This document outlines the 41st Fires Brigade's social media strategy and efforts on Facebook and Flickr. It discusses establishing goals to build trust and engagement. A framework was created with scheduled post types like quotes, questions, and photos. Metrics were tracked and analyzed, leading to adjustments like changing post times. Efforts focused on high-quality, professional content that accurately represents the brigade. Over time, engagement and followers grew as the strategy evolved based on analytic insights.

1. Major General Keith L. Ware Public Affairs Competition
Award Submission for
Category D: Outstanding Initiative in New Media
41st Fires Brigade
Fort Hood, Texas

2. Table of Contents
Page 1
Table of Contents
Page 2
Submission Form
Page 3
41st Fires Brigade Public Affairs Office
Page 4
Audience
Page 6
Goals: Near term & Long term
Page 8
Facebook
Page 22
Flickr
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3. Award Submission Form
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4. 41st Fires Brigade Public Affairs Office
The 41st Fires Brigade public affairs office consists of one officer and
one NCO. CPT Farmer, the current PAO, is the first officer to hold this position in
several years.
In the past, the NCO, operating in a singular capacity, was able to
maintain a decent flow of stories, photos and meager updates to the Facebook
page. With only one person working in the office, maintaining a robust social
media program fell to the bottom of the priority list.
When CPT Farmer came on board in April 2013 all of that changed. The
public affairs office was now able to focus on more than just stories and photos.
Due to the hard work of both CPT Farmer and SGT Hernandez and a
full-blown reprioritization of effort, the 41st Fires Brigade social media program
was fully launched in June 2013 and has been gaining momentum ever since.
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5. Audience
We communicate primarily with our Internal audience, which we have
divided up into three sub-groups: Soldiers, families, and veterans. Facebook
Insights shows that we are split fairly equally between men and women in our fan
base.
Our content is generally broad enough that our external audience in
the local Fort Hood area could appreciate what we post, but we see very little
traffic from people who aren’t tied to the Military, or our brigade, somehow.
Initially, our plan was to differentiate between our three groups and
target them separately with different types of posts on Facebook.
However, it became readily apparent that the groups were equally
interactive regardless of the type of post. This is a relative generalization, and it’s
important because we learned that it wasn’t necessary to tailor different types of
posts for our different audiences.
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6. Audience – Facebook
In June 2013, we had approximately 1,600 Facebook fans. Six months
later, we reached 1,800. This may not seem like a huge climb, but you have to take
in to account the fact that during that 6 month timeframe we were not only
gaining fans, but losing them along the way.
This is strong indicator that we are doing something right on our page
since our followers continue to grow. We continue to remain flexible and adaptable
within the social media realm as it is a fluid environment.
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7. Goals: Near-term & Long-term
Our short term goal for our two primary social media platforms (Facebook
and Flickr) is to engage with our key audiences to build rapport and establish
ourselves as a reputable presence online.
This nests directly into our long-term goal, which is to cultivate a longstanding measure of trust in the content we produce. We want our fans to be
engaged with what we’re doing on a day-to-day basis so as to build their trust in
us as an organization. Trust in our content leads directly to trust in us as an
organization.
It is important, and indeed directly in line with our commander’s intent,
that the 41st Fires Brigade be seen as an elite and professional organization.
Using that as the backdrop for our social media program, we work hard to
ensure that every post and piece of content conveys that message.
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8. Goals: Near-term & Long-term
Every Facebook
message, every comment
on a post, and every time
someone interacts with us
online, we make a
concerted effort to
respond and engage as
soon as possible.
Our goal is not for our
platforms to become ghost
ships, but to be pages
where people know they
can find answers and enjoy
the content production as
well.
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9. Facebook
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10. Facebook
In June 2013, we sat down and put some thought into how best to
reach our audience, how to engage them and how to build and establish trust
and rapport.
In order to do this, we created a social media framework in which we
scheduled very specific posts for specific days. This framework helped guide
what we posted and when we posted.
It’s important to note and also a great AAR comment that much of the
framework we created was based on information gathered from the Army’s
many Social Media Round-up slides on the Army’s Slideshare account. We knew
the code had already been cracked on a lot of this so we took what was
applicable and used it for our own organization.
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11. Facebook – Social Media Framework
Quote of the Week
Motivational quotes from historical figures. Army / leadership related, not
necessarily artillery or cavalry.
*published in the afternoon
Question of the Week
The question of the week is designed to generate feedback and interaction
on the brigade Facebook page. The questions will be a mix of professional /
humorous questions. This is also a great way to get a sense of what is on our
Soldier’s minds. Examples of some questions:
1) If you could add one event to the APFT, what would it be?
2) What is your favorite artillery piece and why? (i.e. Paladin vs. M777
vs. MLRS, etc.)
3) What is the best Division in the Army and why?
4) If you could go to one Army school (i.e. Airborne, Master Gunner,
Ranger, etc.), which one would you go to? Why?
*published in the morning of the first working day of the week
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12. Facebook – Social Media Framework
Professional Development Reading
The professional reading posts are articles that either pertain directly to
Field Artillery or news that’s relevant to the Military in general (i.e. women in
combat, DADT, Sequester, etc.). The intent is twofold:
1) continue to display a professional image of the brigade on our social
network
2) engage our “fans” and encourage professional discussion in an open
forum
*published in the morning, mid-week (Tue or Wed)
Video of the Week
Very similar in scope to the professional reading posts, videos posted will be
relevant to artillery or the Military as a whole.
*published in the afternoon, mid-week (Wed or Thurs)
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13. Facebook – Social Media Framework
Weekend Safety Message
Safety message at the end of the working week; can be anything from a oneliner to be safe while boating, to a full-on flyer for summer safety.
*published in the afternoon of the last working day at the end of the work week
Photo of the Day
One photo, linked to a Flickr album, posted on the Facebook page as our photo
of the day. Intent is to show that we are actively engaged on our page and that
people can expect some quality photos from us.
*published in the afternoon
Special Occasion Postings
This category of specific Facebook posts pertains to holidays, special
events, announcements, etc (i.e. 4th of July, Brigade Golf Tournament, Army Birthday,
etc.). These posts will be worked into the other weekly posts and de-conflicted
throughout the week so as to prevent congestion with our online content.
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14. Facebook
The benefit of the framework was that it allowed us to track progress
through some basic metrics. We chose not to rely solely on Facebook’s metrics
since we were interested in how each of the specific posts were doing. In order to
measure success, we used Views, Likes and Comments as ways to follow the
success or failure of a certain type of post with Views being our primary tracking
mechanism.
We looked at past posts to create a numerical color scheme that would
help us determine whether or not a post was successful (see bottom right hand
of Figure 1 on following slide). At the end of every week, we input the numbers
from the views, comments and likes for each specific post (as seen below in
Figure 1). This became extremely helpful for us as we moved through the quarter.
About 4-6 weeks in to our tracking, we were able to start seeing patterns in the
data and began adjusting our posts accordingly.
As we came to the end of the 4th Quarter, we realized that our
viewership was tapering off and we weren’t sure why. So, we decided we needed
to change things up on our Facebook page as we moved into the 1st Quarter.
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15. Facebook
(fig. 1) 4th Quarter, FY 2013 Facebook Metrics
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16. Facebook
(fig. 2) Bar Graph depicting 4th Quarter, FY 2013 Facebook Metrics
1000
900
800
700
600
500
400
300
200
100
0
Quote
Question
News
Safety
Week
38
Week
39
Week
40
Week
41
Week
42
Week
43
Week
44
Week
45
Week
46
Week
47
Week
48
Week
49
Week
50
Week
51
Week
52
(fig. 3) Bar Graph depicting 4th Quarter, FY 2013 Facebook Metrics (photos only)
1400
1200
1000
800
600
Photo
400
200
0
Week Week Week Week Week Week
38
39
40
41
42
43
Week Week
44
45
Week Week Week
46
47
48
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Week
49
Week
50
Week Week
51
52

17. Facebook
In the 1st Quarter, FY 2014 we went from a photo of the day to a photo of
the week. We knew people enjoyed our photos, but we came to the conclusion
that our audience was becoming a bit over-saturated with content on our page.
Not wanting to make people numb to our photos, we eased back a bit and
moved to a once-a-week photo post. You can see in Figure 4 that the weekly
photo was generally successful, but not off the charts as we’d hoped.
In response to fluctuating success with the photos, we began analyzing the
content of the photo (i.e. group photos vs. profile shots, Soldiers in the field vs.
Soldiers with their families, etc.). We knew people liked our photos, but we
needed to figure out why. We maintained the post through the end of the
quarter so as to establish solid data that would enable a new decision for the 2nd
quarter.
We poured much more effort into our failing Weekend Message. The
weekly safety messages, though important and helpful, were not creating the
sort of traffic we wanted. In order to improve this content we started pulling
useful information from the brigade lawyer and medical officer in addition to our
brigade safety officer (originally, the content for the weekend message was
coming solely from the safety officer). This allowed us to put up useful tips our
audience could practically use (i.e. how to get a power of attorney, where and
when you can get your flu shot, etc).
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18. Facebook
(fig. 4) 1st Quarter, FY 2014 Facebook Metrics
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19. Facebook
(fig. 5) Bar Graph depicting 1st Quarter, FY 2014 Facebook Metrics
1200
1000
800
Quote
Question
600
News
Photo
400
Message
200
0
Week 1
Week 2
Week 3
Week 4
Week 5
Week 6
Week 7
Week 8
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Week 9
Week 10 Week 11 Week 12 Week 13

20. Facebook
As you can see in Figure 4, we saw several weeks of notable success for
the weekend message. However, it was short lived and by week 7 the weekend
message was failing once again. We maintained the post through the end of the
quarter but never saw any major improvement.
The weekly Quote and Question remained our strongest posts, but we
still weren’t doing as well as we had when we first started tracking data. After
some consideration we came to the conclusion that after our early success at the
beginning of the 4th quarter, our audience had become accustomed to our posts
and the novelty of an active Facebook page was losing its effect on our fans.
This wasn’t a bad thing, quite the opposite. It meant that we had successfully
established a higher standard for ourselves and our Facebook page and our
audience now expected solid, quality content on a regular basis from us.
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21. Facebook
In addition to changing what we were posting, one of the other key
developments for us was changing when we were posting. Figure 6 is a snapshot
from our Facebook Insights page and shows that the majority of our audience is
on Facebook between 6 – 7:00 p.m. We had initially been posting our content in
the early morning, but switched our posting times to early evening so that our
posts would hit more fans at once.
(fig. 6) Facebook Metrics showing when our fans are online
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22. Facebook
Moving into the 2nd Quarter, FY 2014, we have re-vamped our strategy
once again. We removed the News and Weekend Message portions from our
framework as there was ample data supporting the fact that there was very little
interest in those two posts. When information relevant to those categories needs
to be disseminated on the Facebook page, we will post it, but we are no longer
actively scheduling those posts as a part of the weekly schedule.
We took another hard look at our successful posts and tried to figure
out how we could build upon them and continue exploit our success. The Quote
and the Question were still performing well enough and we saw an opportunity
with the Photo of the Week. In addition to the Photo of the Week, we are now
working with what we’ve called #MeetTheRailGunners.
Every week, we will take a photo of a Soldier, NCO or officer and post
that photo on our page with the aforementioned hashtag. We put down the
Soldier’s name, unit, hometown, favorite food, favorite movie and favorite sports
team. Based on the success of past posts, we know for a fact that anything
directly and specifically related to our Soldiers or something they are doing (i.e.
NTC, deployment, etc) is always popular on our page. At this point, we’ve only
had one such post and it was decently successful.
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23. Flickr
Our goal with the Flickr page is for it to be as professional and high-quality
as possible. When we load photos onto Flickr, we only post the best of the best. Some
of our photo sets have only a few photos because they were the only good ones. We
are extremely critical of the photos we present to the public since it is a direct
reflection on us as an organization.
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24. Flickr
We use Flickr and Facebook in tandem. We post a photo onto our
Facebook wall (usually as our Photo of the Week) and we then post a link to the
Flickr photo set either in the comments section of that photo or on the Facebook
wall later on. This serves several functions:
1) keeps our Facebook page free from the clutter of hundreds of photos
2) moves traffic from Facebook to Flickr and back again
3) allows us to post our high-resolution images onto Flickr and make
them available to our audience for download.
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25. Flickr
At first, our Flickr
page saw very low traffic,
we were fortunate to get 20
views on a photo.
But as our page
grew and our audience saw
the standard of quality to
which we held our photos,
viewership increased and
continues to do so to this
day (our top ten mostviewed photos have over
500 views each).
Our quality was
also confirmed when the
U.S. Army’s Flickr page
added us a contact as well.
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26. 41st Fires Brigade
Fort Hood, Texas