August 19th was World Humanitarian Day, a U.N tribute to humanitarian aid workers who have lost their lives in service, as well as to those all those affected by humanitarian strife.

This year, The U.N came up with a clever campaign to increase awareness about humanitarian action worldwide. The concept was simple: the #ShareHumanity campaign allowed people to “donate” their Twitter and Facebook feeds for a few hours. Their feeds were then used to tell the story of a humanitarian aid worker somewhere in the world. The campaign put forward some truly inspiring content, sharing the stories of brave and selfless people trying to make a difference.

The campaign generated 170,717 tweets between August 17th and August 21st last week. Using the Visibrain platform, we tracked the use of the #ShareHumanity hashtag on Twitter to try and determine what made it so successful.

A campaign with impressive reach

The Twitter stream overview graph for the week of the #ShareHumanity campaign shows that the number of tweets rose steadily from Monday, peaking on World Humanitarian Day itself. On August 19th, there were 94,870 tweets using the #ShareHumanity hashtag. One number stands out immediately: the 170,717 tweets posted over the course of the week generated a staggering 1,702,188,256 impressions, a great result considering that the main aim of the #ShareHumanity campaign was to raise awareness about humanitarian works being carried out around the world.

So how did 170,717 tweets get nearly two billion impressions?

The power of celebrity endorsement

It’s no secret that a tweet from a celebrity can provide a huge boost to any Twitter campaign, and #ShareHumanity benefitted from a lot of high-profile support, such as this tweet from @annecurtissmith:

Are you going to join this? I am! Donate your feed to share stories that matter. #ShareHumanity https://t.co/lkEgUoxVSf

— Anne Curtis-Smith (@annecurtissmith) August 19, 2015

A large number of celebrities tweeted about World Humanitarian Day, or chose to donate their feeds to the campaign. If we look at users with the highest audiences who tweeted the hashtag, celebrities such as singer Juanes and millionaire Richard Branson are in the top ten.

Actress Shay Mitchell chose to donate her Twitter feed to #ShareHumanity, and nine out of the 10 most-retweeted posts of the week are from her account @shaymitch.

Her most popular post alone was retweeted 2,086 times by Friday:

Skateboarding is so new to #Afghanistan that nobody has had a chance to say girls can’t do it. #ShareHumanity pic.twitter.com/cJ2qQZuoQL

— Shay Mitchell (@shaymitch) August 19, 2015

If we use the Visibrain feature to filter on the most retweeted users, we can see that as well as her individual tweets being very popular, @shaymitch got the most overall retweets by far over the course of the week, making her the top influencer for the campaign.

The #ShareHumanity campaign also benefitted affiliated charities. @shaymitch’s account shared the story of Skateistan, a children’s charity in Afghanistan. If we look at top mentions for the week, the @Skateistan Twitter handle gained 3,349 mentions.

By encouraging celebrities and influencers to donate their Twitter feeds, and in doing so the eyes and ears of their huge respective audiences, the U.N’s campaign attained a reach that went far beyond their own 4.6 million followers.

#ShareHumanity floods Twitter with tweets

Another way that #ShareHumanity managed to maximize the number of impressions was through high tweet volume. The Visibrain platform shows us that the 170,717 tweets sent during the week came from just 54,785 unique users. On top of that, only 45% of tweets were originals, so how why were there so many tweets?

Although many tweeted their support of World Humanitarian Day using the dedicated hashtag, the sheer volume of tweets generated by the campaign were a result of the donation of Twitter feeds. If we take a closer look at tweets from @shaymitch, we can see that her account tweeted 22 times, 21 of which were sent by #ShareHumanity. This means that each time a user donated their Twitter feed, it guaranteed that a large number of tweets would be sent, each one using the #ShareHumanity hashtag.

The sheer volume of tweets helped the #ShareHumanity hashtag to go trending several times over the course of the week, guaranteeing even more visibility for the campaign.

Encouraging others to participate

To keep things moving, encouraging others to donate their Twitter feeds was essential. The #ShareHumanity campaign linked intensively back to the World Humanitarian Day website. At the time this article was written, 13,125 people had tweeted links to the site since August 17th.

Although we can’t know exactly how many people chose to donate their feeds, the fact that so many shared the website link is a very positive sign for the campaign.

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The #ShareHumanity campaign concept turned out to be very effective for achieving maximum visibility for the World Humanitarian Day message. Feed donation allowed large amounts of inspiring content to be shared in an interesting way, while achieving impressive numbers of link sharing, retweets and impressions.

The #ShareHumanity campaign is still ongoing, so if you would like to donate your own feed, you can still do so at www.worldhumanitarianday.org.

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