CASE STUDY: Telstra leverages Facebook to increase subscriber base

Background
Telstra, Australia’s leading telecommunications and information services company, recognized that Facebook offered the opportunity to reach out and engage with its potential customers in a competitive pre-paid market. Telstra’s goals were two-fold: to acquire new customers and to retain the current existing pre-paid market base while increasing advocacy from fans via Facebook.

Execution
Starting in August 2012, Telstra ran an integrated marketing campaign that included six weeks of paid Facebook activity that aimed to increase sales of pre-paid cards and top-up. To drive awareness and reach, Telstra promoted its hero pre-paid offer, Free Talk & Text on Telstra’s Pre-Paid Cap Encore, including paid media units on Facebook. To maximize reach, Telstra opted for page post ads, which showed on user’s news feeds on both desktop and mobile platforms. A video was featured on Facebook’s log-out screen to reach more than 2 million Australians who logged off daily.

To meet its goal of increasing advocacy, Telstra used its official 24x7 page to deliver targeted prepaid messaging to a youth audience. To drive engagement amongst its users, Telstra opted to use ads which featured content that elicited fan action, such as links, photos and questions (examples at left and below).

Results
As part of Telstra’s integrated campaign, 16 per cent more people switched carriers to Telstra amongst those exposed to Telstra’s advertisements than those who were not exposed. Additionally, 27 per cent of the target audience was more likely to visit any Telstra website after being exposed to Facebook advertising.

During the campaign, the Telstra Facebook page saw more than 130,000 engagements to support advocacy for Telstra, including more than 10,000 page likes and the generation of over 29,000 viral stories.