Bell Let’s Talk on Social Media

Bell Let’s Talk is a yearly initiative by Bell Canada that promotes open and frank discussion about mental health.  It’s been hugely successful and many celebrities have been involved in the campaign, thus helping Bell garner even more visibility for this worthy campaign.  Hats off to Bell Canada for sponsoring this campaign since 2010.  Bell Canada is on track to donating $100 million to mental health programs by the year 2020.

Setting up social media profiles to support such a campaign, which is not focused on selling products or services whatsoever, is a clever way of increasing one’s brand name visibility.  For example, the Bell Let’s Talk social media networks compared to the Bell Canada networks are as follows:

There are approximately 40% more Bell Let’s Talk social media followers than there are Bell Canada followers.  That makes for 40% more people to hear about Bell Canada, even though it isn’t specifically about their products or services.  It is still a great way to get visibility and brand name recall.  As a result, even though the company is spending money to promote the Bell Let’s Talk campaign, gives millions in donations (which is tax write-off for the company at the end of the year) and does not receive any revenues for this particular campaign, many would say that the PR and brand visibility is well worth it.

This campaign truly does achieve its goal of enhancing communication about mental health as can be seen by the Google Trend chart for the search term “mental health” in Canada for the past 12 months.  You can see the January bump in data which indicates last year’s Bell Let’s Talk  initiative.  Search trends for the term “mental health” do not come close throughout the remainder of the year.

Here is the current portfolio of Facebook ads for the Bell Let’s Talk campaign, which are being promoted a couple of weeks before the actual event itself, which will take place on January 31 2018.  This year, the campaign is focused on the lives of 37 real people who are telling their story of mental health.  The ads all promote the event’s hashtag, #BellLetsTalk, and many of the ads consist of videos between 30 second and 1 1/2 minutes.  Several of them have a call-to-action to learn more, and by clicking on this button, you get brought to the Bell Let’s Talk webpage with details on the mental health stories included in the campaign.

We will continue to watch the Bell Let’s Talk campaign to see how it evolves on social media.  Stay tuned!

Note: I am not affiliated with Bell Let’s Talk, Bell Canada, nor the agency that developed the campaign. I’m just appreciating their work, and I enjoy learning from others’ campaigns.