This time last year, National Geographic Channel realized that its Facebook strategy was failing to live up to its brand promise. Region to region and country to country, fans didn’t know which page to follow, resulting in the wrong tune-in information and needless messages going to fans across the globe.

When one typed in “National Geographic” into a Facebook search bar, not only did the magazine’s brand page pop up, but also individual country and region pages that people often chose at random, with fans in India often liking the page for Brazil.

“We know that National Geographic Channel is one of the strongest TV brands in the world, by far one of the most recognizable,” said Liz Dolan, CMO of National Geographic Channels International. “But the way the pages were set up made no sense from a consumer point of view. It did not allow us to serve our audience in the way we wanted.”

Without redesigning any of these localized pages and without any noticeable new look to users online, Nat Geo comprehensively changed its Facebook strategy in a top-down process that took its Facebook brand from a confused jumble to a cohesive source of information.

National Geographic Channel began by consolidating relevant information under its global Facebook pages, so worldwide content would be distributed to everyone who had liked the page, but India-specific programming would be provided by the team in India, provided for fans interested in Indian content, for example. That way, the National Geographic brand remains consistent overall, but local teams are able to update pages according to their own programming priorities and regional messaging.

“From the D.C. office, we looked around and saw all of these dozens of pages, and decided that we could make the info much more relevant to viewers,” said Dolan. “We took the time to work through country by country so everyone understood what our long term goal was. In the end, people were very excited to localize their content even more, making it more relevant to the people in their countries.”

National Geographic now boasts more than 50 million Facebook followers, making it the second-most popular TV network (next to MTV) on the social net. At the time of publication, the Nat Geo brand had just over 50,030,500 likes on its global fan page.

The network spoke to some of its stars about the milestone in a brand video, below:


According to Socialbakers, a social media analytics platform, Nat Geo lands in the top 50 most-followed pages worldwide – a list populated mostly with celebrities, with only one other television network also appearing on this list: MTV.

“We wanted to be able to allocate viewers to their appropriate country,” said Dolan. “Searching from Mexico, for example, we see your IP address so you’re getting the international Nat Geo content but also Mexican specific content relevant to you.”

Breaking down the new Nat Geo pages by region, the channel group now has 38 feeds from which TV viewers can choose. Nat Geo’s top-five countries are listed as India, Mexico, Brazil, Egypt and the U.S. More than 14 of Nat Geo’s country-specific pages have more than 1 million followers, with its regional Latin America page weighing in as number one, with almost 13 million fans.

With a global, regional and national Facebook plan that has a solid toolkit and teams around the world updating their own pages, National Geographic is now able to reach and better serve its already socially conscious audience. And while Nat Geo also has a Twitter presence and other social properties, Facebook is by far their biggest platform. Its 50 million fans and counting can get the information they crave from a single brand, individually personalized.

Tags:


  Save as PDF