Using social media to engage with Catapult Network’s stakeholders
Challenge
First appointed in March 2021, our brief was to create a strategy maximising the effectiveness of social media for the Catapult Network.
The Catapult Network sits at the hub of nine individual sector specific Catapults, working across high tech innovation in industries such as offshore wind, satellite, high value manufacturing, energy systems, digital, infrastructure and healthcare.
Their priority is to engage with stakeholders across central and local government, in business, research, academia and industry to enable awareness of how cutting-edge technology is making a difference to society, places, jobs and the UK economy.
Solution
With a focus on delivering quality over quantity to drive enhanced engagement levels, on appointment we undertook a short piece of development work to refine the social media strategy.
This targeted the creation of monthly editorial calendars which, featuring key cross-Catapult themes together with stories fed through from the nine individual Catapults. In addition, we developed a tiered stakeholder targeting strategy identifying key individuals to engage with through the Catapult Network’s social content, updated regularly to reflect government reshuffles.
Supporting this has been a reactive, always-on news monitoring service, where we identify topical stories that the Catapult Network can engage with and add to the conversation as a thought leader. Examples of topics we’ve covered include Net Zero plans, COP, UK government announcements and research and innovation developments, with each of these enabling us to positively reinforce the purpose and positive impact of the Catapult Network. Adding to this is flagging key national events, such as National Apprenticeship Week, Science Week, National Engineers Week, and Women in Science Day, to create engaging copy to boost the Network’s digital presence.
To facilitate this, we have created a suite of templated graphics to accompany reactive content. Alongside this, every month we create two videos to summarise the key stories and announcements happening across the Network, which has helped to further our reach.
Impact
Set with an initial KPI in 2021 of increasing audience growth from 5,000 to 6,600 followers on LinkedIn, we smashed this by exceeding the target in just five months. Today we have grown Catapult Network by 227%, with an audience of 16,396 followers on LinkedIn purely through hard working, organic growth. For X, we have built a follower audience of 31,900. Month on month we achieve an impressive engagement rate on both platforms that is significantly higher than industry average. On X the highest engagement rate to date is 5.3% and LinkedIn 6.8%.
Qualitative KPIs include social media interactions with around 2,000 target stakeholders annually including MPs such as Peter Kyle and Lord Patrick Vallance, industry organisations such as Innovate UK and government departments such as Department for Science, Innovation and Technology and UK Space Agency.
Additionally to our core brief, Leopard Co has supported the Catapult Network with a wider strategy project encompassing both internal and external communications, and collaboration across the Catapults. This has included a communications strategy, plus Studio work including re-designing the Catapult Network’s prospectus and supporting in rebrand (to the Innovate UK Catapult Network) materials.