Campaign Duration: 1st January 2013 to 31st March 2014

A Case Study on Prothom Alo Social Community on Facebook

Submission Category: Creating & Managing Social Communities

ABOUT PROTHOM ALO

Prothom Alo is the number 1 Bangla website in the world by far and leading news media in Bangladesh. It has been operating in Bangladesh since 1998.

Strengths of Prothom Alo:• Print Circulation: 0.51 mln daily circulation with 5.1 mln daily readership and 9.6 million claimed

readership

• Digital Properties has 2.7 mln Unique Visitors & 200+ million Pageviews per month, and

readership from 200 countries across the globe. Digital properties includes:

• 24/7 real time bilingual online edition: www.prothom-alo.com• Mobile site: http://m.prothom-alo.com/• Epaper version: http://epaper.prothom-alo.com/• Mobile Apps: Android, iOS, & Windows

RATIONAL BEHIND FOCUSING FACEBOOK COMMUNITY ?

• Bangladesh is a Facebook dominated

country (nearly 7mln users)

• Lately internet population started searching

news on Facebook and generating huge

amount of social traffic

• Can easily interact with readers eventually

creating loyal advocacy groups

Prothom Alo facebook community url: https://www.facebook.com/DailyProthomAlo

CAMPAIGN GOAL

• Increase Prothom Alo facebook fan base by 200%

• Increase facebook referral traffic by 100%

• Increase community engagement to 30%

• Reducing the unlike trend by 50 %

We set 3 goals (during campaign period) to achieve the community leadership in Bangladesh :

EXECUTION STRATEGYTo achieve the campaign goal Prothom Alo has taken following strategies:

Paid Advertising

Content Posting

Community Standardization

Community Interaction

Engagement Competition

PAID ADVERTISING ON FACEBOOK :

• Objective: Increase 1 mln fans (39% of current total fans)

• Duration : 14 Months (Feb 2013 – Mar 2014)

Feb 13

Mar 13

Apr 13

May 13

Jun 13

Jul 13

Aug 13

Sep 13

Oct 13

Nov 13

Dec 13

Jan 14

Feb 14

Mar 14

- 20,000 40,000 60,000 80,000

100,000 120,000

Monthly Paid Fan Acquistion Trend

CONTENT POSTING

Objective:

• Acquire organic likes of 0.5 mln

• Increase community engagement by 30%

• Reducing unlike trend by 50 %

• Limiting per day content posting to 20-30 numbers

• Formed a separate team called SMI (social media interaction) to look after content posting & community issues

• 0.52 million organic fan increased due to consistent content posting (20% of total likes)

ORGANIC FAN & ENGAGEMENT (CONTENT POSTING)

Feb 13

Mar 13

Apr 13

May 13

Jun 13

Jul 13

Aug 13

Sep 13

Oct 13

Nov 13

Dec 13

Jan 14

Feb 14

Mar 14

- 10,000 20,000 30,000 40,000 50,000 60,000

Organic Fan Increasing Trend

Jan 13 Jun 13 Dec 13 Mar 140%

10%

20%

30%

40%

50%

60%

Community engagement trend on Facebook Page

• Community engagement ratio on facebook page has reached to 50% during campaign period

Prothom alo facebook page experience an unlike spike on September’13-November 13. One

of the main reason was so many post. Thus a survey was conducted among the fan –How

many post they want to get on their timeline.

Less than 20

20-30

30-40

40-50

More than 50

0 5 10 15 20 25 30 35 40

Number of Post The survey result was adjusted to content posting and surprisingly unlike was reduced to 67%.

REDUCING UNLIKE (CONTENT POSTING)

• On April 2013 we noticed an interesting trend of increasing unlike due to spam & promotional post, abusive comments made by some users

• Observing that trend we responded with having a dedicated person to set a community rules of not allowing such posts

• After soft notice we started banning seriously disturbing users and deleting those comments

• In 2 months, we notice huge spike on unlike trend reduction contributing additional 10%

COMMUNITY STANDARDIZATION

Objective: Ensuring 24/7 real time engagement We appointed dedicated person to:

• Reply reader’s PM on real time basis

• Answering against publicly visible comments / queries

• Creating discussion board for readers

• Informing different important country events through events integration As a result commenting & re-commenting increased by 50% during the periods

COMMUNITY INTERACTION

ENGAGEMENT COMPETITION

• On February 2014, Prothom Alo organized a FAB based Selfi contest called Faguner

Saj that resulted 0.1 mln photo submissions and additional 0.31 mln total organic fans

(12% of total fan)

• On March 2014, Prothom Alo again arranged a Sports event targeted Selfi contest in

alliance with Symphony resulting additional 0.21 mln organic fans (8% of total fan)

CAMPAIGN OUTCOME Goal to increase Achievement

PercentExplanation

Fan base 200% 374% Increased to 2.5 mln from 0.55 mln

Referral Traffic 100% 160% Increased to 26% from 10%

Engagement 30 % 50% Number of people increased to 1.3 mln from 0.2 mln

Unlike 50% 67% Perday unlike numbers decreased to 1k from 3k

THANK YOU