COVID-19 and Social Media: Using Facebook to Drive Social and Behavioral Change in 19 Countries

In Bangladesh, the team timed messages to Eid celebrations to remind people to be careful about traveling and social distancing during big celebrations. This practical value message was one of CARE Bangladesh’s top performers.

Several countries identified the need to help parents talk to their children about COVID and the importance of preventative behaviors. Both CARE Cambodia and CARE Somalia created this kind of messaging for parents. Each team created fun, animated videos that were their top performing posts. These posts also enjoyed the most Facebook saves, a rare, high impact behavior seen on Facebook. Somalia’s video featured a celebrity singer who created a song about COVID prevention.

Bangladesh created fun, quick animations that infused a little humor. It turns out a little humor can go a long way as their share rate was +114% above their goal.

CARE Ghana created quick videos that highlighted methods to prevent COVID-19. These videos/images drove high engagement.

CARE Haiti aimed to build trust in the vaccine even though it was not yet available. To understand their efficacy, the Haiti team tested message cadence. People either saw two preventative ads (below left), a single vaccine message (below right) which says, “We are ready for the vaccine! Are you?” or they saw all three. Combined, these posts received 33,000 engagements – reactions, comments, shares, and clicks.

CARE Czech Republic tested the importance of ad frequency, optimizing the campaign so that people saw their video ad 10 times. Interestingly, at a frequency of five, the video completion rate was very high, but the click through rate (CTR) for more information about the vaccine was low. Then, on the 6th – 10th view, behavior started to shift. Video completion decreased but clicks to register increased significantly.

CARE Turkey had a unique audience strategy. They targeted refugees in Turkey, Lebanon, and Jordan and tested a fact-based message, “Safe & Effective” messaging and a “Protect the Community” message. Across all three countries, the “protect the community” message was the strongest showing a +22% increase in CTR over the others.

CARE Philippines tapped into a cultural value related to the greater good to encourage social norming around the importance of getting vaccinated.

CARE Palestine / West Bank / Gaza promoted vaccine registration through a variety of messages, testing “Stay Healthy,” “Protect your Loved Ones” and “Register Now.”

The simple, direct “Register Now” was the top performer driving a +347% increase in CTR over the other messages. The CTR has been an important success indicator since many of CARE’s posts drive viewers to local ministry of health or similar websites where individuals can find out more about the vaccine and/or make an appointment to be vaccinated.

CARE Benin / Togo encouraged people to get vaccinated with four messages. The first two featured messages (see below) encouraging viewers to save lives and reminding people that vaccinations are free (image not shown). CARE Benin / Togo followed up with a “Get Vaccinated Like Me” ad and a more direct “Register to Get Vaccinated” ad.

CARE Benin / Togo’s “Get Vaccinated Like Me” message drove 12.3k post reactions, while the stronger “Register” message had the 56% more outbound clicks than the average.

CARE Cambodia created videos explaining what to expect when arriving for a vaccine appointment.

India created a Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ) video to answer common questions about the vaccine.

Results

CARE Country Offices collectively reached 270 million people in 19 countries through SBCC campaigns to promote COVID prevention behaviors and increase trust in the vaccine. CARE teams are learning a lot about what drives change and what does not.

For example, together we have learned that reach and engagement with ads – an important metric in brand marketing – are not necessarily corollary to behavior change.

In some contexts, we have been able to leverage Facebook’s brand lift study tool to measure campaign effectiveness, but in some contexts the population on the platform is too small for the tool to be useful. We are working together as a learning cohort to find new ways to measure efforts in those countries.

In the countries where we were able to run lift studies, we saw encouraging results.

• In Bangladesh, we saw a 2 point increase in the number of people who know that social distancing is important to slow the spread of COVID-19  – an estimated increase of 7.5 million people.
• In Nigeria we saw a 1.6 point increase in the number of people who understand the importance of preventive behaviors – an estimated increase of 3 million people.
• In India we saw a 2.1 point increase in the number of people who report that they always or often wore a mask in the last 2 days – an estimated increase of nearly 57 million people.
• In the United States, we saw a 10.4 point lift in women ages 34-44 who believed that the COVID-19 vaccines are safe and in men ages 25-34 we saw a 7.9 point lift in belief that the vaccines are safe.

What’s Next

Moving forward, CARE Country Offices are building on lessons learned through the initial campaign efforts and drafting subsequent campaign plans. CARE expects to see a second round of COVID-19 prevention and / or campaigns to build trust in the vaccines in market in the 19 countries in the next few weeks. Our hope is to increase the shifts we are seeing in knowledge, attitude, and behavior in each context because none of us are safe until all of us are safe.