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Social Media Roundup - April Fools' Day

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On April 1, the Online and Social Media Division conducted a demonstration illustrating the power of social media. This week’s Social Media Roundup takes a closer look at how the Army used its social media presences to demonstrate the viral nature of social media and promote awareness of the Army.mil website.
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Social Media Roundup April Fools’ Day
Transcript
Page 1: Social Media Roundup - April Fools' Day

Social Media Roundup

April Fools’ Day

Page 2: Social Media Roundup - April Fools' Day

Social Media Roundup

AgendaThis week’s Social Media Roundup takes a closer look at how the Army used its social media presences to demonstrate the viral nature of social media and promote awareness of the Army.mil website.

Introduction Using social media to spread the story How the story performed How the media responded Why it matters

Page 3: Social Media Roundup - April Fools' Day

Social Media Roundup

April Fools! On April 1, the Online and Social

Media Division conducted a demonstration illustrating the power of social media.

The Army concocted a fake story claiming that Army officials had decided to phase out the beret and make the Cavalry Stetson the new standard Army headgear.

The story was posted to Army.mil the morning of April 1.

The online response was swift, and while not everyone was pleased with the April Fools’ Day story, it became the most popular Army.mil story of all time.

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Social Media Roundup

Using social media to spread the story Once the story was published on

Army.mil, the Online and Social Media Division posted to social media presences.

After Tweeting the story and posting the story to Facebook, the Online and Social Media Division posted a link to the story on the walls of approximately 20 other Army Facebook Pages.

The Online and Social Media Division posted to Army Cavalry Facebook Pages, division Facebook Pages and the Facebook Pages of Army installations.

Facebook post

April Fools’ Day Tweet collected 84 Re-Tweets

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Social Media Roundup

Using social media to spread the story The online community responded

quickly, some recognizing the posts as an April Fools’ joke while others expressed their dismay in the Army’s decision.

After the Army posted to other organization Facebook Pages, many organizations responded with posts of their own. The 1st Cavalry Division (on right) commented on the Army’s sense of humor.

The viral nature of the story, combined with the efforts of Army social media managers, resulted in Facebook being the No. 1 online referrer, bringing over 67,000 visits to the Army.mil story.

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Social Media Roundup

How the story performed The story recorded 211,836 total views over three days; 151,104 on April 1 alone. This single day accumulation of views was more than the total views any Army.mil

story has accumulated since June 2009. The story also maintained its momentum through the weekend, even after being

removed from the feature slot on the homepage, recording another 44,039 views on Saturday and 16,693 on Sunday.

The story saw a major jump during the morning hours on April 1, registering an average of 10,749 views per hour from 0700 until 1300 ET.

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Social Media Roundup

How the story performed Of the 211,836 views over the three

days, 70,435 came from links placed on social media platforms (33%).

Search engines sent only 11,686 but this is strong given it takes search engine databases time to scan the web and display the page in results.

Over the first three days, the article had had 67,355 referrals from Facebook – 32% of the article’s traffic.

The official US Army post on Facebook about the story recorded 1,266 Likes and 740 comments (0.98% Feedback) with 205,011 impressions.

Top 15 External Referrers for April Fools Article

Rank Referrer Instances % of Article Views

1 Facebook.com 67,355 31.80%

2 Google.com 10,164 4.80%

3 i-am-bored.com 9,963 4.70%

4 Yahoo.com 3,575 1.69%

5 Newzjunky.com 2,838 1.34%

6 MSN.com 1,698 0.80%

7 USAA.com 1,684 0.79%

8 Ace.mu.ru 1,648 0.78%

9 Ar15.com 1,471 0.69%

10 Reddit.com 1,228 0.58%

11 Militaryphotos.net 1,173 0.55%

12 Bing.com 915 0.43%

13 Live.com 847 0.40%

14 Twitter.com 726 0.34%

15 Blogs.com 691 0.33%

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Social Media Roundup

How the media responded Several media outlets picked up on the Army.mil story near the end of April Fools’

Day. This added attention served to boost the number of story views even further. The media’s interest in the April Fools’ Day story demonstrated how far a story can

reach once the mainstream media picks up on it.

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Social Media Roundup

Why this matters More people visiting Army.mil raises the overall internet prominence of the site.

This story caused 5,655 more websites to link to Army.mil, thus increasing search engine optimization (on April 4, 2011, Yahoo! reported 645,944 sites linking to Army.mil, compared to March 30, when Yahoo! reported only 640,289 sites linking to the site.)

On of the more intriguing statistics associated with the April Fools’ Day story is the number of people who were referred to the story by social media. Social media use has become second nature in our society and more and more people are using social media to receive news updates.

This case study illustrates a shift in information dissemination, and demonstrates how powerful tools like Facebook and Twitter can be when communicating a breaking news story, whether it’s a simple April Fools’ Day joke, or a major news item.

Stories like this also bring new visitors to the Army.mil website who were not originally looking for Army content – 6,758 visitors came to the site after searching some variant of the keyword “Stetson” on external search engines.

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Social Media Roundup

Contact information

Have questions? Please feel free to reach out to us at the Online and Social Media Division

OFFICE OF THE CHIEF OF PUBLIC AFFAIRSPENTAGON

4/6/2011

Email:[email protected]

To review and download past editions of the Social Media Roundup, visit our Slideshare site at: http://www.slideshare.net/usarmysocialmedia. All Social Media Roundups are authorized to be distributed to a broader audience.


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