Engaging stakeholders: Lot Fourteen's stellar social media success story
Sam Hutchinson • 31 January 2024
Services used:
- Social media marketing
Completion date:
March 2023
Location:
South Australia, Australia
Who is Lot Fourteen?
Based in Adelaide, Lot Fourteen is a world-class innovation, business and global collaboration district that delivers economic, social and cultural prosperity.
They have created a home that welcomes world-firsts, cutting-edge research, and new discovery networks able to solve global challenges and put Adelaide on the world stage.
What was their problem?
When they approached us, Lot Fourteen were in a transitory stage.
The district was transitioning from a phase of successful establishment to a period of growth that would quickly propel its development with the implementation of key infrastructure components.
Lot Fourteen needed a social media team they could trust. One that would deliver consistent social media posts, react to any potential social crises, and build on the authenticity of the brand and increase awareness.
Their needs
Raise the awareness and understanding that Lot Fourteen is a unique, globally competitive innovation district where innovation, entrepreneurship, research, education, culture, and tourism intersect.
Proactively communicate the Lot Fourteen district value proposition.
Build confidence and credibility that Lot Fourteen is contributing to South Australia’s economic growth and future prosperity as the district grows.
Increase knowledge and understanding that Lot Fourteen is enabling growth across the future industries of defence, space, hi-tech and creative industries in South Australia.
Apply a systematic and data-driven approach to content development and placement to optimise content performance across owned and earned digital channels.
Drive business attraction to build a strong pipeline of global industry, business, and development investment activity for the district.
What we did
Social media
We developed a social media strategy that aligned with their marketing and communications strategy. This included building on target markets, formalising content pillars, identifying hashtags, and drafting appropriate responses to constructive feedback.
Challenges
At first, we tried to plan content on a monthly basis, but soon found that stories moved quickly at Lot Fourteen.
We shifted how we worked, planning content weekly at our weekly WIP meetings. We placed emphasis on activities that weren’t just current, but up-to-the-minute. We developed a dynamic way of working, which ensured that the content was always new and fresh.
While working with Lot Fourteen, we achieved a 25% growth in total audience across all social media platforms, increasing the growth from 24K to 30.5K. The biggest growth came from LinkedIn, which saw an explosive growth of 33% (or 4.8K).
The impact
The most popular post of the year that attracted the most engagement attracted over 4,200 engagements on LinkedIn, and over 2,600 on Facebook.
This post shows a before and after of Lot Fourteen site, in 2018 when it was the Royal Adelaide Hospital and the progress made by June 2022. The copy of the post was simple, it highlighted not only how far the project had come, but it also gave a clear timeline for the final goal.
There were no partners tagged, nor many hashtags used. It was a successful post because it resonated with the audience, evoking a sense of nostalgia and motivated the audience to share their thoughts around the transformation of Lot Fourteen in the comments.
The results
The metrics that matter
We measured a range of metrics to assess performance for organic social media.
When impressions peaked, this was directly correlated to peaks in engagement. Engagement consistently increased substantially when large, newsworthy announcements were made, for example, Amazon expanding their HQ at Lot Fourteen and Airbus joining Lot Fourteen. Both of these stories were announced in September 2022.
Engagement fluctuated, over the course of the year, as it was also heavily influenced by the big news stories just like impressions. The State Premier visited the Lot Fourteen site in May, this sparked keen interest across the Lot Fourteen audience. Photos and videos were taken on site, bringing a new level of authenticity and immediacy to the social content.
We saw a dramatic 74.5% increase in engagements across Twitter, Facebook, Instagram and LinkedIn when comparing May 2022 to the previous month. The greatest growth was evident on LinkedIn alone, with over 6,700 engagements in May compared to about 5,500 engagements across Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter and Instagram combined in April.
Audience growth
While working with Lot Fourteen, we achieved a 25% growth in total audience across all social media platforms, increasing the growth from 24K to 30.5K. The biggest growth came from LinkedIn, which saw an explosive growth of 33% (or 4.8K).
While Instagram and Facebook’s algorithms favoured video content, images and posts with long copy still performed well on LinkedIn. plus the target audience for Lot Fourteen was the most active on this platform, making it the fastest growing social media platform for Lot Fourteen.
In our best month, we saw a 98% year-on-year increase in post link clicks, with 4,999 clicks from social media platforms. Most clicks were directed to the Lot Fourteen website.
In conclusion
We worked with Lot Fourteen to unleash their potential at a critical period of their growth, helping them to build their brand and audience across social media.
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