Microsoft’s Safer Online Programme Used Twitter To Get 24K New Followers In 3 Months

About Safer Online

Microsoft founded Safer Online software in November, 2007. Their main motto to create this software was to create a tool which can help in establishing a scenario wherein people can experience safe web options with the help of online safety tips and other resources. Microsoft intends to create a option with the help of which one can take care of one’s privacy issues and can survive in a safe environment thereby being able to defend oneself from online risks. They have been able to do this by developing technologies which included user friendly tools which help people to have a safe online experience. For instance, with the help of Safer Online, parents can ensure that their children are safeguarded in the online world. In addition to this, they also provide awareness on government and law enforcement, consumer education and partnerships with industry.

 Safer Online’s Business Objective

The main objective of Safer Online was to bring about awareness about online safety, initiate conversations and offer a valuable, real time resource which can be used along with its other products in its Safety and Security Center. They decided to use the online medium as the preferred channel of communication as it would be the fastest and the most efficient option to easily, efficiently and immediately alert their online users details regarding their security information. They realized that through the social media platform a lot can be achieved by techniques like running campaigns, advertisements, etc.

Approach / Strategy Adopted by Safer Online

Safer Online adopted a good and efficient strategy to go about achieving their objective of spreading awareness regarding online security among its users. It chose to conduct its online campaign with the help of Twitter platform. It promoted its Twitter accounts and on a daily basis optimized its campaigns. Their main intention was to build a targeted follower base in Twitter. In addition to this, they also did targeting of countries and created separate campaigns for each of them. They built four campaigns for each country and they were different from each other in terms of topical, demographic and product related interests.

They conducted monthly review to update its targeting strategy to maximize its results. To get the best results, they also monitored and adjusted the bid value of their campaigns and kept it slightly higher than their daily bid value. They knew that the users on Twitter could easily share the information by broadcasting it to their friends and family. In addition to this, the users can also raise their issues and concerns with the help of Safer Online’s Twitter handle (@Safer_Online). Microsoft can then immediately respond to their issues and concerns raised by the users by using the ‘at reply’ function.

Hence, there were three keys which could be given credit for the success of the campaign. They are as follows:

• Targeting and connecting the right users and spreading the information to more users by tweeting them with relevant information.
• Regular monitoring and updating of the campaign based on what worked well and what didn’t. The campaign settings which worked well and gave good results were retained and the ones which performed poorly were removed.
• Focused on keeping the audience engaged in conversation and were prompted to participate in sharing their tips and other relevant information related to the topic.

Results

With the help of the campaigns and other engagement moves made by Safer Online, objectives were successfully met. As a result of these measures, they saw a decrease in their cost per follower rate by 25% over two months. In addition to this, they also saw an increase in the follow rate by 24%. With this exercise, Safer Online could gain a lot of valuable information about its audience. They could achieve this through the process of testing, recalibration and targeting. For example, Safer Online found that its audience in the US was more interested in getting information about online safety organizations rather than Microsoft products. On the other hand, their audience in Germany preferred to know more about Microsoft products. Within a period of three months, Safer Online saw an increase in their number of new followers by nearly 24K.

Learning

Safer Online made use of the Twitter platform to achieve its objective of creating awareness about online safety measures. Out of all the social media platforms, it chose Twitter to run its online campaigns since it found that the same will be able to give the desired output. With the help of Twitter, they could target their audience and serve them with the right kind of content which they would be interested in. Also, they created many campaigns specific to the area, demographics and product interest. This helped them to evaluate which campaigns are performing well and which are not. Regular monitoring and updating of the campaigns helped them to optimize the results to the maximum possible extent.

Image Credit: Imagestone, aedweb