Blood Donor Social Media Interaction

While the potential of social media has empowered consumers, giving rise to ever greater abilities to interact and create conversations among very large audiences, the marketing adoption of social media is more difficult.  From a practitioner perspective, implementing a successful digital media viral marketing campaign remains tricky for most organisations. Building on calls for further research into viral marketing and in particular, what contributes the key success factors of viral campaigns, we explore a month of activity in the Australian Red Cross Blood Service (Blood Service) Facebook page for the purpose of identifying the levels of interaction with wall posts for the better calculation of ROI.

While evidence of online social consumer interactions with brands, products or services can be shown in the number of active users and brand awareness can be shown in the number of fans, proving a link between social media campaigns and ROI can be challenging.  Exploration of interaction across several levels is needed to enhance understanding.  The context of this study is the Blood Service, a non-profit organization that seeks to change behavior of Australians to increase blood donations. They are turning to social media as a way to achieve this aim.  Interactions from initial wall posts are measured across three criteria: a like, share or comment.

Findings indicated that a ‘Call to Action’ post (which asked donors to watch and share a video) received the highest number of shares and comments, while a co-creation message (which asked donors to share their stories) received the highest number of likes.

Guiding Theory:

• Electronic word-of-mouth (eWOM)