We were thrilled when our client Human Rights Watch surpassed 250,000 followers on Twitter, and in honor of that extraordinary milestone, we wanted to take you inside their growth on Twitter and how they’ve utilized SocialFlow to achieve it.
For over 30 years, Human Rights Watch (@HRW) has fulfilled a vital role calling attention to abuses and oppression in countless regions around the globe. Roughly a year ago, when Human Rights Watch was ready to ramp up their social media presence, they turned to SocialFlow, hoping that optimized publishing would help their fledgling efforts on Twitter gain rapid momentum.
Objective
In their efforts to defend and protect human rights worldwide, Human Rights Watch produces over 100 reports and approximately 800 press releases annually. When it came time to develop a social media plan, “we wanted to wait for the space to mature a bit before we jumped in,” Enrique Piraces, Senior Online Strategist said of the organization’s attitude toward determining how tools like Facebook and Twitter would complement existing efforts. They felt that SocialFlow was the right tool to help them parcel out a rich store of content.
Solution
Human Rights Watch implemented SocialFlow to extract value out of their existing content and to garner more visibility for their efforts among the public and the press. Intelligence drawn from SocialFlow’s Insight and Analytics Dashboard has helped Mr. Piraces identify what sorts of phrasing works best to yield clicks and Retweets. “For instance, we know that quotes tend to perform better than anything else,” he said. Further, the minimal effort involved in branching off new accounts also allows for a vital “proving ground” for new initiatives and brand extensions, such as accounts in French and Spanish.
The Results
Using SocialFlow to dispatch news and eyewitness accounts from the ground during uprisings in Bahrain, Syria, Egypt and Libya, Human Rights Watch saw their number of clicks grow 500% over between September of 2010 and February of 2011. Further, “It was very low effort,” Mr. Piraces said of setting up content feeds into SocialFlow. “We didn’t have to hire a social media manager.” Though he values the volume of followers and traffic that using SocialFlow has yielded, Mr. Piraces has a very specific target in mind when using Twitter. “[SocialFlow] helps us to get our message in front of people who can influence media.”
