29 Apr Ad Council- Non-profit Social Media Marketing Example #5
It has been a few months since my last post in the social media nonprofit series, so I am jumping back on the blogging bandwagon. I am excited to highlight the Ad Council and their social media techniques. This amazing nonprofit organization has been educating Americans through PSAs for over 65 years, and their tremendous efforts to raise awareness of public issues and encourage action have not gone unnoticed, especially in the social media world.
One of the things that drew me to the site in the first place was the fact that Ad Council is offering seminars to aid nonprofits in creating successful advertising campaigns. While the first few seminars started with more traditional advertising techniques, the more recent seminars cover my favorite topic, social media marketing! Some of the topics include: Blogging 101, Mobile Marketing, and measuring social media success for your nonprofit organization.
YouTube
Of all the social media outlets Ad Council uses, I am most impressed with their YouTube channel. With over 3,000 subscribers and 160,000 channel views, the channel has generated over 200 comments, not to mention numerous comments on individual videos. Since the Ad Council focuses on communication and getting their messages heard, the YouTube channel is a great social media tool for them. They can upload all of their ads in one place; this way, supporters can easily share the PSAs on social networking sites or even embed them into their own websites/ blogs. The Ad Council also cross promotes these videos (and more) on their Facebook fan page under a “video” tab to make them easily accessible.
Facebook and Twitter
The Ad Council is also doing an excellent job of cross-promoting their featured campaigns on Facebook and Twitter. There are over 2,300 people who “like” their fan page, and almost every post has some type of interaction. I’m glad to see that they allow the community to post/ interact on their wall because a few of their posts have generated great conversation and awareness of the issues at hand. They even have supporters who post about their own nonprofit organizations.
On Twitter, they have over 3,500 followers. I also did a search to see what people are saying about Ad Council and noticed that there are many conversations going on, some of which the Ad Council may not be aware of. While many people mention Ad Council in their tweets, they do not always remember to say @AdCouncil. It might be a good idea for Ad Council to do daily Twitter searches and seek out some of these tweets to gain followers, maybe on Follow Friday. They might even consider direct messaging a few people who tweet often and seem to have a passion for specific issues to thank them for their support.
Overall, I think the Ad Council is not only doing a great job of utilizing social media to promote their campaign, but they are going above and beyond to teach nonprofit organizations how they can benefit from social media as well. Do you think the Ad Council is successfully using social media outlets to get their messages heard? Leave your comments below. Feel free to suggest other ways for nonprofits to benefit from social media tools as well!
Full Disclosure: We have done some work with the Ad Council in the past, but I still feel that their social media techniques are worth highlighting in this series.
