Doing More Than Just Posting Relevant Content

Theoretical Background and research questions/hypothesis:  The success of Centerstone, one of the nation’s largest mental health providers, and its prevention services, WhoYouWant2Be, comes from an assortment of paid and earned media. By working diligently to come up with the most up-to-date and relevant information to educate our target audience, Centerstone’s team of prevention specialists provides the content on WhoYouWant2Be.org that is then shared on our social media accounts (Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram).  This content has helped our social media accounts grow. 

Methods and Results (informing the conceptual analysis):  We have strategically spent advertising dollars to give our content the loudest voice and cut through the noise. Advertising is spent promoting giveaways, outreach campaigns, and blog posts. This has helped increase our Facebook “likes” by 230 percent, and Twitter by 100 percent. This success is due to segmenting our social media focus. We no longer post content on Facebook and Twitter to anyone who will listen; instead we deliver content to professionals, i.e. guidance counselors, teachers, and church leaders. To target our message toward teens, we now focus only on Instagram. These posts consist of fun, but educational topics that have led to a 2,000 percent increase of followers on this platform.

Conclusions:  At Centerstone, we are always working at new ways to reach our target audience. We believe we have found several sure-fire ways to accomplish this. Now that we have told you about our success, we hope to show you how we did it.

Implications for research and/or practice:  Social media is not the only platform we use. In 2015, we partnered with a local web company to revamp our Web site. This change helped to de-clutter our site, which gives users a better experience, and provides extra avenues of where to get help through our “Ask an Expert” feature. As a result, the bounce rate on WhoYouWant2Be.org is down, time on site is up, and the number of page views has more than doubled. Furthermore, we purchased advertising on the music streaming service Pandora that led to several spikes to our Web site. One note with this service, however, is that despite page views spiking when this ad ran, our bounce rate increased and our time on site plummeted.