Royal British Legion uses social media thunderclap for online remembrance
Howard Lake | 13 November 2012 | News
The Royal British Legion persuaded thousands of Twitter and Facebook users to send the same message about the Remembrance Day two minutes silence at exactly the same time yesterday morning.
The campaign used the Thunderclap service used last month by Cancer Research UK and the Stand Up To Cancer campaign. It is designed to help a campaign message to stand out from other online content by co-ordinating its delivery timing.
It enables Twitter users to show their support for a campaign by agreeing to let the service send a single message to their supporters at a set time on a particular day. In this way, all their followers will get to see the message at about the same time. Some will receive the same message from two or more contacts, generating, it is hoped, a wave of interest.
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The Legion's message was: "I'll be remembering the fallen at 11 o'clock #2MinuteSilence #LestWeForget".
It was shared by 19,820 Twitter and Facebook users and was published at 9am GMT on Remembrance Sunday. The message reached an estimated 10,227,462 million people.
The RBL called it "the largest ever show of online remembrance", according to BBC News.
About Howard Lake
Howard Lake is consultant editor of UK Fundraising. He founded the site in 1994 and successfully sold it in 2022. As director of Giving X Ltd he is exploring growing giving on a massive scale.
He is the founder of Fundraising Camp and co-founder of GoodJobs.