photograph of Chinese Mooncakes that look good enough to eat to a post highlighting Brazilian music, these posts were the perfect remedy for those who were homesick, and received a large amount of user engagement –shared widely across social platforms.
Inspirational content included posts about travel destinations and inspirational quotes. Many of the travel destination posts included soft CTAs such as "Name that City." The Inspirational content typically received the largest amount of comments. Users responded, and would also share how a particular quote touched them in the comments. For instance, one post featured a quote that read, "Success is liking yourself, liking what you do, and liking how you do it." People responded by saying "Thank you for this beautiful quote!" and "Thanks WU! You're the way I send money to my loving family."
Finally, we designed promotional posts to look similar to the other lifestyle content while providing information about the various promotions and new products available to customers. Because these posts had the same engaging look and feel as the lifestyle posts, they were often met with friendly and inquisitive comments, and usually received just as much engagement.
Our global social content strategy yielded incredible results. To date, Western Union is the fastest growing company on Facebook in the financial services vertical, increasing its followers by over 2 million users and magnifying its reach to over 1 billion impressions. Even with the massive growth, Western Union remains a financial services company with one of the highest engagement rates on Facebook.
The growth of Western Union's global social presence is impressive, but even more meaningful to us, and the reason we believe we deserve the Shorty Award, is the shift in user sentiment. Within a year's time negative user sentiment has decreased by 35% while positive user sentiment has increased 51%. These numbers illustrate how we've accomplished what we originally set out to do: humanize the brand, turning customers into brand loyalists, and empowering those brand loyalists to become brand advocates. Advocates like Delia from Malaysia: "Thank you Western Union for your fastest service in the whole globe!" and Sandra from Ohio: "I love Western Union. What would I do without it?"
